How to Nurture Customer Care After Sales This Holiday Season

Keep the momentum going and make the most out of your holiday marketing success.

So you nailed your marketing this holiday season, but what comes next? You can’t just leave those customers hanging. You need to keep them engaged to continue to foster a relationship. 

This can be done through post-sale nurturing campaigns. 

Post-sale nurturing campaigns allow you to continue engaging with customers who recently purchased with your brand. These can be completely new customers or customers who frequently shop with your brand — the key is to keep the content relevant to their specific needs. 

In this article, we’ll take a look at five ways to nurture customers after they’ve purchased to keep the momentum of your holiday season going. These nurturing ideas will allow you to get to know each of your customers on a deeper level and keep them interested in your products all year long. 

Here’s a sneak peek at what we’ll cover: 

• Why nurturing customers is so important 
• Five ways to nurture customers after the holiday season
• 10 platforms to help you manage your nurturing campaigns

Why Nurturing Customers is Important for Long-Term Success

Attracting new customers can be a costly and challenging process. If they make one purchase and then never come back to your website or store again, the effort you put into attracting them may outweigh the purchase they made. 

If this is a continuous cycle, then you’ll eventually start to wonder why you do not see higher profit margins. 

Well, it’s important to remember that it’s much more cost-efficient for your company to focus on retaining customers than always trying to find new ones. By building relationships with the customers you have, you’ll find that they are much more likely to make repeat purchases and choose your brand when they need a new item. 

That’s why nurturing your customers should be a top priority for you — especially after the holiday season has closed. 

You likely attracted a good deal of new customers looking for the perfect gifts for their loved ones. Now the challenge is finding ways to keep them engaged all year round. That’s where a well throughout nurturing campaign will come in handy. 

Let’s take a look at five ways you can continue to nurture your customers once the holiday season comes to a close to make the most out of all your hard work the last few months of the year. 

5 Ways to Nurture Your Customers After the Holiday Season

Once the rush of the holiday season is over, it’s time to start thinking about how you will retain your customers throughout the coming year. 

For many companies, this is where their marketing efforts fall short. With a heavy focus on attracting new audiences when the number of customers shopping is at its highest, many forget that they need to work to keep those relationships going into the future. 

There are various ways you can keep your audience engaged all year round, but here are five ways to help get you started. 

1. Enroll New Customers in Welcome Campaigns

You’ve likely attracted a few new customers over the holiday season, and this type of customer nurturing is meant for them. 

When someone new makes a purchase and opts in to your marketing messages, you now have their contact information and can start building a relationship with them. Just like you would with someone who recently subscribed to your email or SMS campaigns, you can enroll them in a welcome series. 

Why use welcome campaigns? Well, they’re three times more effective at increasing transitions and revenue than regular promotional mailings. That’s a number you can’t ignore. You won’t regret taking the time to add a welcome series to your marketing mix. Image courtesy of WordStream.

Welcome campaigns are the perfect way to help new customers get to know your brand and start to build long-term relationships. 

A successful welcome campaign will improve customer retention numbers and increase the likelihood that those customers will purchase with your brand in the future. 

So how do you build a successful welcome campaign? Here are a few tips to help get you started: 

• Send welcome campaigns right away to keep the momentum going
• Ask the customers to engage with you again by asking for feedback or a product review 
• Include special offers or discounts to encourage them to make another purchase
• Create different welcome messages based on the types of products each customer has purchased
• Make sure to update your welcome campaigns periodically to ensure they’re still relevant to new customers being enrolled

When it comes to engaging new audiences, welcome campaigns are the best way to go. You’ll not only keep that customer’s attention, but they’ll also get to know more about your brand and find new products that may interest them. 

2. Use Customer Purchasing Insights to Share Relevant Products

You know what products your customers have previously purchased, so why not put that data to work? Using product recommendations in your lead nurturing campaigns will benefit both you and your customers — you’ll increase sales, and customers will find new products they’ll love. 

There are a variety of different ways you can incorporate product recommendations into your marketing strategy. There are so many possibilities, whether it’s sharing products that are similar to the items the customer already purchased or something complementary to it. Image courtesy of Sleeknote. 

Product recommendations may only account for 7% of visits, but they can also drive up to 26% of revenue. 

That’s why sharing product recommendations is such an essential part of nurturing your customers. By providing your customers with products similar or related to the ones they’ve already purchased, you’re putting the content they want in front of them — making it easy to make a purchase. 

Here are a few tips that will help you successfully integrate product recommendations into your marketing strategy:

• A/B test to find the most successful messages
• Incorporate recommendations across all of your channels
• Share recommendations via email
• Create a sense of urgency
• Make sure products are relevant to the customer

Sending the right products at the right time is the key. Over time you’ll start to learn when similar customers are interested in purchasing particular items and can use that data to finetune your product recommendation strategy even further. 

But you don’t have to have an advanced strategy to get started. You can easily curate this for your customers to improve their experience and increase sales in the short term. 

3. Nurture Customers Across Various Channels

Chances are you’re using more than just one marketing channel to reach your audiences. In fact, 51% of companies today are using at least eight channels to interact with their customers — eight channels! 

And you know what, it works! Your customers are active on several different channels, so why wouldn’t you try to reach them across channels? It’s also been shown that using multiple channels to reach your customers will impact how much those audiences spend. 

Using a cross-channel marketing strategy will allow you to reach more customers and increase revenue in the process. It’s been shown that customers who engage with three or more channels are likely to spend 13% more. Image courtesy of Omnisend. 

The channels you use in this strategy could be everything from email, SMS, social, digital advertising, website visits, and so much more. Having the ability to reach customers on so many different channels presents companies with so many opportunities. 

For example, if one customer hasn’t subscribed to your SMS marketing campaigns but follows you on social media, you can reach them on social media, the channel they’re most engaged with. 

Having a nurturing campaign that spans multiple channels provides you with the opportunity to nurture customers, no matter what their preferred communication channel is. 

These are a few tips to help you make the most out of your multi-channel nurturing efforts: 

• Know who your audiences are to improve content customization
• Use retargeting tactics to remind customers about your products
• Integrate paid social advertising to get the conversation started

The more you can get your message in front of your customers, the better. It will help remind them about your products and help them start to recognize your brand. Then, when they’re ready to make a purchase, they’ll remember what you have to offer. 

4. Create Multi-Touch Campaigns

It’s not only important to communicate with your customers across various channels. It’s also important to use all of those channels together into one comprehensive campaign. 

This means that you can’t think of each channel alone. You should be thinking about ways all of your marketing channels can work together to deliver the best experience to your customers. 

Each customer will have a different journey. With a multi-touch marketing campaign, you can build endless pathways to drive customers towards the end goal — making another purchase. When done right, each of these touchpoints can make an impact and work together to increase sales. Image courtesy of Something About Marketing. 

So rather than reusing the same retargeting message or product recommendations across all of your marketing efforts, you’ll be creating multiple different experiences that all have the same look and feel. 

It takes around eight touchpoints before a customer completes a purchase. By building multi-touch campaigns, each message moves the customer closer to their next purchase. 

 Implementing a multi-touch campaign will provide you with: 

• Improved visibility into the success of each touchpoint in the customer journey
• Higher return on investment
• A better customer experience 
• Shorter sales cycles 

If you’re looking for a way to improve your current marketing strategy and make the most out of your digital channels, multi-touch campaigns are a great option. You’ll find that customer engagement numbers and revenue will see a significant increase.  

5. Integrate Personalization Into Each Touchpoint 

Multi-touch or not, no matter how you choose to build your marketing campaigns, you need to incorporate personalization. 

Customers now expect that brands know who they are and what products they’re interested in. This means you need to keep your customer data up to date to stay relevant to your audiences’ needs. 

Personalization is a key component of a successful marketing campaign. Integrating personalization will encourage your customers to purchase with your brand again, tell a friend about your products, and leave positive reviews on your site. All of these things will help drive additional traffic and sales. Image courtesy of Retention Science. 

When nurturing your customers, this is more important than ever. You need them to feel like you’ve taken the time to get to know them and prove that you’ll provide them with the content they want and need. 

There are a variety of ways you can use personalization in your nurturing campaigns. Here are a few ideas to get you started: 

• Identify the pain points of your customers 
• Make sure content is organized 
• Write compelling subject lines
• Add personalized tokens throughout the message
• Keep content relevant and relatable 

In today’s marketing world, choosing not to incorporate personalization into your marketing efforts will hurt your chances of converting customers. The better you personalize, the more your audiences will be attracted to the message, and it will help you build more loyalty among your customers. 

10 Platforms to Help You Manage Your Nurturing Campaigns

Creating and managing nurturing campaigns doesn’t have to be a challenging process. 

With the right tool, you can easily do this from one central location. There are tons of different mobile marketing platforms out there that can help make this process simple. Finding the right one for your business needs depends on your goals. 

To help get you started finding the perfect solution for your needs, we’ll take a look at 10 marketing platforms that can handle your nurturing campaigns across various platforms. 

Listrak

Listrak is an integrated digital marketing platform that will provide you with all the tools you need to connect with your customers during the holiday season and continue to nurture them into the new year. From personalization to cross channel management, this tool will help you elevate your mobile marketing strategy. 

Listrak is a versatile platform that will provide you with everything you need to provide your customers with the best possible customer experience. With the help of things like in-depth customer insights and predictive technology, you can do more with your campaigns. Image courtesy of Listrak. 

Highlighted Capabilities: 

• Cross channel campaign orchestration to connect with your customers across all of the platforms they’re engaged with and build a comprehensive customer experience
• Behavioral based triggers that take real customer data and signals of intent and turn them into actionable touchpoints of communication
• Predictive technology that allows you to take personalization and product recommendations to the next level
• Customer insights that provide you with a complete 360 customer profile to help you give each customer a more personalized and relevant experience 

Channels: 

• Email
• Social
• Web
• SMS/MMS
• Mobile push
• Direct mail

Pricing: The pricing for this platform is customized, and you’ll need to speak with a Listrak representative to learn more about what options are available to your business.

Insider

Insider is a versatile mobile marketing platform that allows you to build individualized, cross channel customer experiences. This platform can help you to connect data across all of your marketing channels, predict future customer behaviors, and personalize experiences all from one central platform. 

Get to know your customers on a personal level with a detailed dashboard about each audience and segment. This will help you to identify the most relevant campaigns to send to them and ensure you’re creating personalized experiences through previous shopping behaviors. Image courtesy of Insider. 

Highlighted Capabilities: 

• Audience segmentation capabilities to ensure you can create personalized customer experiences at scale 
• Prediction models that allow you to predict how any user is likely to behave and identify ways to speed up their journey 
• Create tailored messages to engage audiences when they’re most active or when they’re about to churn
• Build cross channel journeys that are tailored to each customer’s needs based on predicted intent in real-time

Channels: 

• Web
• App
• Web push
• Email
• SMS

Pricing: The pricing for this platform is customized, and you’ll need to speak with an Insider representative to learn more about what options are available to your business.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is an intuitive platform that is the perfect solution for small businesses looking to grow their footprint. It provides you with the tools you need to build stronger relationships with your customers and manage your digital marketing campaigns all in one place. 

Understand who your customers are and create experiences that resonate with them. From adding personalization into your messages to finding the perfect product recommendation — it can all impact how your customers engage with your content. Image courtesy of Sendinblue. 

Highlighted Capabilities: 

• Automate segmentation and marketing messages to save time and always have a message scheduled for each of your customers
• Keep track of all your customer data in one central CRM location to build stronger relationships through personalized content
• Grow your subscriber list with custom forms that are easily integrated into your website 
• Easily track campaign success and identify opportunities for improvement with analytics and reporting capabilities 

Channels:

• Email
• SMS
• Chat
• Inbox

Pricing: There are four plan options including, the Free plan, the Lite plan starting at $25 per month, the Premium plan starting at $65 per month, and the Enterprise plan with customized pricing. Plan pricing is based on the number of subscribers you have. 

Leanplum

Leanplum is a mobile marketing platform that focuses on helping customers provide personalized and optimized experiences across all touchpoints. With everything you need, from data management to engagement and optimization, Leanplum can help you achieve your campaign goals. 

With the right data, you can create customized journeys for all of your customers. The Leanplum platform gives you everything you need to build comprehensive experiences customized for each customer and designed to drive them towards making a purchase. Image courtesy of Leanplum. 

Highlighted Capabilities: 

• Get to know who your customers are with data that captures customer engagement activity across all of your integrated platforms
• Use this customer data to drive personalized experiences that increase conversions 
• Create cross channel marketing campaigns that are relevant and personalized for each customer
• Analytic and reporting capabilities that tell you what campaigns worked and what audiences were most engaged — and which ones weren’t

Channels: 

• Email
• Mobile push notifications
• Mobile in-app messages
• Website browser push notifications
• Mobile app and website inbox messages
• Mobile app and website UI/UX

Pricing: The pricing for this platform is customized and you’ll need to speak with a Leanplum representative to learn more about what options are available to your business.

Braze

Braze is a mobile marketing platform that is focused on helping companies build customer-centric campaigns to connect them with their audiences in real-time. With the help of real customer data and insights, this platform will help you create cross channel marketing campaigns that convert. 

Easily build workflows that move customers through a specified journey based on their real-time interactions and behaviors. This will allow you to nurture them from the initial purchase all the way through them joining your loyalty programs. Image courtesy of Braze. 

Highlighted Capabilities: 

• Build dynamic audiences and create personalized customer journeys with ease thanks to their drag-and-drop interface
• Use in-app messaging to drive engagement and increase transactions
• Tap into dynamic segmentation through real-time customer data and real-world context that changes ae your users do 
• Integrate personalization into your messages based on the channel, send time, copy, and more

Channels: 

• Mobile and web push
• In-app and in-browser messages
• Content cards
• Email
• SMS

Pricing: The pricing for this platform is customized, and you’ll need to speak with a Braze representative to learn more about what options are available to your business.

SendPulse

SendPulse is an email and messenger marketing platform with all the tools you need to connect with your customers on a personalized level. By understanding where they’re interacting and targeting them across those channels, you can easily reach more audiences with less work. 

Develop workflows that move users through their experience based on their interactions with your chatbots and more. This will provide them with a more personalized experience and help solve their problems without the need for them to contact your customer service team. Image courtesy of SendPulse. 

Highlighted Capabilities: 

• Simplify the creation process for your marketing channels with easy use drag and drop editors
• Send triggered campaigns based on customer interactions and behaviors to ensure content is relevant to their present needs
• Create auto-reply flows for your chatbots to ensure that customers always receive a response to their questions
• Send push notifications on the web and mobile to drive increase traffic and grab the attention of your customers

Channels: 

• Email
• SMS
• Chatbots for Facebook, Telegram, and WhatsApp
• Web push

Pricing: Pricing varies for each channel you want to use, and there are specific plans available for email marketing, transactional emails, SMS, web push, chatbots, email verification, and website. 

Autopilot

Autopilot is a marketing automating software that will help you build visual campaigns and customer journeys. You can use real-time customer data to help drive traffic to your website and increase engagement across all of your channels. 

Make message and campaign creation simple with easy-to-use development tools. You can quickly identify opportunities to integrate personalization and create messages that drive customers back to your website in no time. Image courtesy of Autopilot. 

Highlighted Capabilities: 

• Seamlessly sync data from your CRM to manage and connect with your customers in one central location
• Develop segments based on customer data to send highly personalized messages and keep customers engaged 
• Build personalized customer journey maps by connecting triggers, actions, and conditions
• Automate emails and send them at the right time with triggered messages based on timing, behavior, and interest 

Channels: 

• Email
• Social media  

Pricing: There are four plan options, including the Silver plan costing $49 per month, the Gold plan costing $149 per month, the Platinum plan costing $249 per month, and customized plans for businesses with more than 10,000 contacts. 

Branch

Branch is a digital marketing platform that provides enterprise-grade solutions to help increase user engagement and measure the success of your marketing campaigns. This platform will help your customers build comprehensive cross channel experiences and leverage all of your tools and platforms through a simple integration process. 

Know who your customers are and what channels they’re most active on, then build customer journeys based on their specific needs. This will help you reach customers when they need it most, with relevant content based on their needs. Image courtesy of Branch. 

Highlighted Capabilities:

• Ensure you have the best performance across various platforms and channels with the help of link matching 
• Mobile attribution technology that uses a predictive algorithm that incorporates historical attributions to deliver high accuracy attribution
• Cross channel experiences that engage customers as they switch between channels and devices
• Bring together all the different tools you use into one central location to take advantage of all of your customer data and insights 

Channels: 

• Web 
• Email
• Ads 
• App
• Social media 

Pricing: Branch has two plan options, one that is free for small businesses and one that has customized pricing for enterprise businesses. 

Iterable

Iterable is a cross channel marketing platform that improves the customer experience and allows you to efficiently create, optimize, and measure marketing campaigns. Make the most out of your marketing campaigns with the help of this tool and its advanced technology capabilities. 

Make the most out of your customer data and get to know your customers on a more personalized level. This will help you to build more customized campaigns that resonate with your audiences. Image courtesy of Iterable. 

Highlighted Capabilities: 

• Use customer data to develop deeper customer relationships and find more ways to use customer insights
• Get to know your customers and understand their unique characteristics and preferences through demographics and custom event data
• Create seamless, individualized experiences across multiple platforms to attract and audiences 
• Iterable AI technology provides you with a built-in intelligence tool to deliver more meaningful experiences by leveraging data science and machine learning models

Channels: 

• Email
• Mobile
• Catalog
• AI
• Direct mail

Pricing: The pricing for this platform is customized, and you’ll need to speak with an Iterable representative to learn more about what options are available to your business.

Maropost

Maropost is a digital marketing platform that brings together your marketing strategy with your eCommerce goals. This tool allows you to build complex customer journeys and move customers through their purchasing journey by sending the right message at the right time. 

Connect with your audiences across multiple channels and increase your chances of converting them. The more touch points you have, the more likely you will catch customers at the right time with the right message. Image courtesy of Maropost. 

Highlighted Capabilities: 

• Build complex customer journeys quickly that include things like trigger emails, coupon codes, mobile notifications, and more
• Increase engagement with data-driven marketing to improve delivery and open rates once messages hit your customer inboxes
• Build multi-channel marketing campaigns that engage users and build stronger relationships
• Track and report on all of your marketing campaigns with the analytics you need to make decisions on how to improve future campaigns 

Channels: 

• Email
• Mobile
• Social
• Web

Pricing: There are three plans available for the marketing cloud platform, including the Essential plan, the Professional plan, and the Enterprise plan. You’ll need to contact a Maropost representative to learn more about pricing for each. 

Don’t Forget About Your Customers After the Holiday Season

Just because the holiday season comes to a close doesn’t mean you should forget about your customers. You need to continue to find ways to nurture and engage them throughout the year to make the most out of the new relationship you recently built. 

By building post-holiday nurturing campaigns, you can continue to connect with your audiences and increase sales all year long. 

With these tips, you’ll easily be able to turn new customers into repeat, loyal fans. Don’t let the holiday momentum pass you by — keep it going and continue to build stronger relationships with your customers.