How to Drive Sales During Diwali – A Festive Season Guide for D2C Brands

2022 has been a hard year for brands in the eCommerce space. Rising CACs, supply chain issues, and privacy policies have not only made it harder to reach new and relevant people but also made it difficult for brands to acquire new customers and retain existing ones.

As we head into Diwali, brands have one more opportunity to seize victory and make the most out of this year by using smart strategies to sell their products and turn profits. In this post, we bring top marketing strategies to help your D2C brand make the most out of this Diwali season. 

Diwali in India is celebrated like no other festival. People look forward to brands offering more discounts and new product launches while providing amazing support. For people, it is the time of the year when they are ready to spend generously. With WhatsApp remarketing, click-to-Instagram ads and personalization with conversational marketing, brands have a big opportunity to optimize experiences and convert more customers than ever before.

LimeChat has helped more than 175+ D2C brands reduce their CAC by over 30% while increasing retention by more than 15% in the last Diwali season with its conversational marketing suite. Providing not just support but truly delivering an omnichannel experience will help you convert more customers.

So let’s take a look into 6 key strategies we recommend to make the most out of this festive season –

Deliver personalised experiences at scale

Personalization is a great way to not only increase sales but also deliver better customer experiences. Today, offering a hyper-personalised experience is non-negotiable. 

And when the customer experience is amazing, people tend to remember your product. It also drives up retention rates and increases brand loyalty.

With LimeChat’s personalised campaigns, you can reach out to loyal and high-intent customers with customised discount offers right in their inbox. With customer segments, you can understand your customers, their interests and needs and make offers that help you increase AOV and retention.

Personalization -> CX -> Retention -> Sales

Download our free diwali look here and learn more about how you can deliver a personalised experience to your buyers this festive season. 

Create Powerful Social Commerce Campaigns

Using social media to promote your brand during the festive season is a no-brainer. This is one of those times when people are free, and relaxed and spend hours on social media daily.

While you know it is difficult to stand apart on social media, it is still one of the most effective ways for your potential customers to discover your product and offers. 

In the upcoming diwali season, don’t just use social media to promote your products. You must also come up with innovative ways to showcase discounts and offers that might catch users’ attention. 

At LimeChat, we recommend our brands use CTD ads on Instagram to deliver a frictionless shopping experience and sell products right within Instagram DMs. Want to learn more? Book a demo here!

Gamification: Use Smart AR Filters

AR filters are shown to have an impact not just on sales but on brand recall and customer experience as well. While everyone is using the same old tactics to get users, you can gamify the whole experience and come up with innovative and fun ideas to make your brand stand out in users’ minds. 

Gamification helps in greater brand recall and recognition and allows users to take action when they come across your product somewhere in the store or in an ad. Not just this, these fun activities prompt people to share among their friends and make it a huge driver of organic distribution.

This Diwali, try building smart filters and introduce special discounts for winners. Ask them to share among their friends, colleagues and families to drive more reach and discoverability.

Here’s another example- see how loreal used a smart and effective way to not just promote its new shade of lipstick but also gave users a chance to virtually try them on and flaunt their look in style on Social Media.

As shown in the video, Loreal made a virtual try-on filter on Instagram, letting users see how a lipstick shade will look on their face. Additionally, the user can then share their new look among friends to flaunt and get opinions. 

Build a loyalty program to increase retention post diwali

It’s a sad truth, but it is important to know that festive shoppers are usually one-time shoppers. In today’s era, you can’t just sell to a customer once and expect users to order again. You need to get your customers to remember your product and use customer retention strategies to bring them back to your store. Because if your product is good and an offer is irresistible, demand can always be created.

For example, as a token, you can give your users a coupon code with discounts and offers valid for the next three months. Send them timely reminders based on when the product is about to expire and encourage them to reorder.

Optimise your Website 

If you’re running a festive season sale, your website will encounter more traffic than usual. To prepare for this huge influx of visitors, you need to ensure that your tech is robust and that your store is easily discoverable, glitch-free and optimised to deliver a frictionless experience to the visitors.

A few tips you need to ensure:

1. Your website navigation is built and optimised correctly.
2. You have an AI-enabled Search for better discovery of products – because people don’t look to buy products, people search for a potential solution to their problems
3. Product tags are in place.
4. The store pop-up box is triggered at the right moment.
5. One-click checkout is enabled.
6. There are Multiple payment gateways for smooth payments

(Have a Shopify store? Check out the store optimization guide here to know more about how you can optimize your store this season.)

6) Use WhatsApp Marketing Campaigns to drive more traffic and sales

With a whopping 98% open rate, WhatsApp is one of the key channels for brands looking to grow their online sales this festive season.

With WhatsApp, you can not just help users with better discovery but also run campaigns like never before.

Leverage 2- way broadcast campaigns

After working with more than 175 brands, we realized that 50% of buyers drop off when you send them a promotional message due to poor UI, high loading times and website information overload. 

And that’s why we built  2-way broadcast campaigns at LimeChat. With these campaigns, you can not just send messages but also let the users interact, ask queries and place orders without going to your website. This gives your buyers a frictionless experience and increases their intent.

With 2-way broadcast, you can now:

1. Reach out to the right customers
2. Reach out with the right messaging
3. Set-up 2 way conversational flow with appropriate CTAs
4. Launch and monitor your campaigns with our omnichannel helpdesk

Want our Ecommerce playbook on how to get 10X growth via Whatsapp Broadcast campaigns this festive season? Download it here or click on the image below!

Use customer segments to deliver personalized experiences at scale

Convert high-intent customers and increase LTV by truly leveraging the power of conversational marketing.

The best way to stand out for brands today is to understand their customers, interests, and needs.  You can now do this by sending out targeted broadcast campaigns and leveraging LimeChat’s customer data and ready-to-use customer segments. 

Here’s how you can use customer segments to reach your target audience with accurate offerings:

1. Create customer segments based on purchase history: You can easily send a message to customers who bought a particular product and easily re-sell, up-sell and cross-sell by giving them offers they could be interested in.
2. Create customer segments based on Average Order Value: Targeting customers based on Average order value can help you target premium customers and up-sell high-ticket price products.
3. Create customer segments based on Purchase intent: Target customers who abandoned their cart or didn’t place an order for other reasons. Reach out to them with discounts and offers and make irresistible campaigns.

Learn more about how to leverage WhatsApp Broadcast and customer segments and grow your business this Diwali, by downloading our free guide below: –

If you are convinced that WhatsApp can benefit your business, BOOK A DEMO TODAY!