During each holiday season, while behemoth annual shopping events unfold like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Hustle’s reminded of the importance of seasonality coupled with the tools and channels used to get the word out and generate buzz around commercial businesses and their products or services offered. Brands leverage this magical time of year to drop all sorts of seasonal delights throughout the retail landscape, from gifting guides, special subscriptions, seasonal events to seasonal bundles and highly anticipated product launches. The products you offer enable your brand to continue providing value to loyal audiences. Next in importance to seasonal timing and attractive product lines is maintaining connectivity with your audience. For brands small and large, diversifying the ways your brand drives engagement and connection with new and returning customers is a new communication strategy essential, particularly during the busy holiday season. A reality of constant digital evolution is that it’s not enough to leverage a single channel to expand your brand’s competitive footprint. Generating a buzz for a product and achieving authentic engagement requires a multichannel orchestration designed to slice through the noise of exhausted channels that shoppers often mute or ignore.

Conversational peer-based text messaging offers brands a unique opportunity to accelerate engagement with all segments of consumers at scale, including those they may have missed through other channels like social media or the ever-overflowing email inbox. Here are some brain-teaser options to supercharge commercial business go-to-market strategies by incorporating peer-to-peer text for customer engagement during the holidays and beyond:

Build a Product Buzz Using P2P Text and Video Messaging

Thematic Visuals:

Remember that fun meme or .gif text from your friend that kept you laughing? Make it memorable for your customers by sharing images, gifs and videos through Hustle Studio. Be creative, intentional, and considerate! Sharing your mission, promoting and educating your target audiences about upcoming events, products or promotions could be equally fun.

Custom Links: As organizations continue digitally adapting to the future, links placed in texts and emails should be purposeful in appearance and function. The function of embedding custom links in outbound text messages is to drive traffic while tracking insights on audience interest and engagement into specific topics, tools, or products, whereas the appearance should be shortened to to build trust and encourage click-through without appearing spammy. Using a marketing automation tool, you can shorten, personalize, and track links used in each peer-to-peer message.

• Example: https://YourBrand.attn.ty/l/lQ6/

Celebrate Philanthropy: Showcase your brand’s community-social responsibilities, broaden the reach of your work, and positively impact others while you simultaneously promote your brand. During the holiday season and throughout the year, you have a variety of chances to recognize a cause or issue to philanthropically associate your brand with, like the following examples:

• #GivingTuesday
• National Suicide Awareness Month
• African American History Month
• National Immunization Awareness Month
• Asian Pacific American Heritage Month
• National Nonprofit Day
• National Philanthropy Day

Teaser Content: Share suggestive imagery, release teaser messaging that alludes to new products, upcoming releases, or special events. Human-powered texting is a great opportunity to create personalized communication between your brand and audience with questions, reminders, and teaser information specific to their shopping behavior.

• Example: “Hi Sarah, while we prepare your monthly skincare box to ship, ready for what’s next? Photo-ready skin in just 2 minutes…make sure you’re following us on IG for more announcements coming soon!”

Time Sensitive Offers: Introduce urgency in your offers with imagery and personalized messaging to encourage engagement with your brand.

• Example: “Last chance! Sale ends at 11:59PM EST/8:59PM PST”

Offer Freebies: Before making any ask or product pushing, ensure that you’re offering your target audience values to educate and excite them about your mission, products, and next moves. Here are some examples of free deliverables that can be share through P2P text or video to help continue audience engagement at scale:

• eBook
• Quiz
• Survey
• Music playlist
• Recipe

Encourage Referrals: Word-of-mouth is the ultimate conversion tool. Leverage your responsive network to target your most loyal customers for rewards and provide a more personalized interaction experience. Share a special referral link with them via peer-to-peer text, and make it easy for followers to engage.

• Example: “Share the love, and refer a friend using the code below to both receive $15 off your next order. Use code: ShareTheLove2022”

Drive Customer Engagement and Sales with Peer-to-Peer Text

Even during the busy holiday season, Hustle empowers commercial brands to slice through the day-to-day noise of overcrowded channels like email and phone to create personal, authentic, human-powered conversations to engage shoppers at scale and mobilize action. Whether it’s the holiday rush or another promotional period on your calendar, conversational peer-based text helps maintain an open line of communication with shoppers that’s useful for more than just the ability to promote. Maintain strong relationships, gain chief intel, build trust with customers, and drive action at scale through human-powered texting.

If you have a question about peer-to-peer texting for your commercial business, contact us today to learn how to start turning text into action with Hustle.

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