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Blue Monday strikes on the third Monday of January. It’s cold, it’s damp, it’s dark. We’re all missing the fun of the festive season and racked with guilt for already breaking our new year’s resolutions. The only thing that could possibly cheer us up is a little retail therapy and bagging ourselves a bargain in the Blue Monday sales.
OK, so it’s a marketing ploy. But it works - some stats suggest that just under 20% of annual online sales occur on Blue Monday. And whilst it’s nothing compared to the hype of Black Friday/Cyber Monday, it’s still an opportunity worth taking advantage of - if you do it right.
It’s all about your post-purchase strategy and how you use increased traction to build a better brand.
Whether you’re running special offers, discounts or one off promotions like free delivery, the whole point of Blue Monday is to incentivize custom in an otherwise low spending month. But to really make it work in your favor you need to look beyond the temporary boost in sales and use the event to collect valuable data, improve retention rates and encourage brand advocacy.
Here’s how.
Events like Blue Monday bring increased traffic to your store, making them the ideal opportunity to gather insightful feedback through post-purchase customer surveys.
This is your chance to learn more about important elements of your store from the customer perspective - like the ease of product discovery or the checkout experience. You can also run surveys to collect customer experience metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
With more of this information at your fingertips you can work to reduce any points of friction, and get your store’s design and functionality bang on point for the year ahead.
A boost in sales, however temporary, is a chance to generate more review content. This is valuable in itself, but you can increase that value by collecting zero-party data through review attributes.
Attributes are additional questions added to review requests. They can relate to your company, the purchased product or the customer, and have multiple benefits.
Company and product attributes help you improve your services and inform product development. Customer attributes can add context to review content helping future shoppers with their purchase and - if collected from customers on your subscriber list - can be used for better segmentation. That means more personalization in the future and a higher chance of retention.
Think carefully about how to make review attributes work for your brand, and add relevant additional questions to your Blue Monday review requests.
If you’re not yet running a loyalty program an occasion like Blue Monday is the perfect time to introduce one. By awarding points for their Blue Monday bargains you give customers a reason to return to your store post event.
It doesn’t have to be anything complicated. You can implement a quick launch loyalty program with Influence.io to offer points for purchases. You can also help customers quickly build their points balance by incentivizing reviews, social likes and follows (giving you the bonus of more content and more engagement).
You’ll quickly boost the number of customers on your subscriber list - and with review attributes learn more about them for segmentation. You can then spend the following months experimenting with your loyalty program to find what works for your customer base.
We’ve already established that more sales mean more reviews. And with that comes the potential for more visual UGC, particularly if you put a clever play on the Blue Monday concept.
Consider creating a custom UGC request with a Blue Monday theme - something that asks the customer to share how their Blue Monday purchase brought a little bit of joy into their lives. Today’s consumers love creating content, especially if they have a story arc to work with. Give them one and you’ll likely find them more inclined to respond.
For your efforts, you’ll build a library of authentic marketing material - snippets of the product experience at its finest, be that in photo or video form. You can then use our UGC publishing tool to showcase this content in shoppable galleries.
Your brand reputation does not exist in a bubble. It extends across the web, and it might not always be consistent. For example, you may have a 4.9 company rating on REVIEWS.io, but a 2 star rating on a site like Trustpilot, where anyone can submit an unsolicited review.
If this is the case, use the increased traction of Blue Monday and our Reputation Management feature to fix it.
Deliver a great experience, and then send a percentage (or all) of your Blue Monday company review requests to whichever site (or sites) you need to improve your rating on, like Facebook, Google Local and yes, Trustpilot. Ensuring future customers see the best representation of your brand wherever they look is well worth one day of discounted prices.
Sacrificing on profit margin is never ideal, but events like Blue Monday do have their advantages when you have a strong post-purchase strategy in place. By capitalizing on the increased traction you can gain a competitive advantage through more data, more content and more customer satisfaction.
For help with any of the features mentioned above, or to learn more about our loyalty platform Influence.io, contact our Customer Success team. And if you’re not yet using a review solution why not try our 14 day free trial over this Blue Monday. You’ve nothing to lose and a lot to gain.
