A New Way to Connect With Your Customers This Holiday Season
By: Stephen Rivera, Strategic Account Manager
‘Tis the season to amplify your holiday marketing campaigns. The competition is fierce, with retailers putting all their resources into marketing to drive customer engagement and spike their end of year sales.
In today’s digital era, retailers face many challenges when it comes to engaging with customers, especially during this holiday trading period. A brand’s ability to leverage key moments in time and provide personalization and relevancy, is vital to its success during one of the busiest times of the year.
Source: Kantar Media
In 2018 retailers spent $3.7 billion on holiday advertising to drive awareness and have a voice, but at the end of the day their messaging is only as good as someone’s ability to recall it. To truly stand out, retailers must serve the right message at the right time using channels that sync up with their customer’s busy life.
Enter: Calendar Marketing – a new, innovative way to reach customers.
So What Does Calendar Marketing Actually Mean?
Calendar marketing is an effective marketing solution that enables marketers to engage with customers through their digital calendars (Google Calendar, Outlook, iOS, etc.) Already installed on every device, the digital calendar is now one of the most powerful marketing and communication channels that has the ability to deliver the right messages at the right times.
For marketers, calendar marketing ensures messages and notifications have a stronger impact at key moments in the customer’s daily life. For customers, calendar marketing allows them to take control over their marketing experiences and personalize the content they receive based on the brands and events they care about the most.
For both marketers and customers, calendar marketing creates a new foundation on which to build a transparent and robust relationship.
Break Down the Benefits For Me
Traditional marketing methods have become oversaturated. E-commerce is highly competitive, and retailers must look for innovative ways to drive engagement. Calendar marketing transforms customer calendars into new, real-time, personalized lines of communication that keeps brands at the top of customers’ minds.
As the second most popular mobile app across all devices, the calendar can drive activities at key moments in time, whether it may be promoting Black Friday sales, the newest product releases, or winter specials, marketing through the calendar app enables brands to deliver content in real-time.
Additionally, the calendar is a space where brands have complete control over the frequency of notification and content delivery. Because all notifications are enabled by default via the calendar app, lock screen notifications ensure that your brands target message is priority, 100% of the time.
Calendar marketing puts a dynamic spin on the way in which calendar notifications have been delivered to date. Historically, many brands have implemented traditional ICS calendar file downloads as an “in-house” calendar solution which contains little data on the subscriber and is limited in terms of event curation. Today, calendar marketing offers an innovative and fluid solution for creating an ongoing communication channel that’s easily integrated into a brand’s existing properties, whether through embedded HTML or native integration.
The Rokt Calendar Solution
Rokt Calendar is the leading solution for calendar marketing, with world-class brands such as TheSkimm, UFC, and Wall Street Journal leveraging an untapped channel to reach their audiences. On average, brands who have implemented Rokt Calendar have seen 97% notification recall from customers and 100% engagement from 80% of their subscriber base.
On average, brands who have implemented Rokt Calendar have seen 97 % notification recall from customers and 100% engagement from 80% of their subscriber base.
Retailers are able to segment the content distributed to their customers by implementing Rokt Calendar’s tagging system. Empowering customers to not only subscribe to specific type of brand deals of their choosing, but ultimately personalize the content in their calendar as it relates to their preferences.
In further efforts to drive relevant and personal communications, Rokt Calendar is fully compatible with leading CRM platforms such as Salesforce and Braze, and can be implemented in as little as 48 hours. By leveraging a CRM, marketers can easily add the Calendar into their existing suite of messaging tools, diversifying the marketing mix while also creating and delivering relevant 1:1 personalized messages at the same time. This solution provides a platform for custom and real-time connectivity that drives brand recognition and revenue.
As the holidays quickly approach and customers begin receiving an abundance of marketing emails and display ads, Rokt Calendar can help brands stand out against the sea of sale notifications and create a powerful connection with target audiences.
Ready to capitalize on a virtually untapped marketing channel this holiday season? Reach out to us at calendar-sales@rokt.com or head to www.rokt.com/calendar for more information.