Throughout every year, a multitude of major and minor calendar events offer great opportunities to engage with customers at a time when they are open to shopping for friends, families or themselves.
Keeping track of all the seasonal events can be overwhelming, and missing just one or two key marketing moments may mean passing up an opportunity to inspire your customers to shop with your brand.
Klaviyo – an intelligent marketing automation platform – has created the ultimate calendar with more than 150 key e-commerce dates to consider when planning and executing your year-long marketing strategy. These range from majors like Black Friday Cyber Monday, through to the ever-popular Valentine’s Day and lesser-known niche opportunities which your product range might align with, like International Coffee Day or Earth Day.
Jia Lee, senior content marketing manager at Klaviyo, says the company’s suite of tools – including email marketing, SMS marketing, mobile push, reviews, and customer data platform (CDP) – can help brands optimise their campaigns and engagement through memorable occasions during the year.
“These dates can inspire marketers to think outside the box and create opportunities they might not have considered. For example, April Fool’s Day is a time for playful humour. Consider ‘launching’ a new collaboration or product colourway that no one would be expecting.
“You can decide what’s most relevant to your brand and customers to ensure that your strategy and campaigns are well-timed and effective,” Lee concludes.
Here are five key strategies to leverage marketable moments in the year ahead:
1 Create seasonal and event-based campaigns
Campaigns during times your customers care about will attract attention because they’re relevant to your customers.
Use the e-commerce marketing calendar to anticipate these moments and create themed content that resonates with your customers.
Consider each of the days on the calendar and how there might be an alignment with your brand’s products, services or ethos.
2 Promote exclusive deals and early access via mobile push
Klaviyo allows brands to create mobile push notifications that appear on mobile phone screens even when they are locked (with your customer’s permission, of course).
This is a highly effective tool for reaching your most engaged customers. It creates a sense of exclusivity and urgency for sales, offers, or new product drops – easily tied into a broader seasonal campaign. It’s also a great way to rebuild relationships with inactive users.
Push notifications – whether they serve as a reminder of an upcoming subscription deadline or a new product announcement – can still be intended to encourage sales, but carefully worded, they can be framed as a value-add for your clients.
3 Use a CDP to segment targeting of promotions and offers
Use Klaviyo’s CDP to segment customers based on their behaviour, preferences and purchase history. In a previous column, we discussed how using a CDP can help you make smarter decisions by pulling together and securely storing customer data from multiple sources. This helps you identify groups of customers most likely to respond to a marketing message based on demographics and other relevant information.
Using that analysis, create personalised marketing campaigns targeted at those most likely to be interested in marketable moments or seasonal events, ensuring relevance and higher engagement.
Of course, your first priority should be to target customers who bought items at the same time last year.
4 Leverage user-generated content
Savvy brands encourage customers to leave product reviews and ratings on their websites. One way of driving such feedback is by including it in your email flow to customers post-delivery, including a link to your ratings page.
You can also spur customers to share their experiences with your brand and shopping experience on social media, perhaps incentivising such posts with a coupon that can be put towards future purchases.
Using user-generated content in your email and SMS campaigns can build trust and authenticity in your brand and products. At times of seasonal events, consider including some relevant social media posts from previous years – for example, ahead of Mother’s Day, include some feedback from satisfied customers, to give families more confidence in choosing and buying gifts from you rather than a competitor.
5 Automate email triggers based on behaviour
Pair your seasonal events with marketing automation – like a welcome series or abandoned cart reminder, for example – to ensure the best return for the work you put into your campaigns.
Develop automated email campaigns triggered by specific customer actions, like browsing a product without purchasing. These emails can be personalised and timely, increasing conversion rates.
Using automation, you can build campaign flows around seasonal events to build customer engagement and boost sales beyond one-off campaigns.
As Lee concludes: “When you plan your yearly marketing program, decide what events are most relevant to your brand and customers to ensure that your strategies and promotions are well-timed and effective.”
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