Top Ramadan Campaigns – A Big Opportunity for Retailers
While it’s easy to imagine the month of Ramadan as a freeze on most business transactions, the holy month actually sees increased activity in the retail sector; thereby offering a great window of opportunity for brands to capture the attention of a massive audience and create personalized connections.
Analysts estimate that there is a 35.8% traffic surge brought by Ramadan campaigns on ecommerce platforms during this period with overall consumer spending seeing a healthy rise of 15% to 30%.
Now, this is where brands have a great opportunity to ride the rising retail wave. But what exactly are the customers purchasing during this holy season? Food takeaways top the list followed by fashion & accessories, luxury goods (jewelry, watches) and home goods.
A quick drill down of numbers reveals that 58% of consumers plan to buy gifts for their friends while 78% of people eat out in restaurants during this period.
Brands have a great opportunity to ride the rising retail wave with personalized Ramadan Campaigns.
Cut through the Clutter with Data-driven Marketing
With so many traditional and non-traditional marketing methods and strategies available to brands, it’s essential that we take a holistic approach to cut through the clutter. Let’s keep these four aspects in mind:
Yes, we know. While this is that time of the year when brands strategize and implement great marketing Ramadan campaigns, far too many brands also land up with generic offers, discounts, and campaigns that cost them their consumers.
For instance, while weekly retail sales in the Middle East rose by 29% during Ramadan, retailers squeezed their margins to 40% by running generic promotions to achieve incremental sales.
To truly capture the customer’s attention, it’s important for brands to stand out by using a data-driven marketing approach.
Capillary has helped largest retailers in the Middle East to understand their customers through a multi-segment strategy that categorized customers into 13 different segments based on different variables like recency, frequency, monetary, preferred shopping category, discount, etc.
Capillary’s segment-wise strategy has delivered 4.3 X ROI on brand’s marketing spends.
Here are the top 5 data-driven Ramadan Campaigns that have generated great results for the brands working with Capillary and the factors that contributed the most to customers satisfaction before, during and after Ramadan.
CAMPAIGN 1: Global F&B brand boosts conversion rates with Targeted Ramadan Campaigns
Channels Used: SMS, Email, Push Notification
Result: 2.1% response rate, AED 138K in sales through the campaign
Maryam, a 35-year-old mother of 2 children – Fatima and Sultan – is married to Ahmed. Maryam has a craving for cheesecake and chocolate cake at 7 PM in the evening. Maryam is not an outlier in her preference; Capillary’s data revealed that cheesecakes are the most ordered product between 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. just around Iftar time and till fast breaks. The uplift in order volumes continues well after midnight until around 2 AM as Suhoor closes.
Based on this surprising insight that cheesecakes are as much popular as knafeh and other traditional Ramadan delicacies, the brand designed a targeted Ramadan campaigns to save on communication costs without any loss of sales.
Capillary and the brand arrived at a statistical model to predict the probability of a customer to respond to Ramadan’s Buy-one Get-one offer between 6 PM and 8 PM. and targeted a limited set of customers resulting in 2.1% response rate for day 1 as compared to 1.3% response to previous year’s bulk campaign.
CAMPAIGN 2: Leading Luxury Brand generated incremental sales with Personalized Promotions
Channels used: SMS, Email
Outcome: 8% additional transactions and incremental sales of SAR 24,000
While Ramadan is marked by office Iftars, family gatherings and suhoors with old mates, there is an inherently social aspect to this religious month. For Ahmed, Maryam and the kids, the shorter working hours and the upcoming long break for Eid gives the perfect window to go out and shop.
On one of the days when Ahmed returned home early, he received a personalized communication from one of the famous luxury brands in the perfumes and fashion accessories space. The couple shared an interest in discovering new perfumes and they decided to visit the stores to learn more about this offer. Capillary helped the brand to target family customers who were already interested in perfumes by decoding the consumer behavior using past transaction data and running a 20% off on the bill containing 1 men’s and 1 women’s perfume.
This Ramadan campaign generated 8% additional bills and incremental sales of SAR 24,000 as compared to the previous year’s bulk campaign for the same offer.
CAMPAIGN 3: Major Kid’s Apparel Brand generated 3X ROI with Segmented Facebook Ramadan Campaigns
Channels used: Social (Facebook)
Outcome: 3X better campaign ROI compared to other channels
While Maryam was exiting the mall, Fatima was amused to see a funny looking cartoon character image along with the QR code and asked her mother to click her picture with it.
Maryam then instinctively remembered that she had come across an offer on her Facebook feed a couple of days back. But how was Maryam targeted on Facebook? Capillary worked with the brand to generate a “Parents Segment” who had visited the brand’s store in the last 6 months and to everyone’s surprise, 78% of this segment was available on Facebook.
Adding to this, Facebook revealed last year that users spend an extra 57.6 million hours on Facebook during the holy month. Maryam then scanned the code using the app to get details of the personalized offer on kidswear issued to her based on her transactions in the last 6 months.
CAMPAIGN 4: Leading Luxury Homeware brand generated incremental sales with Personalized Social and Mobile App Promotions
Channels used: Social, Push Notification
Outcome: Incremental sales worth 559 OMR in 2 days
With 70% of people in the Middle East relying on Facebook for gift ideas, a luxury homeware brand targeted its customers for cookware and dinner sets. Maryam was a part of the loyalty customers target list based on previous year Ramadan campaigns transactions and she was targeted through Facebook and Push Notifications.
Customers were given 20% to 45% off based on the loyalty tier and the campaign was successful in generating 559 OMR incremental sales with an additional 0.3% hit rate over a period of 2 days.
CAMPAIGN 5: UAE’s leading Jeweler generated incremental sales with Micro-Segmentation and Personalization
Channels used: SMS, Email
Outcome: Incremental sales worth AED 900,000
Ramadan brings with it plenty of occasions to socialize with friends and family. As a result, everyone wants to look their best during the Holy Month and jewelry is a great way to elevate a look, while still being respectful of local culture.
Maryam was targeted with the Eid offer to win a free gold coin above purchase of AED 5000. Customer segments based on recency, frequency, and past category purchases were used to generate additional incremental sales of AED 900,000 for one of the leading gold and diamonds retailer in UAE.
So there you go, here are some campaign ideas you should keep in mind next time around. And remember, consumer experience is key!
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