Ramadan, just like Christmas, has become a season of increased consumerism - whether it’s to prepare the home, cook special meals, or find Eid al-Fitr gifts for loved ones. With the adjustment of routines around eating and sleeping, also comes an adjustment in shopping patterns and an openness to exploring new brands.
As such, it is important for Ecommerce businesses to note the key differences that set Ramadan apart from the rest of the retail year. These include having a deeper understanding of consumer behavior, particularly, category preferences, purchasing frequency, digital propensity and so on.
In this piece, we have outlined 4 key trends to help you design your Ramadan marketing plan:
Frictionless Multichannel CX is key
Customer interaction is greatest on socials
Creators and influencers catalyze purchases
Cross-border discoveries are on the rise
The Trends
1. Frictionless Multichannel CX is key
With multiple brands at their fingertips, customers grow impatient and demanding during Ramadan. As such, you need to proactively reach your customers where they are. As a matter of fact, brands that stay silent during Ramadan risk reducing their brand awareness by 39%.
Basically, it is now more important than ever to leverage multichannel solutions. To put in numbers, 72% of consumers expect to get in touch with brands across a variety of platforms - starting from social media to messaging apps.
If this sounds like too much work, worry not - MyAlice is here to help. You can connect all your customer-facing channels to a unified inbox. This can help you gain a thorough understanding of your customer while giving them a tailored experience.
Now, let’s glance at a few more factors that you perhaps already know about.
User Friendly Website
If surfing your website is as tough as piloting a ship through the fog, your usability is poor. And with a goldfish's attention span, buyers will waste little time figuring out your interface.
So, make your website easy to navigate. Look into user interaction and user experience while designing a website.
Navigation & Site Search
While shopaholics enjoy spending hours exploring a site, the majority of people do not. Most people want to find what they are looking for within two or three clicks. If they are unable to do so, they will soon be heading somewhere else.
Shoppers wanted a clear and visible search box on every page
They wanted the simplest possible search: one search box and one search button
They wanted to search for non-product terms e.g. free returns, exchange, etc.
Customer support
Customer support is essential both during the website visit and post-sales period. Prompt response, live chat and chatbots are few important factors of efficient customer support. In fact, over 50% of customers prefer to communicate with chatbots before reaching customer representatives.
By using MyAlice bot, you can speed up response times and guarantee that clients receive contextual responses at every point of their journey. In the MENA region, 82% of Ramadan shoppers mostly use their smartphones for searching products online. And to guide them through these searches, chatbots can play a crucial role.
Check out and Payment Gateway
The sale isn't successful until the customer pays. A check-out system must be simpler and easy to navigate, as most customers tend to withdraw from the purchase if they find the final process too complicated for them.
Remember, 83% of cross-border shoppers made serendipitous discoveries while shopping during Ramadan in 2022. However, only 61% of those purchases were made seamlessly.
That is, only a frictionless purchase journey can lead to higher conversions.
2. Customer interaction is greatest on socials
During Ramadan and in the period leading up to it, people tend to be more open to new products and brands. This discovery occurs both offline and online, with social media playing a key role.
Source: Meta
And a majority of these shoppers have derived the inspiration for their purchases from WhatsApp - a staple platform among 90% of internet users in the Middle East.
Source: Meta
And when it comes to selling your business in the world of social media, influencers are your go-to. As the chart shows, if your business can forge a connection with an influencer, you've won half the battle.
Source: Meta
3. Creators and influencers are the new cool
As mentioned previously, for festive seasons like Ramadan, influencer marketing can be a worthwhile investment. 76% of shoppers trust the content provided by “regular people” rather than brands.
And this is no longer exclusive to Facebook and Instagram. With new trends like #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt on TikTok, it has already become a key component of holiday influencer campaigns.
Source: Meta
The perks of onboarding creators don't stop here, though.
Shoppers seek for influencers' reviews even when making international purchases.
Source: Meta
4. Cross border discoveries are on the rise
The evolution of e-commerce has blurred the lines between local and global shopping—making it much easier to access products and services across borders.
In fact, consumers are spending more on cross-border items as 55% indicate they are more likely to purchase from abroad during the Holy Month, as reported by Meta.
Source: Meta
And in terms of category, consumers in the UAE purchase fashion products followed by Electronic and designer goods from abroad.
Source: Meta
This creates a unique opportunity for businesses to reach cross-border shoppers—and MyAlice can help businesses target those audiences. With MyAlice, you can learn about your user demographics and their online behavior to develop data-driven customer profiles.
Over to you
Ramadan is a global event celebrated by a quarter of the world's population. And brands can capitalize on this huge community of shoppers by enabling easier discovery, reducing purchase friction and leveraging influencers.
Do you find yourself chasing down new customers because current customers aren't sticking around, and you need to keep your eCommerce business afloat? Is it a sustainable strategy to run your eCommerce business?
We hear you saying no because it actually isn't. It's time you need to focus on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
In this competitive narrative, you can't really go far by keeping on investing in getting NEW customers rather than keeping your OLD customers. What you really need to concentrate on is maximizing your revenue from your present customers. And this is where customer lifetime value comes into play.
According to Tim Cameron Kitchen- CEO of Exposure Ninja, "In order to increase your customer lifetime value, you need to pull two levers. One, increase the number of purchases. And two, increase the purchase value of each customer. And of course, a good business will have a combination of both of these levers."
We want your business to have high customer LTV. So we noted down a series of pointers that you could follow to increase your customer lifetime value and higher profits. Before we dive into the strategies, let's start with the basics.
What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?
According to Omniconvert, "customer lifetime value (CLV) shows how much revenue a business can expect from one customer compared to how long the company predicts that customer will stay."
Customer lifetime value is an important metric for eCommerce brands to measure the average accumulating total of their purchase for some time.
Lifetime value helps you determine if your business will scale the ROI from marketing. It also helps you evaluate the retention strategy depending on how low or high your LTV is.
How To Increase Customer Lifetime Value
You can increase your customer lifetime value by either increasing your Average Order Value or Average Purchase Frequency. An increase in either of these metrics will rise Customer Lifetime Value. Apart from that, let's take a look at the other ways to increase CLV.
— Improve Your Customer Support
Treating your customer right is the core to increasing customer lifetime value. According to Tim Han, an international speaker and author from success insider - "treating your customers like family is the key to recurring customers."
Now we're not telling you to turn a blind eye to their red flags and keep on supporting them. But we definitely recommend you to go a bit above to give them special treatments. In fact, according to research from PWC, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. So enhancing your customer support is an absolute must.
A solid customer support strategy includes attention to the customer pre, mid and post-sale. Your customer support should cater to your customer at every stage of their buying journey. A great way to make sure your customer's queries are always answered in no time is by using an AI-powered chatbot. Having a live chat available can turn a customer question into a sale or complaint into a resolution. We recommend you check out MyAlice as their chatbot can actually automate your entire selling process from start to finish. And the best part is, MyAlice is completely free to sign up!
You need to make sure your customers are returning again and again for the delightful experience you provide.
— Send out occasional gifts
Who doesn't like free stuff? Especially when it comes as a surprise from a place you shopped from. We find ourselves leaning towards shops that offer great discounts or free goodies in most cases. And that's because this is a psychological trick that all of us fall for.
Lippincott's creative consultancy provided a scientific and psychological-based study called the "Happiness Halo" - proving exactly that. In the "Happiness Halo," the author stresses, "Appeal to customers' reason and they're yours for a day. Appeal to customer's emotions, and they're yours for a lifetime."
And nothing is more solid than sending gifts to appeal to your customer's emotions. It shows them that you care about them more than just a means of getting some sales.
We're not telling you to send out gifts 365 days a year to every customer for every purchase. But rather, identify your loyal set of customers and potentially loyal customers, and then send out occasional gifts to show them you care.
— Nudge Your Customers into Subscriptions
One of the most popular ways (that works) of increasing the number of purchases of your customers is by bumping them into subscriptions. They're one of the new trends of e-commerce. And they can be lucrative enough that we even see big names like GoPro getting into the subscription realm they previously didn't opt for.
You can nudge them into a subscription by displaying a subscription-biased pricing option of your product.
This basically means you will show the pricing option of a one-time purchase on one side. And on another, the pricing option is based on subscription. However, you need to show your customers how the subscription pricing will be more effective and profitable.
This will incentivize them to opt for the subscription rather than going for a one-time purchase.
Another way of getting your customers into subscriptions is by showing the subscription as the default purchase method. And if customers want to go for a one-time purchase, they need to click on that purchase method.
You can do to level up the subscription game by giving them an option to allow your customers to customize the time frame and the amount of product for the subscription. This way, they will not have too much stock of the product based on their lifestyle. And they are less likely to cancel the subscription altogether.
— Integrate Add-ons and Upsells
Another great way to increase the average order value of your customers is by adding add-ons and upsells. Big names like GoDaddy GoPro have been using this pricing strategy for years now, which has helped them generate more sales.
Everything that you throw at your customers before and after purchasing the products is for one thing - increasing the order value.
And therefore, there's an increase in customer LTV. Some of your add-ons and upsells features may seem annoying to your customers. But it's a genius idea for your business.
Since you are competing in a very competitive and price-sensitive space, If you want to maximize your customer acquisition, you need to maximize the value of every customer you get through the door.
By doing so, you can save the money that you would have otherwise spent on getting new customers. So you can now invest it in other business activities. Like - marketing. Which will help you build market share without increasing the price of their core product.
— Introduce Premium Versions
Introducing a line of premium versions of the same product can incentivize your customers to opt for better options. But, you need to make sure you can present it in a manner that demonstrates why the premium versions are better than the regular ones.
That way, customers who always want the best of everything are more likely to opt for the premium purchase. The pricing of the premium product will also be higher than the regular, which may be a problem for some of your customers. In such a case, you can introduce split pay for that.
Now split pay is absolutely everywhere and another massive trend of e-commerce over the last few years. One of the biggest players in the split pay market -Klarna, claims to increase the average order value by up to 58%.
Split pay will help you get more sales for your premium products and end up increasing the average order value for your customers.
Drawing Conclusion: Loyalty Brings Revenue
The right customer lifetime value model can boost your company's growth and progress in many ways. It puts more money in your business's wallet by lowering customer acquisition costs and saving money on marketing and sales activities.
Delivering a great deal of value, understanding the customers being in their shoes, prioritizing customer service are what they need to come back to you again and again.
