6 Strategies to Boost Your Sales During Diwali 2023

With the official start of Diwali on November 12, the festive season in India begins. And this also means: it's shopping season! We will show you six strategies for using messaging to make your offers stand out more, reach more customers, and increase your sales during Diwali. 

The festival season is here! For vendors and stores, this is also the busiest season of the year. People are out shopping for gifts, and businesses are putting out one bombastic deal after the next. From Flipkart's billion sale to Amazon's special deals on virtually anything: Diwali is not only the festival of lights and gold, but also of shopping.

For the 2023 Diwali, experts are expecting the highest ever spending propensity since the pandemic, and businesses need to prepare for the biggest marketing and sales opportunity of the year. How can you stand you with your offers, and get customers to buy your deals? We have put together six strategies that will help you increase your sales during Diwali.

Diwali 2023: what businesses can expect

There are very few people in India that are not celebrating Diwali. After all, the festival of light initiates the festive season in the country. And for Indians that also means: shopping, but especially... waiting for the best deals.

According to an industry report, consumers tend to defer their purchases until Diwali sales weeks, driving 50-60% growth in orders compared to the rest of the month. And if last year's numbers are any indication, Diwali 2023 is going to be big! In 2022, e-commerce sales saw a 5.4 x growth in overall daily sales, and shipment volumes grew threefold. 

As Indians have adopted new online shopping habits during the pandemic, e-commerce will also play a significant part in the 2023 Diwali spendings, says Sandeep Bedi, Senior Director Sales SaaS at Sinch, India.

We can expect a lot of online activity from big e-commerce players like Flipkart, Amazon, and Meesho, but also smaller businesses. Engaging in conversational commerce will therefore be really important for businesses in order to reach their customers.

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Six strategies to increase your sales during Diwali

So how can you make sure that you get the most out of the Diwali sales? Conversational commerce, the art of making the shopping experience more conversational, will be the key to getting your customers' attention, and increasing your sales.

1. Meet your customers on the right platform

Regardless if you have an e-commerce business, a brick-and-mortar store, or a mix of both: the best way to reach more customers to increase your Diwali sales is to meet them on the right platforms.

And in India, this means: messaging! India's SMS traffic has reached about one billion messages per day, and 487.5 million Indians communicate on WhatsApp, making it the biggest WhatsApp market in the world. Messaging is also the preferred way for customers to interact with businesses.

Use this large user base, and take advantage of the conversational commerce opportunities that messaging apps like WhatsApp offer for businesses.

Conversational messaging will:

• make the interaction with your customers more personal
• enable you to talk to your customers like they would with their friends on a messaging app like WhatsApp.
• initiate a direct relationship between your brand and customer

As a result, customers will build a stronger loyalty with your brand, and they are also more likely to buy more and spend more!

2. Get users excited

One of the best strategies to increase your sales during Diwali is to get shoppers excited about your deals. Marketing messages on instant messaging apps are the perfect tool to build that excitement.

For example: set up a special Diwali messaging broadcast where subscribers receive shopping deals or discount codes, and keep users engaged with regular newsletters. You could send out different offers every day, and thus re-engage with your customers. This will keep customers interested, and you'll be able to keep the shopping momentum going throughout the entire festival season.

With our newsletter deals on Telegram, we achieve up to 40 transactions and reach up to 2000 Euros in revenue per week.

Juliane Leicht, Head of Marketing at SportSpar

3. Create inspirational content

Sending users messaging newsletters is only the first step. In order to inspire them to shop (and to make sure your offers stand out), you also need to create meaningful and engaging content for them. The quirky e-commerce company Wish, for example, used the festival season to reach out to customers on WhatsApp. But instead of just promoting deals, they used a chatbot to send subscribers gift ideas.

The creative marketing campaign helped them increase product views, and trigger more sales.

4. Reach out to existing customers

During Diwali, customer will see good deals everywhere. So your best bet of making sure that people are shopping with you is to reach out to people that have bought from you in the past. Your previous customers already know your brand, they like your products, and you already have a relationship with them. They are more likely to buy from you than new customers, so re-activate this pool of existing customers!

With professional messaging tools for WhatsApp Business, Telegram, or the Facebook Messenger like Sinch Engage you can easily set up specific target groups to reach out to existing customers, and send them personalized messages.

It'll be more effective and cheaper than trying to reach new customers.

5. (Cross-)promote your deals on social media

Conversational commerce is most successful on messaging platforms, but how do you get people into your WhatsApp or Telegram channels? By promoting them on social media!

If, for example, you get a lot of traffic on Instagram, use the platform to promote your WhatsApp channel or Instagram Direct shopping. Within the Meta family of apps, you can even create click-to-chat ads that will lead customers from a Facebook ad to your Facebook Messenger chat or into your WhatsApp channel.

Cross-promoting your messenger apps on social media will generate more visibility for your brand and your offers, and get you more traffic to your messaging channels.

Also think about other ways to promote your messaging channels. Do you get a lot of foot traffic in your store? Set up QR codes that lead customers directly into your chats. You can also include QR codes in your e-mails, on your website, and even on your business cards.

6. Be available for customers, before and after the sale (with chatbots)

Diwali is the busiest sales season in India. For businesses, this also means: more customer inquiries, more work with shipping and packaging, and more returns. Use chatbots to automate these processes!

It will speed up your operations, help customers faster, and reduce costs.

For example, you can set up a chatbot to answer the most frequently asked questions, which will save you and your customers a lot of time. It's also possible to send out automated tracking information to customers, and even automate the return process.

Chatbots can therefore help you make both, the pre- and post-sale process a lot easier and more convenient for customers, reduce the work load for your employees, and save money.

And: chatbots are also a great tool to get more customers to your business. The Bangalore-based Orion Mall, for example, created "Genie", a chatbot that answers customer queries, but also informs them about ongoing events and promotions at the mall. The bot has helped the mall get more customers to the shopping center, and increase their sales.

The experience with the chatbot is really good. Customers can get information with just a few clicks.

Rahul Malhotra, Head of Marketing at Brigade Group

How to scale your sales during Diwali

Conversational commerce offers many opportunities to increase your sales during Diwali. In order to get the most out of the possibilities that messaging offers, we recommend using a professional business tool for conversational messaging.

Sinch Engage, for example, offers you not only access to the WhatsApp Business Platform, but also to other messaging channels, such as Instagram Direct, the Facebook Messenger, and Telegram. The streamlined ticketing system allows you to handle all the channels centralized on one platform.

You can also:

• 🚀… scale your sales without additional IT resources
• 🗞️... send out bulk messages on messenger apps like WhatsApp to an unlimited number of users
• 🤖... set up a chatbot for marketing and / or customer service in a few easy steps
• ⬆️... configure automized answers for frequently asked questions that will save you time during the busy Diwali season

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