Black Friday Masterclass: Unlocking Success For Your Brand

First of all, I'd just like to say welcome to the Black Friday Masterclass unlocking success for your brand. Thank you very much for covering our time and spending it with us today on this webinar. For those of you who don't know, my name is Will Wilson, and I'm the RVP of Sales for a masters for the APJ region. So I work with new clients to look at your, requirements for your marketing automation, and work to onboard you and unlock the value of your business on our platform. Today, we've got some really great content and some fantastic speakers focused on the Black Friday sales season, but we know what a masters marketing is much bigger than just Black Friday and cyber Monday. For those of you who don't know, a masters is one of the world's leading omnichannel, customer engagement platforms, and we work with retailers and e commerce brands predominantly to focus on customer life cycle and automations and personalization. This is with the intention of improving revenue customer experience and database growth to really help move the needle on the business outcomes that matter for your brand. Some of the advancements this year that we're really proud of we recently launched a new channel, which brings us to the most channels available on any platform globally. That channel is the mobile wallet For those of you who have a retail store network, this is really relevant to help identify customers in store at the point of sale. While also attributing installs to your online activity. So it's been a really great new channel that's been very well adopted by customers, particularly in this region, so thank you for those that are supporting us. Without further ado, I'd really like to, introduce Sam in and and Laura into the session. Before we do, I just wanna acknowledge that there is the chat button down below. So please, we want this to be very interactive. If you'd like to start by sharing who you are and where you're from in the channel, then it would be great to get that chat going. And then on the other side, you have a Q and A button. So any questions that you'd like to ask, Laura or Sammy in particular, we will we have a dedicated time at the end to go through Q and A. So I will be monitoring that. If there's any things that come through, we'll pop them up. But for now, I'd like to hand over to Sammy and Laura. Good morning. I will. Thank you so much for having us. So hi, everyone. Thanks for joining our session today. So my name is Sammy Mckee. I'm the strategic services team lead. And I'm Laura gamble. I work as a customer experience consultant in the Strategic Services team in APAC. Sorry. Thanks. So just to let you know a little bit, what the strategic services team does. You know, we're known under a different name, strategic services, strategic essentially what we do is we, support, strategy and production, to existing clients to help really maximize the use of the tech for them, to make sure that they're making the most of the tech, getting the best return on investments. And so we work with a really wide range of different clients in different industries. So, whether you're existing an existing customer or if you're new, we're going to be sharing with you today, a little bit of the nuggets of knowledge that we've acquired, through our experience working with all of these different clients, and also, you know, what we've seen the strategies that we've seen, really work in driving engagement, especially during ACL period like Black Friday. Awesome. Great. So as, Will said, and as Samu said, we've got a lot of content to share today. So we're really hoping that we can make sure that everyone leaves today's session with some really actionable insights and, actions that you can take away to really help drive some extra success and extra impact in your Black Friday campaigns. And these don't just need to be Black Friday cyber Monday. It might be that these are all like, double digit days, like singles day or even boxing day following up from Christmas. And so we know that some of you are gonna be really far progressed in your plans. Some of you are potentially only just getting started. So hopefully there's a little bit of something for everyone in this today. So what we're gonna do first of all is we're gonna talk about how you can define your strategy for success. So think of this like laying the foundations for a really strong, sales period. Then what we're gonna do is talk about how can you use tech to take this strategy to the next level to amplify those results. And then finally, we're gonna piece this together as part of the bigger picture. So how does this campaign period sit within your own life cycle and with your strategy at large. And then as Will said, we'll have an opportunity for Q and A right at the end. But first of all, before we get stuck into that, we just wanted to touch really briefly on, I guess, the state of the environment as well as have a quick recap on Black Friday last year. So I think everyone on the, on the line will be aware that it's a little bit of a tough environment for retailers at the moment. So the cost of living is increasing, inflation is up, interest rates are up, and consumers are just being, across the board a little bit more careful about what they're spending. So the flow on effect there as I'm sure everyone is seeing is that, sales periods are becoming more and more important. Customers are actually holding out, to make purchases until the sale period comes around. So what that means for the holiday period coming this year is that not only do we expect see an influx of seasonal shoppers, but also a number of shoppers who have been holding out on purchases that they would make for themselves, and they're gonna be coming back during potentially Black Friday, cyber Monday for double digit days to make those purchases. And what that means in turn is that we're gonna see a huge number of, I guess, brands competing for a share of voice in the market. So it becomes even more important to think about what's your messaging going to be? How are you gonna get some cut through? And this is even more relevant, I think, in the next to what we saw last year for back Black Friday. So in analysis, we saw a forty five percent year on year increase in customer engagements. Which is huge. So this spanned all the way from a forty four percent increase for email right through to a ninety nine percent increase for which is really reflective of brands moving towards, very much an omnichannel approach. So trying to meet their customers on the right channel at the right time with the right message. And so that's not really surprising. We've seen that two years ago customers were looking two touch points to make a purchase. Whereas now they're looking at six touch points to make a purchase. So I think that all of these things are gonna really come together to to just show that it's really important that, you've got your strategy really cemented, to drive that impact at this period of the year. So let's get, onto it. So I'm gonna pass over to Samyan who's gonna talk to defining your strategy for those maximum results. Thanks, Laura. So, yeah, just, you know, we know that you need to have more touch points. We know that we need to have more personalizations to cut through the noise, but exactly how do we do that. And so we're gonna go through the steps today on, you know, what we've seen our most successful clients do, how they've driven results. And based on, you know, our experience that we've had working with them as well. So, obviously, why, it's, you know, it sounds a little bit obvious to us marketers probably, but, you know, why is it important to really look at having a personalized approach. So we know obviously that an approach, which is blas driven, you know, will talking to a lot of different people, but won't be having the same level of conversion as an interactive driven approach or a behavior driven approach. So it's really important to kind of think about all of these different touch points within your strategy and how you're really going to be able to craft a strategy that's going to be personalized to your customers to drive that customer engagement, to drive that relevance, and then term drive that conversion. So the first step that we really recommend, when you're defining your strategy is to taking first of all, taking a little bit of step back and looking at your data. You know, it's very easy to think about, okay, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna send these messages, etcetera. But the first step that we really recommend our clients to do, is to take a step back and really looking at your data. So there's so much data that you have. And I know in a Mars, we've got so many pieces of, data dashboards that you can look at with audience reporting, strategic dashboards. The key things to start to look at, for example, are, you know, learn from your previous experiences and learn from, you know, what happened last year. So if you're looking at your Black Friday strategy, analyze what happened last year, analyze your engagement, your volume, you know, what are some of the challenges that you face what did you do well and really identify and list out the gaps and what you want to improve on this year. So potentially last year, you had a very email forward strategy. And this year, you're looking to roll out a more omnichannel approach. Or maybe you had a very reactive strategy or, you know, a messaging that was very much about sales. And this year, you wanna have a more personalized approach So really kind of learn from what your data told you in the previous series and look at what you wanna be doing this year. The other thing that we would really recommend is to making sure that you understand your customer database. You know, leveraging information and any existing data you may have on them already. You know, maybe do you know where they live and that might be relevant to your business if you're in a fashion, you know? I don't think a customer in Melbourne would be wearing the same things as customer in cans, for example, or, maybe, you know, you know, their gender you wanna personalize according to what they're interested in or what they've browsed. Consider potentially, creating different customer profiles you know, and also, uncover any relevant purchase patterns. So you might have your customers that, you know, maybe purchase with you once a year and it's always during a sale period. So you know that that's the moment that where they're gonna come back and purchase with you. Or maybe you've got customers that purchase with you on an on an ongoing basis and a sale here is just another extra opportunity for them to get a good deal. So you might not want to talk to those customers in the same way just as potentially you might not wanna, talk to a customer who's a lead. Versus an active buyer in the same way. So really kind of understand your customer database, understand those relevant purchase patterns. You know, once you've identified and looked through these key pieces of information when defining your strategy, identify if there's any gaps in your data. Actually, I have no idea who is a lead or who is a first time buyer, etcetera. So you might identify that you don't know that information or, you know, you don't know, for example, the age range of your customers and that's relevant for you to push content to them, relevant content to them. So really look back and see, okay, what is missing from the data and how can you potentially close those gaps in your data to get that information about your customers. So let's say that you identify. Okay. I don't know who my customers are, and I wanna understand who they are before I can push relevant. Messaging to them. So potentially you still have the time between now and when you're developing your, strategy. To go and find that information. So you could be looking at selling, putting some surveys and PS surveys to understand more, or you could also be at doing a progressive profiling strategy with your welcome or on a on your sign up. So there's still time or assess, you know, what are the gaps and the key things that would make, or that that, you know, you might need to know and what would make a difference and really try and work on seeing those. And then finally, once you've got all of that information, make sure that you define your key KPIs and your target outcomes. What are you trying to get out of this? And finally, once you have all of that data, just, we'll look at that a little bit further, but make sure that you also keep in the back of your mind, you know, how is this campaign period that you're going to, strategize and and define how is that going to, work and insert and self and work with your wider strategy and your wider communication strategy. So the second thing is once you've got your data is to really construct your ideal plan. So something that might be important is to, decide on your discount approach. And that's going to be really important because it's going to inform you how you might wanna segment how you're going to want to personalize your content. So is your discount approach product or category specific is accumulative. Like, for example, the more you spend, the more the bigger discount that you get is going to be time based. Or on the contrary, are you a brand that's not going to have a very aggressive, discount strategy because it doesn't fit with your brand. Maybe you work with your luxury brand and you don't really have that approach, or maybe your margins are really small and you need to really find what works for you, but you want to leverage, this period of Black Friday where people are paying attention. So really decide on what that discount approach is gonna be. With that information as well, decide on your segmentation and your personalization strategy. So you have so many is that you can consider when you're creating your segmentation. For example, your customer life cycle, like I said before, Sorry. Like I said before, you might not want to talk to an inactive customer or to a lead in the same way as you would want talk to an active customer. So this is maybe something that you can create. A lead might need more information about your unique selling proposition, you know. So if they've never purchased with you before, what's, maybe there has about purchasing with you and how can you reassure them? You know, for example, what's your deliver delivery, what are your delivery options? How quick is your delivery? If you're an online business or what's your return policy because that might weigh in into making a decision that feels safe for them. Other information that you could potentially look at segmenting on is contact data, browser behavior, purchase patterns. Again, we're talking about potentially that sale period customer versus that active customer, different customer profiles, etcetera. What do you think, Laura? Yeah. I think that you're absolutely right. And I think one of those key groups at this time of the year to target particularly if you're a gifting retailer is that group of customers who are only shopping once a year. So I think a really good, I guess use case for this is if you're a brand who sells gift cards, gift cards are a really sort of easy product to know that this is something that your customers are gifting. So does your data allow you to see who has touches to gift card around the same time last year. And then how can you target those customers throughout this period to say, you know, would they like to buy gift cards again? That already is a super personalized and targeted message based on the behavior that that customer had at the same time last year. Which is likely to provide a lot more cut through than just a really general, like, Black Friday sale message. And it doesn't mean you can't include, a lot of that messaging within your cons, but you can lead with something that's more personalized. Yep. So completely agree and and that's also, you know, all of the segmentation strategy, you know, what's relevant to your business is going to be really important, when you're deciding on the content and the channel that you're going to be pushing. So once you've decided, let's say I want to talk to my leads and my active customers and my defecting and inactive customers in a different way, then you need to tool then you need to consider your versioning. You know, a lot of the times, the typical messaging that we see, over sale period is Okay. The sale is about to start. The sale has started. The sale is still going on and the sale is almost finished. So that tends to be very much the type of messaging that we're seeing. So that can be, you know, a little bit of repetitive content for a lot of customers and it doesn't necessarily take account where they're potentially sitting in their purchase journey with you. So it's really interesting to take a step back and to think about how you would wanna be addressed as a consumer and the type of information that you would wanna have. So really think about that when you're creating that messaging journey throughout that period that you are communicating with your customer. Also think about personalization. You know, you are gonna be, going with, there's going to be a lot of competitions during this period. You really need to think about how you are going to be able to cut through the noise. So customers have a very short attention span. If they were see the message that's not going to be personalized, that's not going to show them products that they're interested in. They're probably not going to pay that much more attention and so you might lose an opportunity to engage with them there. So it's really important to really think about that and really create as personalized with journey as you can. Something else to bear in mind is obviously also the different channels in which you might want to engage with your customer. And so, you know, you might get a really good, engagement from email. You get you send a first email, and we do know that a lot of customers really enjoy being, engage with on email for from brands. But you might find that that might not work for some other customers. So what are other points that you can add into the journey to make sure that you are touching, creating touch points for your customers at different stages. So, potentially digital ads through social media, can, help with when you're retargeting your customers or SMS messaging, app notifications. If you've got an app, So all of these different touch points are really important, and it's really important to think about this as a three sixty view as a whole strategy. So try to be proactive as well with these instead of reactive. So, try to engage with your customers and make sure that you're staying front of mind when you're creating your strategy on your on your on your messaging strategy. So once you've constructed your ideal plan, and you have you know, defined what is your ideal plan looking like and, consider and potentially review any potential challenges that you might have, you know, enrolling out that plan. So think about what might get in the way of you getting the results that you're hoping for. So the first one, that's a really big one, especially during a period where you're going to potentially be increasing the number of communication and messages that you're sending to your customers is your deliverability. So really make sure that you review your deliverability, is it where it needs to be, is it or actually are you having some pitfalls and make sure that you, you know, you design your whole content strategy and segmentation strategy to, make sure that you're not going to hurt your deliverability during the sending period. The other thing that we talk about as well is potentially existing templates. So you might not have reviewed potentially how your templates have been performing, but the reality is what does your click rate look like? Is your click right below, is it below one percent? If it's below one percent, I would probably suggest that you review, how you what you could do to get your click rate higher. So we see some customers. We have click rates of two to three percent on, batch and blah, those tend to be higher for, sorry, blast blast and, batch and blast campaigns. Those tend to be higher on automations, of course, but it's really important to review your existing templates. I think Laura, you had a really interesting stat about, dark mode as well. Yeah. Definitely. So I think that talking about best practices and your templates, it's really important to think about, not only, I guess, from your own brand perspective, but think about what is changing, I guess, in the wider space. So for example, I read that, dark mode is being used by over eighty percent of people. Which, just seemed, I don't know, super high to me. So I think that the flaw on effect to that is that obviously, your assets aren't always gonna reflect as well on dark mode if they haven't been built for dark mode. So always checking in on how does that look in particular things like your logos and your TAAs, which are obviously, really important. And I think the other thing that I would add here as well is that we've seen clients who've made updates to their templates and then actually found that perhaps they are not quite having the results that they expected, so they've made, like, really beautiful refreshes based on, you know, a brand update, but actually as part of that, they've removed something, which was actually really key to, to the customer who was reading the in particular email here, who was reading the communication. So they've had to actually go back and add different, elements back in. So we would always recommend to test any changes that you are making to templates. So you can do that in a couple of different ways sending to, you know, with one batch email, for example, you could send fifty percent to the new template and fifty percent to the old template and start to monitor your different, engagement that you're getting Yeah. Thank you. So a hundred percent agree with that, you know, we are a data driven platform and our recommendation, you know, to all customers is really make sure that you test everything. You know, it's very easy to make some assumptions about what works and what doesn't, but if you don't have the data to back it, we really recommend that you test everything that you're going to be rolling out if you've got the time. And so that kind of brings me to my next point as well is, you know, review internally your team's capacity and resources. It's very easy. I think as marketers to get very excited about. I wanna do all of these personalization. I wanna do all of these versions, etcetera, for my campaign. But, you know, how is that likely to pan out and, you know, in terms of what your team is capable of from a resourcing perspective? So really recommend that you take a little bit of time to review internally with your resources. Do you have any other ongoing projects that are potentially going to be into here. Are you replatforming your, your website? Are you re using a new, a new e commerce platform or you know, those are things that are potentially going to get in the way while you're preparing for Black Friday or, you know, end of your period sales. So There's things that you can do, obviously. So one of the very key, bottlenecks that we tend to see a lot from our customers is usually design So, you know, how can you potentially work with your designers to create a better plan for them? Maybe you can create wireframes based on best practices. Maybe you can then also pre draft the copy and make it easy for them to create efficiencies within your team. So that's that. The other thing that you might have to consider is potentially, you know, scaling back you know, maybe your plan is a little bit too ambitious with the resources that you have in your team. So you can scale back or potentially something could look at is also looking for external resources to help you. So that's really something to keep in mind when you're designing your plan is not being too ambitious. And trying to be something that you can solidly roll out, which also brings me to the next point, which is making sure, you know, that you're focusing your time when you're defining your plan with your team on what is going to be the have the biggest impact. What's likely going to change the dial. So it can be very, tempting for example, if you've got a rebrand, for the holidays, that you may wanna roll out that rebrand across all of your different automations with a new banner or with something else. Like, but the reality is if you've got automations that are performing well. How much is that going to shift the dial? Maybe it would be better to, you know, focus on where your gaps are that you can address during that period. So really think about what capacity do you have and where it's spending your time where it's going to make the difference. So really work on with your team and remember as well what are the KPIs that you set, you know, for yourself and what the key objectives are that you're trying to, address and focus really your energy on those. Great. Thanks, Sam. And so not much at all, really. Just lots of different things to be working through. So I guess, now that you have laid the foundations for your success, we wanted to take a few moments just to talk about a few different things that you can do to take your holiday campaigns to the next level. And increase the chances of getting that cut through that you're looking for. So I think, AI has been definitely a buzzword and this year. Definitely following from the release of ChatGPT in November last year, I think it's become even more so. So, know there are definitely emerging uses for AI and marketing, and I think that there'll continue to be disruption in this space. But we do have a few different ways that we can start to leverage AI now for personalization, which is gonna continue to drive that relevance and then that conversion. So for example, a masses, has a tool called Max AI, which looks at data like engagement scores, purchase history, and behavioral patterns to actually start to make predictions about your customers. So It starts to make predictions around how likely a customer is to convert and make a purchase or to churn or to become inactive. We can also look at the customer's likely value based on cart values. So is a customer likely to be a low, medium, or high value customer? The flow on effect of AI like this for a sales period is that you can start to be a lot more targeted and personalized So one way to do this would be to look at which channel is a customer most likely to engage with. So perhaps, you want to make sure you're reaching them first on the channel, they are most likely to engage on. So if they are unlikely to engage on email, it might be that we try to speak to them first of all using digital ads or using, app push if you have an app. And then I guess this is also super relevant for those brands who don't have a very heavy counting strategy at this time of year. So, brands were protecting their margins. So you might look to run a segment on customers who have a low medium or a high cart value, and then you can target these customers with different levels of discount, or you could set the cart threshold at a different level. And one other area that we have AI to support is send time optimization. So send time optimization allows, you to break a campaign into child campaigns. Which then land in a customer's inbox when they are most likely to engage with the campaign, which of course then, is more likely to be, in red and a conversion more likely to come from. So arguably probably another buzzword, is gamification and interactive content, but definitely something, you know, another use of tech that we've seen a lot of our clients start to use to drive more and more engagement and conversion. So the great thing about interactive content is that it really allows you to collect a lot of your data at the same time, which is obviously another key priority for a lot of brands this year. So we found that this interactive content can like anything from infographics and quizzes, games and competitions. It can look like calculators and assessments even we've got, you know, Google annotations released by Gmail this year where this starts to be some animation in your inbox before you even click through. And so on the page here, there's a few examples of what some of these might look like. Sammy, do you wanna jump in and explain, you know, where these came from? Yeah. So we've got a really, cool team of the Marsys called Studio Production. So essentially the Marsys, you've got the ability to essentially design or or code completely, custom, web channels or or interactive messaging that you might want to display. We also have some templates, of course, but A lot of our clients, we've seen a huge increase in demand for more gamification aspects, you know, scratch cards, spin the wheel, progressive profiling, real time engagement. All of those different types of initiatives. And so what our team has done is they've really taken, their practice. They've looked at, you know, what works well, and they've created these, kind of templates that our customers can then work with them on, making their own, to really help and then leverage, you know, these, this increase in gamification and interactive content that we're seeing in the market at the moment. So this is definitely an option that we've got with the Marsis. And that you can work with our team on on on I'm looking at. Something else that, you know, we're talking about also real time interact and and messaging. Something that's also really, interesting, that, you know, we recommend to do and we see great results in. Is, you know, real time upsell and cross sell opportunities. So for example, here, our studio production team has created an overlay to, you know, identify that a customer is below the threshold for the free delivery order. So this is a great opportunity potentially for the customer to then, you know, increase their average order value. So we it also includes some product recommendations that the customer might be interested in. So that can really help, to, engage with the content, increase their average order value when they're paying attention, when they're on your website, when they're browsing. Of course, this has to be done carefully. You definitely don't want to get in the way of a customer who's, you know, very determined about what they wanna shop, but it can, you know, potentially sway them if they're interested to add a little bit more to their cart and increase their average for order value. So these are some of the examples, of some of the packages and and some of the opportunities that you've got, to engage with your customers in real time. I think we're gonna see more and more of these sorts of overlays that are really interactive as we, you know, kind of move into next year as well. It's definitely a space that that's really growing. So the last thing that we wanted to touch on in terms of taking your campaigns to the next level is law So, you know, whether you have a loyalty program or maybe you don't, there are definitely some ways that we can talk to customer retention. So we know that it's easier and it's less costly to keep customers who you already have than to attract and convert new customers So loyalty is a really, like, key tool and, I guess, the market is toolbox to enable this. So loyalty programs we find really allow you to be a lot more personalized and targeted. They also allow you to offer value that's not necessary lee coming off your bottom line or monetary. So, you know, we can look at things like exclusivity, we can look at perks, events, and other sorts of rewards, maybe gift with purchases that can go alongside something like status points, or points that are accumulated. So A few examples of how you might activate your loyalty members with, a master's loyalty, for example, during the holiday period, would be the use of exclusively early access. So blocking access to certain pages for customers unless they're in your loyalty program. This really adds, value to those customers who you want to retain. We can look at short term loyalty reward campaign. So things like double points of a Black Friday week in which is something that's maybe over and above what the other discounting promotions that you're running. We can also look at running something maybe like to drive back at basket size. So maybe specifically for your loyalty members, you've got a promotion running for free shipping. I mean, this of course would be alongside all of your ongoing loyalty campaigns that you already have. So I think all of that forms together to really delight, your customers and drive that retention. So if you don't have a loyalty program, though, you can definitely look to your segmentation, and your campaigns to how can you actually, you know, replicate a little bit of what you might find in loyalty. So for example, do you have a group of premium customers who are your top spenders, who you want to target with, you know, some sort of campaign over that period, which tells them how much you appreciate them would be one example. Thanks, Laura. So, you know, now that you've defined your strategy, and that, you know, you've looked how omnichannel AI can help you take as well your campaign to the next level and, you know, you've also created a surprise and delight. Strategy for your loyalty customers. What we really wanna take is to also look at the bigger picture. You know, this is a really key campaign period, but also how does it work within your own wider strategy of communication with your customers. So first of all, it's really important to, you know, lean on automation to do the heavy lifting for you. So, MRsis, we have a wide range of tactics that are available to you that are out of the box that can help you really rolled out, automations really quickly and efficiently. So, you know, look at that, identify potentially, you know, where do your opportunities lie, especially within this wider context? What you don't wanna be doing is, you know, putting so much effort in to a campaign, you know, really defining all of these objectives and then essentially having a leaky funnel where you are losing opportunities to re engage with your customers after they've converted. So you really wanna make sure that these are prepared, hopefully ahead of time as well before the campaign kicks in. So you also can then rely on them to just, help drive that customer engagement with your brand. As well as potentially further, conversions. So really identify where your opportunities lie do you have potentially a large group of leads that maybe considering, engaging or making their first purchase with you during a sale period? Because it's a great opportunity for them. Or maybe do you have a large group of customers that, again, like we said, only purchases during a sale period So make sure potentially that you've got the right automations in place. And then once you identify your opportunities, then build them out, you know, build out your, either your custom build, automations or rolled out your key tactics. So some of the ones that are really important So think about, you know, beyond your normal price drop, wish lists, that you can have as well that are going to be really relevant during this time. Are, you know, some key omni channel life cycle automation. So your welcome is going to be really critical. Of course, you might be generating a lot of leads during this period. So make sure that you've got the right tools in place to welcome your customers who are signing up online or potentially in store. Have a lead reengagement strategy to maybe warm up your leads, ahead of the sale period. Obviously, your abandoned any of your band and browser are gonna be really critical during this time where people are going to potentially be browsing on your website to purchase, not just, you know, potentially to make an online purchase, but potentially to browse ahead of when they're gonna come in store to make that purchase. So make sure that you've got those to stay front of mind with your customers. And then, obviously, your key was your first to active buyer automation, your win back campaigns are coming to be really key, as well as your post purchase journey to making sure that the customer remains engaged with you and your brand stays front of mind, and you're always providing that really positive customer experience throughout the whole journey with them. If you do have a number of these already, you know, something that's going to be really thing to think about is how do you enhance your existing automations? You know, are you doing some AB testing that you want to make an adjustment on would you potentially add additional touch points or a reminder or a different channel? Maybe you wanna follow-up with an SMS or maybe you wanna, integrate at push messages in there. So really think about that and potentially as well. How can you drive personalization, to customers during, in those existing journeys? So it takes me to the next, slide where, you know, we wanna really if you are at a stage where you've got your basics covered, How can you potentially drive further personalization in your customer life cycle? So for example, a welcome doesn't just have to be a welcome If you have a store, you could create a welcome that targets customers who purchase in store and customers who purchase online and that creates a personalized journey for each of those customers because they're going to be very different type of customers, which are going to require potentially a different messaging. So similar with an abandoned browse, maybe you have a wide range of categories and you want to, you know, add a little bit more personalization. So a customer, we had we did this with a customer who is a furniture customer, and we personalized their abandoned browse based on the category that there were, purchasing because we noticed that, customers purchased a lot of, products within, same category. So if you were purchasing things for your kids versus things for your outdoor area, you were likely to group those purchases together, and so we made recommendations for additional products. Within those categories. So those are things that you can do as well. Similar for a win back, you might not talk to a customer who you know, is an active who's purchased with you once before only, in the same way that you would have, speak to a customer who's purchased with you many times already. Because the person who's only purchased with you once might need a lot more convincing, maybe a bigger incentive, than the customer who's purchased with you a lot of time. So there's a lot of things that you can really think about when you're looking to take your personalization of your automations to the next level. Great. I think I think before we, move on to some Q and A time, we just wanna sort of look back, I guess, and reflect on what we have covered in the in the session. I think that we all want ahead of time. There is a lot that we've tried to sort of include in this session. We wanted to make sure that we, kind of, covered everything. So like what we've talked through so far is we've talked about leveraging your data constructing your ideal plan, then working through how you then roll out that strategy. Then once that's all done, you're looking at thinking about how can you use AI gamification, interactive content, and loyalty to amplify those programs. And then once that's all done, looking at how you can cement these campaigns within your wider life cycle strategy, with the use of automations, So, I think that if if we don't have any oh, actually, I'm gonna move into Before we move into the QA, I just wanted to share this here, and I'm gonna come back to it once the Q and A starts. So we do have resources if you do want to learn more. So you can look at we've got a ebook for powering up your Black Friday. There is another ebook, which is talking specifically about revenue driving holiday customer engagement. And then, of course, if you want to speak to us, you can reach out via the website. Alright, Sammy. And Laura, thank you very much for the content. It's been really amazing. And I just wanna acknowledge there are a lot of people that have joined. So thank you also to you for joining this session. There's also a lot of questions that have been submitted. So we might not have time to go through all of them. But I'd like to go through a few now Samin and Laura. One of the first questions is, what would you say is the key automation to drive results in this period? Thanks, Will. So that's a really good question. And I think, it's a little bit hard to give a fast one because it really depends on where a customer, is currently in their strategy. So if you haven't got your key automations ticked off. I would say the two ones that we see have the highest return are often your welcome and your abandoned cart. Make sure that those are live and performing and ready. But if you're a customer that's got, you know, all of the basics off, then you might want to be looking at, you know, where are the ones that you can see a bigger, make a bigger difference, you know, where maybe they're not performing quite as well. And driving personalization might support that strategy. So it really depends where you are at. So, unfortunately, I don't have a really key one off answer for you, but really the first few ones that I would make sure that you would pick up are obviously your welcome and your abandoned cart those are really going to be really key. And then think about as well during Black Friday what's going to be that make the most difference to your business. If you have a large group of leads, maybe it's the time to try and warm them up, or if you have a large group of inactive customers as well, So really look at what does your data tell you, and and then construct your strategy around that. Right? Thank you very much, Samyan. Another question that's come through, can you provide an example of how you might consider a customer's purchase journey when communicating with them for a specific promotion. I actually really like that question, so thanks for asking it. I really, I think it's a really good question. And again, it's it's it's a there's a lot that you can do so you know, first of all, it's really understanding who your customer is. So even if you're talking about a specific promotion, You might have a specific promotion in store or online. Do you wanna maybe personalize your your content for a customer that you know purchases online exclusively or a customer that purchases in store exclusively. So there's a lot that you can consider in that respect So whether that where does that customer like to purchase, as well we were talking about, you know, is that customer or, you know, you're talking about a promotion. Are you speaking to a lead to an inactive customer or a customer that's purchased with you a lot? Are you talking about a premium customer? Are you talking about a low value customer? All of that are things that you can personalize according to. So, there's a lot that you can personalize. You can personalize the content, you can personalize the recommendations, the type of products, or maybe, you know, you're also doing a specific promotion around a specific product category. So who's potentially purchased in that category before and is going to be really interested in that type of content. So there's a lot that you can consider, and there's a lot. And, if you've got more questions as well about that, you know, feel free to shoot them over. Awesome. Thank you very much, Samyan. There's even more questions coming through. We might not get through all of them, but a couple more just for the sake of time. How do you recommend and I think this is a really great question because you cannot make money from emails you don't send. How do you recommend getting customers to opt in for marketing emails? Yeah. I think that that's really key, and this is something that we definitely, talking with clients about a lot. So I think the answer is really twofold. So one is making sure that you're driving your identified customers. And in particular, you're opted in database, And then the other is actually thinking about those other channels. So how are you gonna be contacting the customers or the contacts that you have details for, but you cannot them email. So I guess, first of all, in talking to, driving opt ins, it's about making sure that you're making the most of all of that traffic that arrives on your website. So for example, what we usually recommend is the use of web channel overlays, obviously, if you have some sort of incentive as part of sign up, that's gonna be a stronger drive to getting those customers to in. That's not always within strategy. So it's not not at all something that you must do, but something to sort of be aware of. So we wanna make sure that we are communicating to customers when they arrive on-site that we do have a database, we have a subscription program, or maybe it's a loyal program, and what are they, what's the value that the customer will get from that program? We also wanna make sure that at, I guess, all points of purchase, the customer has the option to to opt in. So, you know, is that at the checkout online, and also they're not forgetting about the in store experience as well, like, how can you drive customer identification and opt in in store as well, which is something that we often see is kind of missing. So we work with some of the brands that we work with in on, like, e receipt solutions or perhaps loyalty, to start to tie you know, online and offline back together. And then I think in terms of what do you then do about the customers that you cannot email, like, it's really important not to forget those customers. So how can we contact them on digital ads? How can we contact them maybe on SMS? Can we contact them using app stay on the app. All those sorts of things, you know, thinking about the omni channel strategy as a whole and not just email are really important, but Yeah. I totally agree. Well, that's a really important question. Mhmm. And it that ties into really the last question that we'll cover today. Which is, again, you can't make money from emails. You don't deliver. We did touch briefly on deliverability, but there's a question How can I know if my deliverability is good or not? Yeah. Thanks. That's a really good question, and that's one that we tend to see quite often. Is, you know, how do I know that my, emails are reaching heat inbox and not the spam box? So first things that you can do is, you know, you can go into your, platform. So in a Marissa, you'll get a deliverability report. When you send your emails, and you'll be able to see, how is your, how your emails are are doing. So often what you tend to see is, you know, has the email actually been sent or ended up in the, inbox, but how do you know it's actually placed in the inbox and not the spam box? The what's good is to get a baseline of your customer engagement. So if you see that, you know, your click rates tend to be around your click rates and your open rates tend to be about certain percent, that's going to be a really good baseline. And if you start to see that potentially for a specific period or specific campaign. You see a big drop in that, then that's going to be a sign that there's potentially a problem. So you can in a Marsis, you'll be able to see the breakdown by ISP. So you'll see that potentially, your Gmail is suffering. All your Gmail customers are suffering. That's going to tell you that you potentially have a problem with Gmail. So we've got a lot of deliverability experts in our team. You can reach out to them at that point. To understand what's happening, and they'll be able to give you a little bit more information. So, obviously, what you wanna be doing when you're considering deliverability in your strategy is really being careful when you're engaging large groups of customers and potentially customers that are inactive. So make sure that you're following practice when you're creating your strategy of segmentation for, you know, communication, especially during Black Friday, you might want to engage with a lot of customers that haven't engaged with you in a long time. Be very careful how you do that because you don't want to, fall in spam traps, and you don't wanna get blocked by a specific ISP because you're sending too frequently customers who aren't engaging with your content. So really beware, I think, Amarris has a lot of resources on that to make sure that you are following this practice, I really recommend that you, look into those to avoid any deliverability issues during a really key, period for you. Yeah. And I think Simon's worth acknowledging. We have the inbuilt, deliverability adviser within the platform. We have a dedicated deliverability team at Amarcis. So if there are any questions or concerns that particularly our existing customers have, it's really important to speak up and and get support. It's it's there. This is something that we do very well at a masters. We send our own emails using our own email infrastructure, and any shared IP is really with other credible customers on the platform that have been through, an onboarding process, and so, this is not too much of a concern. But again, if it's something where we pick, you know, picking around Black Friday cyber Monday. It's good to be proactive and and put in some of those strategies. Before we wrap, we've got one really a really good question that just came through that I think is worth sharing, so I'll ask this one before we wrap up and and, and close. The question is, should the automations strategy be adjusted or scaled back during Black Friday period, as Black Friday message will be heavily pushed by the ADM campaign and SMS. Yeah. I mean, Sam, feel free to add to this, but I would probably say that what we find is that automations and batch and blast tend to really go hand in hand and sort of support each other. So a lot of your automations will actually all of your automations the advantage of them are gonna be a lot more personalized. So, straight away, you're gonna be sending lower volumes of these emails, but you're they're gonna be sent at a really targeted time and a really put, like, a time when the person has potentially made an action. So for example, they've abandoned a cart it makes a lot of sense to them why they're receiving those communications. So I don't think we would necessarily, generally suggest to scale them back, but of course it would depend, like, if there's a specific automation you have in mind that might be particularly don't know, hear the handed, then then maybe it's something we would look at. Sam, would you add anything here? Yeah. A hundred percent. I I agree, with with what you're saying, Laura. I think, obviously, your automations, are you're usually going to be triggered by, a specific segment so you're trying to reach customers who've had a specific behavior as well. So obviously interactive or behavior driven automations are going to have a big impact, and they are definitely going to contribute to, your Black Friday impact. But exactly as Laura is saying, you know, maybe you have a specific automation that might clash during that period, then that's something you kind of really need to look into, you know, what kind of content, is that content going to be clashing during this period? So that's, something to look at. So it really depends. But as a general rule, as long as and that's why it's really important to think about your wider strategy. You know, for example, a post purchase journey is really going to support by engaging with your customers. So I would tend to actually prioritize making sure that your life cycle and automations are running well to really complement your ad hoc batch and blah strategy. I think also look at, you know, your customer's engagement level. If the customer is very engaged, they're more likely going to not mind receiving a little that maybe one or two more communications from you. But potentially you might wanna look at, how who your automations are targeting and who your ad hoc communications are targeting and then kind of make that decision looking at your data in that way. Fantastic, Sammy, and Laura. We are running a little bit over time, but there's been some really good questions that have come through and really great engagement from from everyone on call. So, I just wanna first, they say thank you to Laura and Sammy for, putting together the content today and sharing insights around how we should be approaching Black Friday and the and the sales period for the the q four that's coming up. Thank you very much, Laura and Samyan. To those on the call, thank you again for spending time with us today. There are lots of resources on the screen. As Laura pointed out, we have the power up your Black Friday booklet, as well as the revenue driving holiday customer engagement booklet. If you are an existing customer, first of all, thank you. Please feel free to reach out to your dedicated customer success manager, to talk more about strategies for q four, Black Friday. Or to reach out to Laura and Samyan directly, through the team. If you're interested in learning more about a masters, then, the best way to do that is contact us on the web on the website as well, and we look forward to receiving your inquiry and and having a chat. For now, we're gonna leave it Thank you again for joining, and we look forward to seeing you at our next webinar. Thank you, everyone.