Summer Sales: combine “full base” campaigns with precision targeting to boost your revenue

The Summer Sales are just around the corner. Highly anticipated and loved by your customers, you’ll want to make the most of this busy period to boost your revenue and offload any unsold stock. I have first-hand experience of this specific e-retail challenge because I was a Digital Marketing Director at an e-commerce company before I joined Tinyclues. In this article, I’ve laid out the top tips for the sales period from the best campaign strategy experts in the industry. Marketing directors, campaign managers, data scientists and customer success managers – they’ve all contributed to show you the best ways to optimize your marketing campaigns throughout this six-week shopping marathon.

Summer Sales: step away from systematic mass emails

To meet revenue goals and clear stock, e-retailers all too often send emails to their entire customer base. Come the morning of D-Day, they’d send an email to all of their subscribers announcing the start of the sales. Later on that day, they’d send a reminder to those who didn’t open the first email or click on any of the links. They’d continue with this two-pronged attack throughout the sale period.

Using this method, some e-retailers do manage to reach 100% of their customer base without too much fuss. But there are several problems with this tactic:

• The emails aren’t targeted: different customers want different things. If you have a wide-ranging product catalogue, a mass email won’t translate into sales – and you may end up annoying your customers.
• You can only showcase a few products: a single email can only feature so many products, so you’ll have to order them to please as many customers as possible.
• You risk bombarding your customer base with emails: customers are more open to receiving lots of emails if they tally with what they want. If not, you may get a flood of unsubscribes and your chance of reaching those customers will disappear for good.

So, why do so many marketers continue to use such suboptimal practices? Time. Or rather the lack of it. How can you generate propensity to buy scores for dozens or even hundreds of products in just a few hours? How can you automatically manage conflicts between the targets of these different, highly segmented campaigns whilst still ensuring that your reach is broad enough to boost your revenue?

The winning formula: combine “full base” messages with highly targeted campaigns based on real propensity to buy

To optimize turnover, reach and marketing fatigue, your best strategy is to target customers who are most likely to buy each discounted product or product line. Of course, these highly targeted campaigns have to be optimized across the board and be in addition to your “full base” mailouts. Among our clients who take full advantage of the sales period, the winning strategies are:

• Identify which products or categories you want to sell and draw up a campaign calendar for the sales period.
• Set daily and weekly limits (for example, no more than one email a day and four emails a week) and, using Splio’ Artificial Intelligence (AI), create an optimized campaign plan which generates maximum performance.
• Throughout the Summer Sales, use AI to assess and optimize your communications by only selecting the best targets for each product you feature.

Splio is a unique solution powered by a Deep AI targeting capability which can automatically identify the true potential buyers for any product or category. The result? You’ll reach 100% of your customer base, minimize the risk of fatigue and boost your performance. My team’s job is to partner with our clients and help them be successful. The results speak for themselves: by combining the above strategies with a sound marketing plan, A/B testing proves that clients using Tinyclues often boost their revenue by more than 50% – whilst also having fewer unsubscribes.

Start optimizing your Summer Sales today!

Your success of the sales depends on how well you plan in advance. From here on in I’d advise you to:

• List all of the products you want to showcase, whether they’re higher value-added products or leftover stock (including niche products – Tinyclues AI marketing can earmark potential buyers from just 30 sales).
• Draft several templates and creative email content depending on your needs.
• Plan your communication calendar for each week of the six-week period.

With your battle plan ready, you won’t break a sweat come D-Day:

• Once the Summer Sales start, send “full base” emails for each new markdown.
• Every day, use Splio to send highly targeted emails (I recommend about five), utilizing the templates you created. The aim is to still reach 100% of your customer base each day but by sending perfectly tailored emails to various target groups.
• At the end of the sales, look at the additional turnover generated using this new approach, compared with your previous method, and decide whether you want to use it during your other busy periods!

Are you looking for an easy-to-use tool which takes the stresses and strains out of the Summer Sales? Splio’ innovative, proven solution is just what you need. And like any marketing software, it needs input of some specialized industry expertise to be used to its full potential. Feel free to get in touch with me to discuss best practices and learn some top tips!