Gear Up For The Year End Festive Season in Southeast Asia (before your competitors)

New Customers aka New Opportunities (Grab Them Before Competitors)

A whopping 17 million new consumers in Southeast Asia have recently started their online shopping journey. An undoubtedly big opportunity, but there’s no denying big opportunities bring along big challenges.

Decode Psychology of First Time shoppers

By default, every new customer in the realm of online shopping is a bit hesitant. Hence, unsure about finalizing a purchase. This might sound like a problem but opportunity lies within it.

Merchants need to focus on building trust. The earlier you develop it the better it works in your favor.

Introduce your brand

Customers love to work with whom they know about, welcome them with a brief introduction over email and social media will accomplish your task.

Have a Brand Ambassador

Image Credit- youthincmag

You need a face to represent your brand. It will humanize your brand and gives the much-needed impression to customers of dealing with another human. As a result, it deepens your connection with customers.

How to influence New Shoppers Before Your Competitors

Shopping Journey

Explore your customer shopping journey to discover every touchpoint and challenge. You will discover the below

• Pain Points -Fix these without delay to experience more customers and better reviews. Byte-sized videos and personalized emails are highly recommended to address the issues.
• Customer Behavior – Insights unfolding customers’ requirements and purchase patterns are key ingredients to building an accurate buyer persona.

Customer’s First Offer

Create a special offer for every new customer and let them avail it as soon as they land on the website. Getting beyond expectation is rare and something to be cherished. Therefore, it encourages repeat purchases and enhances customer retention rates.

Personalized Shopping Experience

Personalization has always been a solid customer engagement strategy that never fails to influence purchase decisions. It makes customers feel they are being valued and offered what suits them best.

• Address them using their first name in the email
• Display their first name on images with a discount offer
• Offer product recommendations based on location and browsing history
• Educate the customer about products based on his buyer persona using a storytelling approach

Regions That Need Special Focus (Singapore, Indonesia,Philippines)

Best Practice To Woo The High Spending Customers in Southeast Asia

Singapore Millennials And GenZ

• Focus of sharing bite sized videos on facebook, instagram, telegram to target Singaporeans as 57% shoppers are young (maximum age as 35 years) and active social media users.
• Singaporeans live to purchase items that originate in below countries
  • Malaysia
  • Japan
  • South Korea
• Google Ads are best to grab the attention of the shoppers. 6 in 10 consumers prefer to start product research on Google.

Indonesian Millennials And GenZ

Indonesia is home to 270 million youngsters and for them, K-POP is a very integral part of their life. Hardly a single day might pass without interacting with K-POP content.

K-POP influencers for product promotion are the right choice for online merchants to leverage the hype and boost festive season sales to unexpected levels.

Filipino Shoppers

Freebies help Filipinos to end the dilemma: should I buy or not? 86% of Filipino shoppers will go for a product that comes with free gifts or some discount.

TV ads are a better option for the below product categories than online ads to lure shoppers of the region to your store.

• Home appliance
• Skincare products
• Personal care
• Food and beverage

More than 50% of customers are aged 18-30 years. Hence, incorporating the below attributes is likely to influence the shoppers during the festive season.

• Video content plays a vital role to help them segregate best from the ordinary
• Brands that convince to give a distinctive look have a better chance over the rest
• Always on the lookout for discounts.
• Personalized shopping experiences and limited edition products keep the thrill of shopping higher.

Live Commerce (Meet The Customers Where They Love To Be)

Live commerce is a phenomenal trend with a high potential to overshadow other trends during the festive season.

It is a guided shopping experience where KOL (key opinion leader) or local influencers demonstrate ins and outs of the product and viewers find it highly interactive. As a result, live commerce makes shopping a very authentic experience.

The success of live streaming lies in the fact that it boosts customer interest in the product in a matter of minutes. Also, there is no denying that Southeast Asians consume and share video content in much larger amounts (7 in 10 users prefer it) during the festive season than the rest of the year.

Live Commerce Stats That Speak About Its Unlimited Potential

• Live videos are capable of holding user attention upto 20X better than other forms of content
• The average viewing time for live streaming is as high as 26.4 minutes per session. This is sufficient to help the customer from understanding the product to influence him toward the purchase
• 80% of those who engaged with live streaming last year in Southeast Asia ended up making the purchase.

Hence, the region is very conducive to live commerce. It has started to emerge as the next big thing and influence the shopper’s journey toward buying more.

How Can Merchants Enable High Sales With Live Commerce

• Product demonstration videos dispel the myth about product usage and encourage people to buy the item.
• Behind the scenes videos are fun to watch. It helps to generate loyalty among the viewers as you are not pitching an item to sell..
• Create FOMO about high-demand products. Go live and announce the much-awaited special variant is available at discount for the next 15 minutes only.
• Ensure the fun element is never missing from live videos. Playing a game, offering giveaways, and responding to viewers’ comments are the trick to making a session entertaining.

Customers view it as an additional perk that is not available in other formats of product marketing.

Leading product niches that benefitted in terms of improved sales and high product visibility are from

• Apparel
• Fashion

Merchants who desire to sell items belonging to the above category should incorporate live commerce into festive season marketing strategies. It will help them with grabbing customer attention before the competitors.

Image Credit: livescale.tv

Live Commerce is the Game Changing Trend of This Festive Season. Be an Early Adopter To Reach Customers Before Customers Reach Competitors

Address Customer Privacy Concerns Harness Ultimate Customer Loyalty

Every shopper expects to browse and transact on a safer web. It is among the non-negotiable attributes. Hence, delivering beyond expectation puts you in a win-win situation. Here’s what on your privacy page will keep customers assured about privacy.

• Outline exactly what data you will collect and your novel intentions behind it.
• Steps taken to secure customers’ confidential data.
• Explain why only your company has the access to the data.
• Adhere to GDPR policies and highlight the fact it is GDPR compliant.
• Allowing the customers to erase their personal data if and when required.
• Assure under any scenario data will not be sold to any third party outside company incorporations.

A customer with no worries will complete his shopping journey faster and there will be room for more spending

Learn From Leaders How To Adopt Trends To Boost Festive Sales

Brands tend to do requried research before adopting new techniques that promise massive outocome along with additonal perks.

Optimize For New (Potential)Keywords

Pandemic resulted in customer searching products differently and it’s a big enough change to be overlooked.

Upon discovering it, Kieh (a global leader in the cosmetics industry) deeply studied the pattern and optimized its content to rank for new high-potential search keywords.

As a result, they successfully engaged the same customer who just happened to now use different keywords to search the products. Targeting new keywords improved online sales by 27%.

Tips To Reach Your Customers (Whose Search Pattern is Changing)

• Use tools like Answerthepublic.com to gain insights into the latest search terms that are trending among your customers.
• Explore forums like Quora and Reddit to find out exactly what new terms and topics are recently being used to discuss products you are offering.
• Use paid tools to locate new keywords from which your top competitors have started getting traffic in the last few weeks. Do it regularly.

Responsive Search Ads (Show Only What’s Relevant DOn’t Rely on Guesswork)

Every ad doesn’t succeed to engage the target audience as expected. The primary reason your ad might sound repetitive, therefore customers just scroll over without getting bothered.

• RSA (Responsive Search Ads) comes to boost your product visibility with the following attributes
• It supports 3 headlines instead of just 2 along with 10 additional characters in the description field.
• These are capable of adapting with device-width.
• Customer location, past clicks, keywords used in a search query, and other important factors are taken into consideration before crafting these ads. As a result, customers find it relevant and have no qualms before clicking on it.
• Displays the most relevant combination of headline and description. Hence, highly likely to grab customer attention. Multiple headlines and descriptions enable your ads to successfully appear for more queries. It eventually fetches you new customers who are on the lookout for your products but unaware of your brand.
• You can have upto 15 headlines and 4 descriptions for a single responsive search ad. These are enough to deliver personalized ads to the target audience.

Some More Good To Know Trends For Festive Season 2022

• Southeast Asians tend to share videos and pics far more frequently than the rest of the year.
• Upto 80% of video posts are shared over smartphones.
• Sellers who launch promotions too late will nullify their chance for extra sales. Reveal promotions a month earlier to have ample time to influence purchase decisions.
• Offering free shipping will work in your favor letting your store stand out against competitors. Free shipping can be the last decisive factor (if price, quality, and shipping time are the same) for finalizing the purchase at your store than at any other.
• Offering discounts on women-centric products will fetch you bigger gains as 6 in 7 women shoppers are habitual of bargain shopping.

In a Nutshell – Leverage Festive Season Trends To Turn The Table

Festive season is the best opportunity for merchants to boost profitability. Build a deeper understanding on how festive season 2022 trends tend to influence cosnumer behaviour. It will play key role to assist merchants capture attention and win customer trust.   

Happy Selling During Festive Season!