Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) will have been a customer data goldmine for every retailer, delivering a huge increase in traffic and engagement across websites and messaging. 

The most successful retailers know that with smart planning, the real rewards can run on long past the end of November. 

A 2023 BFCM Aftermath Report by Klaviyo – an intelligent marketing automation platform – found that 25 per cent of all consumers and 32 per cent of Gen Z consumers are still holiday shopping post-BFCM. That represents a massive opportunity to engage prospects and convert them into customers.

But there’s more to the story than just sales, the BFCM season is the ideal time to build awareness and engagement between the retail brand and customers. 

While every customer secured during BFCM is important, every new browser who visited the site or responded to a promotion represents a new prospect for long-term engagement and conversion.  

This week the company shares four strategies that retailers can leverage to capitalise on post-BFCM momentum and retain new customers. 

1. Assess the data and reflect on your BFCM performance

Learn how to report on core KPIs (key performance indicators) to understand your BFCM marketing performance. Taking a deep dive into what worked – and what didn’t – during your BFCM campaign will not only make it easier to follow the next three strategies, but it can help shape your campaigns for future promotional periods in the lead-up to Christmas, for the post-Christmas sales season and beyond. 

Savvy brands know BFCM isn’t the finish line – it is one important step along the way to building smarter long-term digital relationships with customers. As your brand deploys more efficient marketing strategies, you’re not just improving your bottom line, you are familiarising your customers with what to expect from your brand and strengthening the engagement and your relationship with them.

Klaviyo has resources to help retailers measure and analyse their BFCM performance – including a helpful video and a step-by-step guide showing how to use them. For starters, consider these guiding questions:

• What marketing initiatives worked well for this BFCM?
• What were your top-performing campaigns and flows?
• What deals outperformed others?
• Who within your audience was most engaged?
• What were your best-selling items?
• How did you maximise efficiency, saving your team time, money, etc.?

By using all of this valuable engagement data from your BFCM campaign – clicks, product views, purchases, or wishlist items – you can create highly targeted follow-up campaigns spur additional purchases. 

2. Turn BFCM shoppers into repeat customers

BFCM is a season when every retailer should be gaining new first-time customers. Now is the time to deploy new engagement strategies to hook these one-time purchasers to your brand and turn them into brand enthusiasts and loyal customers. 

Most likely, a retailer’s approach to pre-BFCM expansion was based on the marketing funnel: 

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversion
• Loyalty

Jia Lee, senior content marketing manager at Klaviyo, advises retailers to “flip that funnel” to focus on highly engaged customers and first-time purchasers from BFCM. 

“Let your brand advocates spread the word about their recent purchases, and reward them for their engagement,” she says. 

“Then use that content to nurture those first-time purchasers into making an additional purchase or a higher-engagement program – like subscribe-and-save or loyalty. Infuse social proof into your marketing to increase repeat purchase rate, and increase the customer lifetime value of those first-time BFCM shoppers.”

3. Use segmentation to retarget customers

The peak BFCM season might now be over and sales volumes have returned to normal – but savvy retailers know not to lose the momentum BFCM has given their business. 

After reflecting on performance and diving into the useful data described above, now is the perfect time to re-engage with key audiences, using personalised messages and targeted ads on email, SMS and push notifications. 

Every successful BFCM automation should be followed up with a carefully planned, segmented campaign to remind prospects and customers of your products and services. 

Klaviyo recommends adding December campaigns directly into your campaign calendar, by using the data to create robust customer segments using the platform’s segmentation tools. Set up automated email flows triggered by specific customer actions, ensuring timely and relevant communication. 

You can learn more about this from our earlier BFCM campaign-focused features on Inside Retail that focused on creating winning strategies and using SMS and email campaigns to boost sales. 

4. Encourage customers to post reviews of the products they bought during BFCM

Encouraging product reviews is a great way of engaging with past customers at any time of the year, increasing retention and building lifetime customer value. Not only do they present an easy opportunity to engage with customers without pushing sales or promotions, but they also help build the confidence of new customers when they browse your site looking for products they can trust. 

Klaviyo reviews – currently available for Shopify and Shopify Plus users – consolidate data in one platform, allowing retailers to get the most out of their customers’ reviews. Users can see at a glance the number of reviews posted, the response rate and the average rating. From there, retailers can drill down to a wealth of information that can help shape product development, site design and ranging decisions.

By automatically collecting reviews from customers at the right time in their customer journey – and only after confirmed purchase deliveries – Klaviyo’s platform removes the risk of poorly timed messages that risk irritating customers.

Retailers can reward five-star reviews with a coupon for future purchases or a personal message thanking them for their feedback. Negative reviews can be passed on to the customer service team for resolution. Remember, even a negative review creates a potentially positive customer experience by resolving a problem and restoring customer faith in the brand. 

Using Klaviyo, Compass Coffee boosted the number of customer reviews by 70.5 per cent per quarter. The cafe chain wanted to encourage customers to send images of them enjoying the coffee at home or work – in the first quarter using Klaviyo’s solution, the number of images received lept by 370 per cent. 

“Klaviyo wins on the customisability of the review collection correspondence,” said Joel Shetterly, CMO at Compass Coffee. “The rate of review collection is completely solved; the rate of photo collection is completely solved.”

With Klaviyo, marketers are equipped with the integrations and functionality they need to power smarter digital relationships – not just during BFCM, but all year long.