How to do effective Christmas customer profiling? Find out who they are and how to convince them to keep buying after the holidays.
Christmas, as well as other holidays, are pivotal times for a large proportion of ecommerce and retailers.
A good portion of our customers may have purchased from us solely during these occasions: investigating who these people are and creating personalized experiences is critical if we want to convince them to continue buying from us and not just during the holidays!
Let’s investigate them together in this new episode of our column, User Profiling Pills.
Who I am
As we said we are talking about the customers who come to us only on Christmas or specific holidays, let us now see how to investigate their habits a little more in depth.
It is first of all important to be able to understand which of them:
- purchased from us solely during those occasions and then never browsed your site again
- who, between holidays, still visited your site with some frequency although without purchasing.
By distinguishing these two macro groups, we will be able to devise different personalization strategies so that we can engage each of them in the right way.
Initially, it will be important to focus on the second segment. This will in fact be made up of customers that we can more easily think of attracting more frequently as they show an interest in our products or services even during the rest of the year. It will then be a matter of figuring out what is the spring that can lead them to buy more frequently.
How I identify them
To perform useful customer profiling for our purpose we can use three different types of filters:
- behavioral
- demographics
- contextual
By crossing these filters we can get the segment we need.
With the behavioral ones we will filter out customers who made a purchase in the previous Christmas period (or the holiday period we are interested in monitoring). Again with this category we will be able to exclude those who browsed the site out of season.
Thanks to demographic filters, we will instead go on to identify which of them are subscribed to our newsletter or not, again an important signal to keep in mind both for the reengagement possibilities it gives us and as an additional manifestation of interest.
Instead, contextual filters will allow us to identify these customers as they are browsing our site, so that we can intervene with ad hoc messages in real time.
Always remember to verify that the segment we went to create is actually significant in terms of number of users or value, understanding this information will allow us to properly prioritize this activity.
If the segment was particularly populous we could perform further segmentations by possibly going to identify the product purchased in the previous year and dynamically propose useful tips.
How to act: some suggestions
While being nagged by doubt as to why an entire year has passed without these people buying anything more from us, we must first take action to get them to re-purchase from us and defer to a later stage the development of a strategy on how how to get them to re-purchase.
We prepare an appropriate set of communications and define whether we possibly have coupons or special promotions available that we can use as a “Welcome Back” to show when these users return to our site.
Feeling recognized is in fact one of the main levers that determine bonding with a brand.
Another action that can definitely bring benefits is the development of a communication via e-mail or through the other channels available to us-Social, In App Notification, Web Push Notification, to name a few-that discreetly reminds our users that it is time for gifts.
Let’s gradually increase communication pressure as the holiday approaches but let’s not overdo it!
If you want more tips on how to personalize your e-commerce at Christmas, you can read this article.
Finally, let’s remember that the consumer is often stressed about having to choose Christmas gifts! Recommendations, within the site and direct communications, if personalized and communicated in the right way, can be a release for your customers who will then have a great experience…so much so that they will return to you as soon as possible.
