The coronavirus outbreak has immersed several psychological and economic impacts, which will last for a longer time. The virus has disrupted all aspects of life, including work, businesses, studies, traveling, etc. Customer behavior patterns have changed, and so the ways products are bought or sold.
As per The CMO Survey, marketers have undergone a significant loss in terms of profits, revenues, and customer acquisition during the pandemic. Many companies have witnessed a drop in budgets during this period. Sales revenues had a big hit in terms of losses, with an average drop of 17.8%. To overcome the impacts of this crisis, marketers need to evolve their marketing strategies.
How to Retain and Grow Customers during the pandemic?
A loyal customer is all any organization would need for growing their business. In a report, SignalMind stated that from a new customer there is only 5-20% possibility of sale, however 60-70% sale is presumable from an existing customer. It also reported that 80% of the future profits would most probably come from 20% of existing customers. These statistics clearly say that customer retention is far more important than acquiring a new one.
During the pandemic, your business must have mastered new strategies to acquire a new audience. Let’s dive into some approaches to retain your existing customer base and grow it during the crisis.
1) Your existing customer must be having an idea about your business and brand values. Promote your brand initiatives to build trust among your customers and gain loyal customer relationships.
2) Keep your social game strong. Be social, deliver insightful information, and communicate with your customers. In this situation, google forms can play a vital role in collecting essential information from your audience and serve their needs.
3) Pivot your products or services, according to specific customer concerns. Offering discounts and promotions would be helpful. If possible, collaborate with influencers to promote safety and wellness.
4) Provide a personal touch, to enhance your customer experience. Through customized e-mails, handwritten cards, personalized messages, you can provide a personal touch to your customers.
5) Incentivize purchases with added gifts, bonuses, and free trials. This will help to retain your existing clients, and feature magnified customer service.
How to Optimize Online Sales in Current Market Scenario?
The Covid-19 crisis has been demonstrated to be favorable for e-commerce retailers, with most people shifting to online shopping. Since the pandemic rules have restricted people from going out, marketers need to make the best use of it and invest in growing online sales. Let’s discover some ways to optimize your e-commerce store.
1) Homepage, your digital storefront, introduces your business to customers. Optimize your homepage SEO, to make it easy for customers to quickly and easily understand your products and services. Make sure to use keywords that are most likely to rank in Google.
2) Make sure to provide a frictionless checkout process. Eliminating friction from your checkout process can greatly impact your conversion rate. Provide a hassle-free experience in navigating through your site and purchasing the products by optimizing your product pages.
3) Use the marketing strategy responsive to current trends. Incorporate products or services addressing the ongoing crisis. Provide a contact-less, safe, and free delivery to attract customers’ interest.
4) Page loading time is one of the most significant factors for online shopping. If your product page is taking too long to load, it might disinterest the potential customer and increase your site’s bounce rate. Reduce the page loading speed to retain the customer on your site and optimize sales.
How Should Marketing Strategies Evolve amidst the Ongoing Crisis?
The economic slowdown due to the Covid-19 outbreak has had severe impacts on many businesses. To survive this uncertain period, marketers must adapt some innovative strategies to reach out to the target audience proactively. Let’s dive into some insights on evolution marketing strategies during Covid-19.
1. Track and Fulfill Customer Requirements
The ongoing lockdowns and social distancing have made it mandatory for people to stay at home. This eventually has impacted people’s minds, their thinking process, about the current situation, and future. Marketers need to add innovation, agility, and resilience to their strategies. To implement these strategies, they should track, understand, and fulfill their potential customers’ requirements. Their way of thinking, lifestyle, and everything else has changed in these critical times, hence assessing their needs and understanding them is crucial for the business. Making your business “a brand in need” will surely reserve a place in your audience’s checkout list.
2. Maximize the Use of Technology
During the Covid-19 outbreak, businesses are facing adverse repercussions. It is more challenging to meet customers’ needs in this challenging time amidst the constraints of social distancing and ongoing lockdowns. Marketers need to emphasize on emerging technologies and new ways to reach out to people. Whereas, e-commerce websites are also facing challenges as they need to ensure safe delivery, safety of employees and customers, stock maintenance, and coping with ever increasing orders, etc. In this situation, only technology can help the e-commerce companies to run their businesses smoothly. Amazon has ramped up numerous measures to ensure safe delivery and fair pricing during the Covid-19. Amazon unveiled Prime Air, a future delivery system intended to safely deliver packages in 30 minutes or less using drones. Apart from this, the Unattended Delivery option is also available to avoid delivery agents coming in contact with parcels.
3. Boost Your Digital Experience
Despite the adverse impacts of Covid-19, businesses are striving to leverage their marketing strategies. The ongoing lockdowns and social distancing have put lives in a virtual model. People are spending more time on social media, OTT streaming platforms, and e-commerce sites. In this situation, enhancing your brand’s social presence will be the only savior.
Many big brands are altering their marketing strategies to increase social media engagement and enhance the digital experience. Market giants such as Adidas and Nike are urging people to do home workouts and stay safe during the crisis through digital campaigns.
4. Emphasize on Customer Experience
People are most likely to love the brands which are acknowledging current issues and situations. Emphasizing and prioritizing customers’ needs will help your brand to build a firm customer base. Set the face of your brand that should deliver your brand values. Enhanced customer experience starts with excellent human interaction. According to PwC research, even before the pandemic, 59 percent of global consumers felt companies had lost touch with the human component of customer experience, and 75 percent of the customers preferred to interact with a human instead of an automated machine. During the crisis, people might need this human touch to a greater extent as they strive to navigate several things of the new normal.
A leading brand in beverages, Coca-Cola has donated its social feed to partner community organizations. With this declaration, the brand empowered organizations to serve society in the hard times of Covid-19 through their social platforms. Even though you want to boost your business, you need to emphasize customer experience first, ensuring your brand delivers the same values even during the crisis.
Conclusion
Despite many challenges, businesses are striving to build new marketing strategies for better growth. These hurdles are presenting an opportunity for businesses to enhance the digital ecosystem and their online reputation. The evolution of marketing strategies is of greater importance during the Covid-19 crisis.
Related Articles
