In 2023, UK shoppers spent a reported £13.3 billion over the Black Friday weekend. While Black Friday remains predominantly an online event, in-store purchases saw a rise in 2023, with 44% of consumers making Black Friday purchases in physical stores.
According to Sendcloud, they forecast a 41% higher probability in lost parcels during the final quarter of this year compared to Q3. The risk of a lost parcel is highest in November, when the odds of a package getting lost in shipment increase by as much as 40% compared to an average month. December follows right after, with a 21% higher risk of lost packages.
So take a look below at the five ways you can still make the most of Black Friday to ensure your business has a bumper year.
1. Clean Up Your Black Friday List
It is essential that your business cleans up its data ahead of any marketing campaigns. 88% of customers believe suggestions from friends and family over other forms of advertising, making word of mouth marketing very important. Therefore, if you are planning on sending out Black Friday marketing this year, make sure you check your database for any inaccurate data beforehand.
If your business compiles large volumes of data then a bespoke solution will enable you to cleanse, dedupe, and standardise your database. In turn, this will help you to remain compliant with GDPR and adopt a clearer view of your customer base.
Are you planning an email campaign?
If you are planning an email marketing campaign, it is also well worth considering email validation, as the email addresses in your list may be malformed (data-entry error or spam) or even non-existent. A large number of inaccurate or invalid emails will increase your email sending costs (based on list size) and may damage your sender reputation. Email validation analyses each email address in your list and returns a report. Once your list has been validated, you can be confident that your emails are being sent to active and verified email addresses.
2. Now it is clean – help your customers to keep it clean
Once you have cleaned your customer and prospect data, the next step towards the perfect customer journey is keeping that data clean. Validating their addresses and emails during the online checkout process is a prime way of doing just that. 18% of shoppers will abandon a cart if a checkout process is too complicated or flawed in any way. In an era where customer experience is king, capturing data correctly is the linchpin of the purchasing process.
So how can you do this? By integrating a sophisticated address validation and email validation solution into your web form that receives regular Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF) updates. This will help to combat and reduce customer frustration and address-related cart abandonment.
3. Verify Payment Details
Last but not least on the road to perfecting your customer journey this Black Friday is verifying their payment details. Internet scams greatly increase during November and December as consumers up their online spending.
Whilst scams reduced by 12% to £340.65 million in 2023 it is worth bearing in mind that you do not want your App or website to be enabling fraud.
To help safeguard your customers and your business this Black Friday make sure you utilise bank validation software to reduce the risk of fraud. The quick and accurate capture of data at the point of entry within the online shopping cart will save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
4. Improve Customer Relations
Customer retention is just as important as procuring new ones this Black Friday, therefore, improving and maintaining your customer relations is a must.
Ensuring you have the correct information about your customers in your database for future communications will help improve relationships. This can be tricky considering that 9,590 households move and 1,500 people die on a daily basis. Marketing to the wrong address or deceased persons could damage customer relations and ultimately your brand image.
After all, 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand after one bad experience, and 92% will completely abandon after two or three negative interactions.
Hopewiser’s Bureau team use our state-of-the-art data cleansing software to match business data against a series of suppression files to highlight deceased and mover records. Continuing to clean your data post Black Friday and Cyber Monday will help your marketing campaigns and analysis.
5. Protect Your Brand Image
Further to what we said about improving customer relations, another way to protect your business and brand image is by using a data cleansing service.
Overall 78% say they’re loyal to some brands and will pay more to shop with them. But customer data rarely stays accurate for long due to natural decay – on average, data decays at a rate of 30% per year, so using a reputable data cleansing solution who receives daily Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF) updates will help ensure your data is of the highest quality, thus protecting your brand’s reputation.
The Result
Once you’ve addressed this 5 step process you can sit back and watch your business thrive.
If your company struggles with data, then outsource to the experts today! Find out how Hopewiser’s innovative address and data solutions can help you create the perfect customer journey this Black Friday.
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