Connecting with your customers during Ramadan 2023, the omnichannel way

Ramadan, the holy month for Muslims and a time for spiritual reflection, brings changing shopping behaviours to countries including but not limited to Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Following the lunar cycle, Ramadan 2023 is expected to begin on 22 March and until 21 April. For 30 days, lifestyle changes such as fasting during daylight hours affect the habits, actions and decisions of consumers.

During Ramadan, Malaysians start shopping as early as 4 a.m., while Singaporeans start at around 5 a.m. Also, 82% of Ramadan shoppers purchase directly from their mobile phones and start shopping a month in advance. As many merchants are offering attractive discounts and promotions, businesses need to implement timely strategies that will resonate with consumers.?

On top of your e-commerce and productivity tools, maintaining a presence across all social media platforms can be exhausting, but it really doesn’t have to be if you’ve got a powerful omnichannel platform like SleekFlow right by your side. Let’s prepare you and your teams for the upcoming high-sales period with some tips to maximise conversions, exposure and customer engagement.?

Effective ways to attract customers and increase sales from Ramadan to Raya 2023

The first half of Ramadan most often begins with discovery through mobile engagement; in other words, this is the time when Ramadan customers browse through the internet or social media to discover brands and products.?

Then, towards the second half of Ramadan, people start to shop intensively in preparation for the Eid celebration. Thus, brands must learn how to leverage smart tools to establish the best Ramadan marketing campaigns and follow through all steps of the sales process efficiently to close more deals.

Automate interactive Ramadan marketing messages

Marketing during Ramadan doesn’t have to be too complicated. You can start by automating your Ramadan wishes to clients through popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DM or whichever channel they prefer to make your customers feel important and respected.

Schedule the social media posts to be published at the right time. Following that, you can use social CRM features, including chat labels and analytics, to properly segment the potential leads engaged with your Ramadan content or prospects who have dropped enquiries. All these contacts and details about them are valuable data that can be used for future retargeting, where messages can be personalised by adding variables such as the product of interest to generate better campaign performance.

Moreover, since Muslim employees may need more time to rest or perform additional prayers during Ramadan, you can also use automation to reassign the conversations from your Ramadan digital campaigns to the appropriate sales agent, making sure that no leads are missed out in the process.?

Create a sense of urgency with a limited-period offer

Highlighting the exclusivity of the offer by emphasising it is only available for a short period of time, such as the last 10 days of Ramadan, can be effective in generating a sense of urgency and encouraging the customers to act quickly before the promotion expires.?

For example, one of the Ramadan digital campaign ideas for a fashion retailer can be the distribution of a limited number of online vouchers or coupons that is only available during the month of Ramadan.?

A social media post can be used to share details about the vouchers, and customers will have to comment under the post to get them. With auto replies set up for your Ramadan content and posts on social media, the vouchers or coupons will be automatically distributed to these customers who are truly interested in your products. Chat buttons can be included in the flow so that it’s easy for your audience to reply to your messages and engage with your brand.

Furthermore, if you incorporate this Ramadan marketing strategy with buy online, pick-up in-store (BOPIS) as a part of O2O commerce efforts, customers will be more inclined to shop. With an efficient BOPIS system available, your customers can:

• Save up on shipping costs
• Available immediately, no need to wait for products to be shipped
• Get a refund or return products on-the-spot if there’s no stock or unsuitable

The improved shopping experience will increase customer satisfaction and encourage more word-of-mouth marketing for your Ramadan campaign. Providing more incentives and convenience for consumers is bound to drive impulse buying and make customers more compelled to make purchases right away.

Send Ramadan broadcast messages to customers

Discount codes from your Ramadan digital campaign can also be delivered using WhatsApp broadcast messages or Facebook Messenger broadcast messages. On the free WhatsApp Business App, you can broadcast information about your Ramadan sale to 256 contacts. If you can allocate more budget for marketing during Ramadan, you can get aboard with the WhatsApp Business API and broadcast to an unlimited number of customer contacts.?

On Facebook Messenger, you can utilise OTN and Message Tags to organise broadcast campaigns for your Ramadan sale. However, this is only for users who have engaged with your Facebook Business Page before. To reach out to new Ramadan customers, you can include a click-to-Messenger CTA button on your Facebook Business Page or Facebook Ads so that they become your Facebook contacts, to which you can then send personalised broadcast messages to them.

Plus, if you choose to broadcast messages on various channels using omnichannel commerce software, you can manage all conversations in an all-in-one inbox, bringing in more leads and sales for your Ramadan campaign while handling them efficiently.

Capture leads at any time with a live chat and chatbot

As mentioned previously, the browsing time for Ramadan shoppers can start as early as 4 a.m. before sahur. It can be too demanding to allocate a team of customer support specialists to work at such a time. This is why you should set up a live chat on your e-commerce site and create a chatbot to capture leads at any time. Utilise automated chat flows to allow conversions to happen anytime, anywhere.

Using the chat buttons or automated chatbot flows, you can also apply the element of gamification to generate a higher engagement for your Ramadan digital campaign. For instance, if you’re selling food products, you can create a character to share some recipes. The chat buttons on the messages can be options for the customer to decide what the character will eat, including recipes for sahur and iftar.

Live chat analytics can also offer insights into the bounce rate of your website pages and the customers’ browsing time on the web pages, aka the products they’re interested in.

Sell more with in-chat payments on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp

To allow your Ramadan customers to pay in the chat on various social media channels, you only need omnichannel commerce software like SleekFlow. With your Shopify store natively integrated, you can draft orders in chats on Facebook Messenger, Instagram DM, Telegram, WhatsApp, WeChat and more and instantly send an in-chat payment link to collect payment for their orders. They don’t have to switch apps or create new accounts just to place an order from your store. The convenient and seamless shopping experience can be completed right in the chat, saving time and effort for both your business and your customers.

Collaborate with influencers and affiliate partners using unique discount codes or WhatsApp QR codes

Influencer marketing has been proven to make a big impact, and the ROI is 11x more than banner ads. To better manage your influencer marketing efforts, you can distribute unique discount codes or WhatsApp QR codes to each influencer or affiliate partner that you’re collaborating with and set up automated labelling to categorise the incoming conversations and leads to ensure that sales attribution is organised and well-structured.

Explore SleekFlow‘s Automation feature to engage customers who interact with your Ramadan content, and equip all your Ramadan digital campaign ideas with essential tools.?

Until next time

Thank you for joining us, and we hope you learned something new! Let us know in the comments below about your thoughts on potential topics or content to cover for our next Newsletter. Last but not least, don’t forget to subscribe to our Newsletter. See you here in two weeks!