Inflation has consumers reconsidering their spending habits this holiday season. A survey conducted by Klaviyo and Qualtrics of 3,500 people revealed how consumers will make buying decisions this winter, and while responses varied across demographics, respondents who identified as single, widowed, or divorced sent a unified message: the holidays are still the holidays. Singles are ready to spend.
That’s not the whole story, though. While more than half of single people say they’ll spend roughly the same as they did last holiday season, their spending will be more selective. Singles say they’ll be more cautious with discretionary spending. Essentials such as food will take top priority, while recreational spending will favor some areas, such as fitness or entertainment, at the cost of others.
So how can your business navigate this trend of selective buying? How can you adapt your strategy to reach the consumers that are most likely to spend?
The key is to have an adaptive solution that enables you to meet the demands of the market, the season, and the customer base you’re trying to reach. A tool that lets you accommodate vast engagement activity in one unified playground of store credit via gift cards, loyalty, rewards programs, and digital wallets, will give you a clear advantage during the 2022 holiday season.
Selective Spenders Need a Holistic Approach
An adaptive strategy is the best way to win singles (and all shoppers) this year. When economic uncertainty impacts spending decisions, businesses with the agility to adapt to consumer behavior and diversify their engagement assets have a leg up.
According to one finding in the Klaviyo and Qualtrics survey, the majority of singles plan on
doing half of their shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, and the other half online. Omnichannel solutions provide the perfect opportunity for crossover spending. Offering gift cards and rewards that can be applied in both physical and online stores is a great way to tailor your strategy to singles’ spending habits.
In fact, omnichannel sales is a key component to selling to all demographics, not just singles. The survey found that all respondents, regardless of age or relationship status, said they’ll do just 50-75% of their shopping online. That means offering crossover incentives will give you an advantage over businesses whose gift cards or rewards are limited to a single location or website.
The proof is in the cake batter. Milk Bar is a dessert restaurant who utilized Rise.ai’s omnichannel solution to parlay the success of their physical locations into online success, and increase their AOV in the process.
Using Rise.ai’s Store Credit platform, Milk Bar ran a two-week campaign that rewarded every $75 in purchases with $10 in store credit. What differentiates Rise’s program from others is this: the store credit could be used online or in-person. During the campaign, Milk Bar saw a 9% increase in AOV. And customers who redeemed their credit spent almost eight times as much as their credit, resulting in more than $70,000 in upsell revenue. A holistic solution like Rise.ai allows for seamless omnichannel crossover with a unique currency approach to store credit: a digital wallet that enables the user to accumulate credit in many different ways—through gift cards, refunds, and rewards and loyalty points, to name a few—which can be redeemed anywhere. This is a big advantage over competitors and gives businesses more opportunities to increase customer engagement as well as growth and upsell potential. Omnichannel sales tap directly into the spending habits of this year’s holiday consumers, as well as any shoppers who split their spending between physical and online stores.
Automations: Effortless Engagement and Retainment
Utilizing automations that offer the right reward or message to buyers in the singles category at the right time can ensure a seamless experience that wastes no opportunity to increase AOV.
Dr. Squatch sells organic men’s grooming products that blend rustic roots with a hip, urban aesthetic. Massively popular before Covid hit, they foresaw a pandemic-slowed holiday season and wanted a strategy to retain their customers and drive sales even as worldwide spending slowed.
With Rise.ai, they were able to execute multiple automated strategies that helped them stay top-of-mind of customers, generate new revenue, and even continue to build their audience.
Rise.ai’s bulk store-credit solution allowed Dr. Squatch to re-engage shoppers and give them incentives to visit the website and buy. The gift card solution, meanwhile, turned loyal customers into brand ambassadors and generated new business through holiday gifts. Combined with an automated refund solution that eliminated manual adjustments and increased customer satisfaction, Dr. Squatch was able to engage, acquire, and incentivize customers during what was projected to be a slow holiday season.
The result? More than 30% of customers who received store credit visited the store to redeem their credit, with most spending above the credit amount. All in all, the campaign generated more than $197,000 in revenue—with $111,000 in upsell.
Consumers across all demographic lines plan to do less discretionary spending this holiday season, and singles are no exception. But paying attention to the discretionary spending they are planning, and enabling automation tools to reach them directly, will help you market the right products to the right customers.
For example, the largest expenditures for single respondents outside of food and essentials include fitness products/services (54%), electronics (33%), and hobbies (50%).
When you combine such a powerful tool for communication with the leading gift card and store credit provider the impact for the merchant is like no other.
Automated tools can give you a direct line to these customers in order to promote the products they’re most likely to buy. With Rise.ai, you can automatically issue store credit rewards and enable your customers to instantly send personalized gift cards to customers.
The Rise.ai and Klaviyo integration allows all emails relating to store credit rewards and gift cards to be sent through Klaviyo. The integration also allows you to pull Rise properties into Klaviyo emails so that you can update your customers with their loyalty account information in emails and create campaigns based on customer information. you can filter people who marked their status as “single” on sign-up forms, and then send them automated gift cards, rewards, and other assets advertising products you carry that fall within the desired categories.
Personalization: An Impetus to Holiday Spending
Brand identification is a powerful motivator for today’s consumers, and especially younger shoppers. Personalized incentives give shoppers a stake in their relationship to a business, and create engagement whose reach extends beyond the customer itself and exposes their friends and loved ones to the brand as well.
Leveraging loyalty programs can help turn those singles making a one-time purchase from your brand during the holidays into lifetime customers. So, even though the economic climate may lead some singles to purchase less during the holiday season, by offering them store credit for making a purchase, for example, you can bring them back after the holidays, and their lifetime value to your business will actually increase.
Reaching out to customers who are already part of your loyalty program ahead of BFCM—offering rewards to incentivize them to return, or reminding them of store credit they already have in their digital wallets—is a good way to bring cost-conscious customers back for the holiday season.
Another prime example is gift cards. Gift cards have been a go-to holiday option for years and are especially popular with singles, last-minute shoppers, and others who prefer to let their loved ones make their own gift decisions. The benefits of gift cards are numerous: they increase brand exposure, raise potential upsells, and generate extra cash flow during the holiday season without taxing the merchant’s fulfillment load.
Personalized gift cards take it even one step further. Solutions like Rise.ai give you the media, animations, and tools to personalize gift cards and expose the recipient to your brand. With a solution like Rise.ai, a seamless backend lets you manage balances and reissue gift cards without hassle. This creates a seamless management experience for the merchant and a creative, personal touch for shoppers that will generate engagement, upsells, and growth.
Elasticity is Key this Holiday Season
As the survey shows, consumers will be more selective with spending this year. Though singles may spend the same as last year, their priorities will be different. They’ll favor some products over others, and take a hybrid approach to in-store and online shopping.
And of course every business is different, with its own set of needs. There is no single strategy that benefits everyone. The key to success in general, and especially this year when consumers are spending more selectively, is to account for selective spending by employing diverse solutions, automating operations, and making on-the-spot changes to your strategy as the season progresses.
Merchants who can seamlessly employ loyalty programs, rewards, and omnichannel solutions through one holistic engagement solution can turn even a selective window of shoppers into a large and dedicated customer base. A toolkit that adapts to each merchant’s needs is essential for reaching singles—as well as shoppers from all demographics—and giving them what they’re looking for.
With a solution like Rise.ai, you can avoid the fragmentation and stress from toggling between different tools, and accommodate vast engagement activity in one unified playground of store credit. This lets you answer the diverse spectrum of buying needs with a single holistic approach.
The survey shows that, despite economic uncertainty, people are ready to spend. All you need is the right tool to reach them.