How to increase sales with omnichannel commerce in Singapore & Malaysia during Ramadan
Ramadan, a holy month for Muslims and a time for spiritual reflection, brings changing shopping behaviours to countries including Malaysia, Indonesia, and even Singapore. Lifestyle changes such as fasting during daylight hours will affect consumers' habits, actions, and decisions, and businesses must learn to adapt to these changes to thrive and boost sales during Ramadan.
According to research, Malaysians start shopping as early as 4 a.m., while Singaporeans start at around 5 a.m. during Ramadan. Also, 82% of Ramadan shoppers purchase directly from their mobile phones. These significant data and statistics indicate that businesses must strategise accordingly to create the best Ramadan marketing campaigns. By understanding contemporary trends and concepts such as omnichannel commerce, you can maximise sales, exposure and customer engagement for your brand in the month of Ramadan.
Conversions increase by 30% during Ramadan. - Forbes
First of all, what is omnichannel commerce?
Omnichannel commerce refers to the seamless integration and coordination of sales and marketing efforts across multiple channels, such as in-store, online, mobile, social media, and more. This allows customers to have a consistent experience and access to products and services regardless of how or where they engage with the business. Omnichannel commerce also enables businesses to collect and analyse data across all channels, which helps curate the perfect strategy and improve customer experience.
Generally, businesses use an omnichannel commerce platform (e.g. SleekFlow) to offer a personalised buying journey whereby customers can hop from channel to channel. Smart tools such as automated workflows, chatbots, CRM or ERP integrations, in-chat payment links and more are incorporated to deliver a frictionless shopping experience.
Now that you understand the definition of omnichannel commerce, let’s move on to learning how to use it for your Ramadan campaign.
5 tips to increase sales using omnichannel commerce during Ramadan
Increasing consumer expectations and decreasing user patience call for a flawless omnichannel commerce strategy. As 84% of consumers spend more during Ramadan, brands that are not prepared will miss out on the opportunity to go to competitors who are fully equipped with tools from an omnichannel commerce platform. Here are a few tips to help you attract more customers and increase conversions during the month of Ramadan:
1. Understand your Ramadan customers
Before developing the best Ramadan marketing strategy, you need to understand their needs and preferences. This means doing research on the buying habits of Muslim consumers in Singapore and Malaysia during Ramadan. Some insights to effectively attract Ramadan customers:
65% of shoppers spend more time watching video content during Ramadan and Eid
59% of shoppers are more likely to trust a brand that collaborates with a trustworthy partner or creator
64% of shoppers have purchased from personalised ads
65% prefer messaging businesses rather than using email or phone calls
Food and beverages (68%) are the top commerce categories, followed by fashion and apparel (55%), confectionary (38%), food delivery and restaurants (34%), charitable donations (33%), healthy and beauty (30%), religious items (27%) and travel (16%)
2. Use social media and messaging apps to share Ramadan content
Social media is a powerful tool for reaching customers during Ramadan. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are great for sharing content relevant to the holiday, such as recipes for traditional Ramadan meals or information about special deals and discounts. Upon collaborating with influencers to organise a live video or posting Ramadan content, make sure you reply to every single comment on the post to encourage engagement. Taking it one step further, you can initiate conversations with those who leave comments under your posts to create a personalised experience.
In addition, since 66% of customers feel more connected to a brand using instant messaging during Ramadan, having popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram DM available to them is essential. Since social media ads are such popular Ramadan digital campaign ideas, you can get ahead of your competitors using click-to-WhatsApp ads, encouraging in-depth customer connection, as messaging apps are a rather intimate space for communication.
For instance, if you’re a fashion retailer, you can attract Ramadan customers to chat with you by allowing them to customise their fashion style and choose their hijab. A Ramadan campaign idea like this emphasises customer intimacy and can bring lifetime value to your branding and reputation.
3. Personalise messages for your Ramadan campaign
Personalisation is key to winning the customers’ hearts. During Ramadan, it's important to tailor your messaging to the specific needs and preferences of Muslim customers. This could mean highlighting halal-certified products or offering special deals and discounts on items traditionally purchased during the holiday, such as dates or prayer rugs.
Here are some examples of how a marketing message can be personalised:
Address each customer by their name and sign off with your service representative's name to add a personal touch
Serve product recommendations based on user behaviour, such as shopping or viewing history
Schedule messages based on location and time zone
Offer discounts for members on their birthdays
4. Optimise for mobile shopping
Many consumers in Singapore and Malaysia use their mobile devices to shop, and mobile usage increases during Ramadan. Hence, it is vital that you optimise your e-commerce platform for mobile and make it easy to navigate. Even better, you can allow your customers to shop on messaging apps using in-chat product catalogues.
They can add the desired product to the cart directly or even share it easily with friends by just forwarding the catalogue without switching apps. With the payment link integration in place, you can instantly generate a link from them to make the purchase and close deals faster with impulse purchases. After that, the receipt and order tracking details or statuses can be automatically sent to them. As a result, a seamless Ramadan shopping experience is completed in the chat on the same app.
5. Be responsive, even at 4 a.m. during sahur
Finally, it's important to be responsive to customer enquiries and concerns during Ramadan. This can be quite challenging as manpower may become scarce if you need to plan your team’s work schedule to accommodate Muslim employees who are fasting. This is when you need to apply automation and chatbots to quickly respond to messages and help resolve any simple FAQs. This way, you can make sure that manpower is utilised efficiently for more complicated tasks or dealing with difficult customers.
How to leverage tools from an omnichannel commerce platform to gain traction and increase sales from Ramadan to Raya
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.
58% of Ramadan consumers said they plan to start shopping a month ahead, while 41% expressed that they wait till a week before.
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.
As 45% of Malaysians spend time on social media when they fast, you can also find the best time to post on Facebook or Instagram during Ramadan. 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, such as the last 10 days of Ramadan, can effectively generate a sense of urgency and encourage 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 are 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.
Burger King introduced a 10-day long limited-time offer with a special menu for Ramadan.
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:
Burger King introduced a 10-day long limited-time offer with a special menu for Ramadan.
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 they are 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.
During the Ramadan season, sales increased by nearly 50% for many industries.
Worried about tracking sales journey on social media for your O2O campaigns? Simply integrate your Salesforce CRM or HubSpot CRM via omnichannel commerce software.
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 of your budget for your 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 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.
I would recommend SleekFlow to businesses that are looking to send WhatsApp broadcast messages to their customers. It comes in handy.
The Marketing Team
Pearl Holiday
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.
Nestlé’s Ramadan chatbot generated a 2.9X increase in time spent on their website compared to traffic from usual Facebook campaigns.
Live chat analytics can also offer insights into your website's bounce rate and customers’ browsing time on the pages, as well as the products they’re interested in.
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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.
Having a frictionless checkout process can increase the conversion rate by 35.26%.
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.
Boost sales with omnichannel commerce via SleekFlow this Ramadan
In today’s highly digitalised landscape, selling on through one channel is no longer enough. Having multiple platforms, including social media channels or e-commerce sites, for customers to purchase your products can be chaotic, but it doesn’t have to be.
On SleekFlow, one of the best omnichannel commerce platforms, you can boost sales with effective marketing during Ramadan, use automation to engage customers who interact with your Ramadan content, and equip all your Ramadan digital campaign ideas with essential tools.
Through SleekFlow, you can utilise a wide range of features to explore the full potential of your Ramadan digital campaign ideas:
Broadcast personalised messages and Ramadan wishes to clients through popular channels such as WhatsApp (and Facebook)
Access detailed analytics to analyse the performance of your Ramadan marketing strategy and Ramadan digital campaigns
Dedicated sales performance dashboard to compare the results from various branches or outlets
An all-in-one omnichannel inbox with multiple logins for your team members to manage conversations simultaneously
Payment Links for customers to check out right in the chat, including full or partial refunds when requested by customers
Chatbot and automation to save manpower during Ramadan and increase productivity
Free comment auto reply feature on your Facebook and Instagram account
Free Facebook Lead Ads integration to gather contacts and segment leads effectively
Free no-code Live Chat widget to be installed on your website
A centralised CRM with organised segmentation and labelling
Powerful integrations to boost sales with omnichannel commerce, from booking management to automated workflows and tracking of contacts, leads and campaigns right next to the chat box
Want to outcompete your peers with SleekFlow's help?
Book your personalized demo with SleekFlow today and unlock the potential of seamless communication
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