Our team are keeping tabs on the creative and practical ways in which you can keep your business communication running throughout the current troubled times. Business continuity is important, but so are the messages you are sending and their potential effects.
So far, we’ve learnt that audiences are in fact engaging with marketing communications (as demonstrated by doubled open rates) and that many of our customers are reporting success as they take up different channels, so far SMS is proving to be the front-runner when it comes to critical, time-sensitive information.
If you haven't seen them already, here’s a round-up of Covid-19 related content, you may find useful during this crisis, and also as we transition out of it.
- Managing communications in times of crisis explains what crisis communications are and gives pointers as to how you may want to devise your own crisis communications plan.
- Even continuity brings change. Here's what you can do to remain relevant provides a broad range of marketing considerations now that your customers are socialising less, shopping online more, and changing their routines altogether.
- Effectively communicating your business continuity gives a run-down of the channels available to you, and key considerations when communicating business continuity updates.
- Don’t panic and send toilet paper emails is a blog written by our very own head of deliverability, Tanya Plaza, and explains why you shouldn’t send a Covid update just because everyone else is.
- 5 ways you can adapt to rising online demand provides ways ecommerce stores can and have evolved to meet the needs of changing consumer behaviour.
- Meanwhile, 5 tips to grow your ecommerce business in preparation for when lockdown lifts addresses the long term shift in shopping habits that Covid-19 has realistically brought about.
What’s more…
It’s likely that there are tons of features available to you in your Dotdigital account that you may not be using right now. We’ve highlighted some quick links below to get you thinking about some of the tools you may be under-utilising.
Making the most of your Dotdigital account
Your Dotdigital account is your one-stop-shop for data management, email, SMS, chat, and reporting.
1. Data acquisition and management
It’s likely you have fewer trade shows to go to (physically at least), and if you’re working from home you’ll get loads of time back that you typically spend commuting. There may be no better time than now to spring clean your data. In order to make sure you’re sending the right content, with the right messages, to the right audiences, data management and data acquisition are as crucial as ever. Here are some articles to help:
- Quickly and easily build, design and publish great-looking pages to help drive your customer engagement, provide information, and increase conversion
- Insert forms to your landing page to collect information such as customer contact information or feedback
- Keep engagement meaningful by setting up a preference centre to put your customers in control of what they receive from you
2. Send rich and relevant content with email
Email is your go-to channel for rich content with key messages that your contacts can keep to hand, and refer back to. As mentioned above, we’ve seen a huge increase in email engagement, so make the most of it with these tools and tactics:
- Send to the right customer groups, with segmentation
- Personalise your emails for each of your recipients, for improved engagement
- Use dynamic content to send display content relevant to your recipients’ location or interests
- Use send-time optimisation to improve open rates
- Send bestselling product recommendations, simply by syncing your order data - at no extra cost
- Browse all email articles
3. Send critical messages swiftly, with SMS
SMS is the channel for sending headlines, time-sensitive information. Open rates for SMS are unparalleled and you can include links to either provide further information or for data capture. If you’re new to SMS, here’s how to start sending:
- Creating an SMS campaign
- Editing an SMS campaign
- Test sending an SMS campaign
- Sending an SMS campaign
- All SMS articles
- Learn more about SMS with our ebook here
4. Give site visitors a window for conversation with chat
If you’re referring customers or prospects to your site from your email, SMS, social media or other online and offline campaigns in this time of crisis, it’s important to give them a quick way to get in touch with you. Get started with these articles:
- Getting started with Chat
- Edit your team name
- Customise the chat widget
- Add the Chat widget to a website
- Read and reply to a chat session
- Manage your chat queue
- Set your team working hours
- Learn more about using chat with our ebook here
5. Keep your finger on the pulse and adapt, with reporting
In these strange times, it’s more important than ever to keep an eye on what’s going on with your customers and prospects. As this blog emphasises, it’s likely that, along with their routines, your customers’ online browse, search, and purchase behavior has changed. Keep an eye on this new but temporary normal, and you might identify ways in which to adapt your marketing. You may uncover that a typical new customer today, takes longer to make a second purchase. Or you may find that loyal customer AOV is going down, whilst their purchase frequency is increasing.
Reporting will help you see what’s changed, and more importantly, how you can adapt. Here are some articles to help: