Introduction

The festive season is crucial not only for shoppers but also for online retailers. A Unicommerce report revealed that e-commerce order volumes surged by around 37% during the 2023 festive season sale compared to the previous year. True to the saying, “The Early Bird Gets the Worm,” price-sensitive shoppers often plan their purchases well in advance. Another report from Criteo indicated that in 2023, at least 74% of festive season shoppers had finalized their gift selections between July and September, and over 50% had already made some purchases by then.

So, a headstart in pre-planning for the festive season can surely help brands enhance customer engagement and improve their Festive season sales. Now most retailers would first concentrate on improving the online shopping experience. However, simply refreshing the user experience (UX) won’t suffice in outpacing competitors and capturing a larger share of the festive season market.

Digital-native customers expect highly personalized, & seamless omnichannel shopping experiences. In fact, 80% of customers are more inclined to buy from brands that offer personalized interactions.

Despite many e-commerce retailers already investing in personalization, loyalty and sales remain challenging. The widespread adoption of personalization and evolving customer expectations have set a higher standard. Simple personalization is now a baseline expectation, & not a USP.

In an e-commerce landscape poised for a discount-driven festive season, how can brands distinguish themselves and boost sales? Retailers need to move beyond previous strategies. To stand out and attract customers this festive season, they must deliver hyper-personalized shopping experiences.

By prioritizing personalized customer conversations, retailers can future-proof their businesses for the festive season and beyond.

Festive Personalization: A Key Differentiator

We are living in the experience economy in which customers are loyal to the experience, not brands. Messaging apps are now the most popular smartphone apps, with almost 90%(5) of global smartphone users utilizing at least one of them. According to the latest 2023 report, over 2.7 Billion people use WhatsApp, 1.3 Billion use WeChat, 1.3 Billion on Instagram, 930 Million use RCS, and 700 million use Telegram worldwide every month. In India alone, 535.8 Million people use WhatsApp every month! Messaging apps not only provide an opportunity for brands to connect with customers on a one-to-one basis, but they also offer enormous potential for personalization – something that customers love.

By leveraging the popularity of the messaging app, brands can capitalize on the conversational and personalization opportunities to attract, engage, sell, and delight shoppers during this festive season.

Boost Engagement & Conversions

Today, most senior-level marketers (86%) agree that it’s absolutely critical or very important to create a cohesive customer journey across all touchpoints and channels. However, in our constantly changing digital landscape, traditional models like AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) and linear buyer journeys are no longer sufficient.

Customer expectations have evolved, and easy access to information across digital platforms means customers can interact with your brand at any stage of their buying journey. Therefore, brands must personalize every touchpoint and deliver a consistent experience at every stage.

Gupshup’s WhatsApp Business Solution can assist brands in personalizing and enhancing every customer interaction, ensuring minimal lost leads and moving prospects closer to conversion. Take a look at this infographic for a clearer insight into personalizing the customer journey with the WhatsApp Business Solution:

Omnichannel Strategy for Always-On Connection

Increasingly, customers expect a hyper-personalized and consistent experience across channels. Being present across channels not only ensures guaranteed message delivery but also empowers your customers to engage with you on a platform of their choice. With Gupshup’s omnichannel automation support, brands can now stay fully functional on all channels – WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, RCS, etc., increasing the brand’s chances of discovery, conversion, engagement, and loyalty. With festive spending expected to increase 10 percent compared to last year, largely on online channels, omnichannel conversational strategy is the key differentiator to success.

Here’s how your brand can get creative and plan festive campaigns on multiple channels to improve ROI:

Drive high-quality conversations across the customer journey on WhatsApp

Festival season is a busy time for brands and consumers. To succeed, brands should proactively use WhatsApp to acquire new customers & promote offers. With 2B+ monthly active users, the channel offers 80%(6) read rate.

• Build first-party database with click-to WhatsApp ads
• Nurture prospects by answering pre-purchase queries
• Qualify leads by assessing customer need
• Re-target and with offers for free(within 72 hrs of first interaction from Click to WhatsApp Ads)

Design social posts to convert into actionable conversations

The festive season is when brands go all guns blazing with their social media handles. Channels like Instagram are provided to get 10 times more festive visits to online shops.

• Design organic posts to encourage user comments
• Configure DMs to promote reply
• Deploy journeys to capture leads, collect opt-ins, and guide users to the sales journey

Turn local searches into Business Opportunities

Research suggests that 46%(7)of all Google searches are directed towards seeking local information. With the festive season around the corner, GBM is the perfect way for businesses to connect and engage with customers directly at the moment of consideration.
Ways to get the most out of GBM

• Activate Google’s Business Messages on Google MyBusiness Account of regional stores and branches
• Highlight festive offers and invite customers to chat
• Deploy journeys to capture leads, collect opt-ins and guide users to sales journey

Reap higher open and engagement rates with retargeting campaigns on WhatsApp & RCS

The festive season is the best time to re-engage dormant users, given that the cost of reactivation is notably lower during this time

• Connect with opted-in users with exciting offers on WhatsApp
• Trigger action by delivering an upgraded rich CX to your SMS database with RCS

Optimize Purchase Journey & Post-Festive Loyalty

Now that you have your customer’s attention to your message on an app of their choice, the next most important step is to sustain the attention. While a one-way blast can get you the open rate you’d want, it might not leave a memorable impression. Hence, it becomes imperative to design a conversational journey that is personalized, intuitive, and engaging. It’s equally important to tailor the experiences as per the natural course progression the customer would most likely prefer to take.

Think about the campaign objective

Would you like the customer to make a purchase? In this case, design the journey to address pre-purchase queries, share reviews and ratings, display product catalogs and categories.

Speak in the language they speak

Know who your customers are and how they talk. For example- using the latest lingos, emoticons, and GIFs with teenagers or using a formal tone with homemakers to establish an instant connect and help build trust. Adapting to regional languages and colloquial can also make a huge difference.

Know your product

How technical is the product you’re selling? Would it need an installation guide, technical support, a demo video, etc.? If yes, planning follow-up conversations after the products are delivered can be a great way to showcase that your brand cares. If the product is a high-value purchase, offering live agent support upfront can speed up the purchase process

Make use of Rich Interactive Elements

When designing the conversational journey, you have the power not only to shape the interaction you’d have with your customers but also guide the final destination. Every messaging app offers a range of interactive elements such as quick reply buttons, catalogs, carousels, location templates, listicles, etc.

Leverage the power of AI

AI is becoming a part of your customer’s life. With Gupshup’s newly launched ACE LLM brands can build truly intuitive conversational experiences based on enterprise datasets, making it a digital sales assistant.

Using Conversational AI for Festival Success

Now that you know ‘WHAT YOU NEED’ to deliver phenomenal experiences to customers during the festive season, it’s crucial to also understand ‘HOW TO RUN’ your festive campaigns to ensure maximum throughput. By using channels like WhatsApp, brands can fix a robust campaign strategy to make sure that customer conversations are proactive than reactive, more human and less robotic, more conversational and less instructional. Here’s a 3 step approach to get started:

Triggered Campaigns:

The festive season is prime time for sales, with customers actively seeking out the best offers. If you’re running a time-sensitive promotion, leveraging WhatsApp’s triggered campaigns can be a game-changer. Automated notifications and reminders can be sent to customers based on their actions, ensuring they get all your offers. For example, if a potential buyer abandons their cart, an automated reminder can nudge them to complete the purchase, helping you capture those missed opportunities and boost sales.

Conversational Intelligence:

As sales surge during the festive season, your customer support team faces an influx of queries, trying to truly understand each customer. Conversational Intelligence has the superpower to analyze every interaction in real-time, gaining deep insights into customer preferences and behaviors. These insights empower conversational strategists, designers, and analysts to gain a holistic view of the customer experience, enabling them to refine and enhance the entire conversation journey.

Segmentation Techniques:

By categorizing customers based on factors like age, gender, purchase preferences, spending capacity, location, and engagement rates, you help you convert leads into loyal customers. For example, divide your audience into groups like Frequent Shoppers, New Customers, and Geographically Targeted Segments. This approach allows you to offer exclusive deals, loyalty rewards, and personalized recommendations, enhancing the festive shopping experience and boosting sales.

Industry-Specific Festive Use Cases

Retail

For consumers, the festive season is all about fun, family traditions, gifts and celebrations. For brands, it’s the most critical time of the year.

With conversational journeys brands can sell more with a personalized and easy-to-navigate shopping experience on messaging apps.

Popular Use cases

• Customer acquisition
• Product discovery
• Cart Abandonment
• Back-in-stock alerts
• Conversational shopping over vernacular voice notes
  Payment & Purchase

BFSI

With the festive season fast approaching, the BFSI sector is already experiencing a remarkable upswing in credit card sales, personal finance, and retail insurance. With conversational journeys brands can automate customer engagements across sales and support, securely and at scale.

Popular Use case

• Lead Generation
• Renewals and Pending Payments
• KYC & Document Submission
• Block Card Using Voice Notes on Whatsapp
• Web And App Chat for Visitors

Food & Beverage

Food and family hold a significant role in every celebration across the world. Festivals are the perfect time for people to come together and enjoy their favorite food and for brands to make the most out of this opportunity and maximize their revenue with conversational AI.

Popular Use case

• Order placement and tracking
• View menu & order online
• Onboard delivery partners over chat
• Easy checkout and payment

Travel & Hospitality

The festive season is the best time to strengthen bonds and create lasting memories through travel. With Gupshup’s AI-powered chatbots, you can automate the entire traveler journey lifecycle from marketing to support

Popular Use case

• Lead Generation & Nurturing
• Tailored holiday packages
• Booking Support
• Booking Reminders
• Traveler assistance on the go
• Hotel bot: Check-in, Upgrade, Room service
• Flight booking and check-in
• Messaging in native language

Best Practices for Quality Customer Experience

Start Now

Festive related shopping begins at least 3 months prior. Allow time for campaign planning and preparation, start pre-festive campaigns now and keep optimizing your campaigns.

Consider Rich, Interactive & Personalized Experiences

Leverage all the features on any platform of your choice (e.g. message personalization, buttons, rich media formats, product messages, two-way interactions, NLP-based conversational flows) to build interactive experiences that increase stickiness and quality.

Don’t focus on only one type of standard campaign for one cohort of users, experiment with more categories of campaigns

Diversified campaign mix to target different cohorts like active browsers registered but not purchased, new-to-brand users, premium loyalists, inactive users, and journey drop-off customers Campaigns can be pre-buzz, sale bursts, personalized recommendations, engagement ones and more.

Success Story

How Tata engaged more consumers with customized messages and offers with WhatsApp

Brand’s goal: Tailoring customer engagement

Tata CLiQ wanted to reach every customer opting to receive follow-up communications through its website but observed conventional methods like email and SMS often yield lower open rates and fewer flexibility in creative messaging. To target more customers with personal, relevant notifications, the company needed a dynamic and reliable dedicated communications channel.

Solution: Custom-fit notifications for shoppers

Tata CLiQ launched its WhatsApp channel to engage shoppers.

With custom-fit notifications, customers are 1.7x more likely to purchase when using WhatsApp.

Witnessing the speed and ease of delivering messages via WhatsApp, Tata CLiQ ramped up their campaigns —which involved more sophisticated customer targeting and

The Impact: