You are planning for e-commerce holiday sales like 50 of the best brands in the world. They have generously agreed to share their holiday marketing plans and strategies – when they start planning, what their concerns are, and how they engage new and existing customers – to help you position your brand for your best holiday yet.
When to Start Planning Holiday Marketing
More than 25% of high-growth brands we surveyed start planning their holiday marketing campaigns months in advance. The top five months to begin holiday planning are:
- September: 25.5%
- October: 19.6%
- June: 15.7%
- July: 9.8%
- August: 7.8%
While nearly half of the brands start planning in Q3, note that 26.6% of brands start early in Q1 or Q2:
- Q3: 43.1%
- Q4: 25.5%
- Q2: 21.6%
- Q1: 6%
Top E-commerce Concerns during the Holidays
Concern about what matters separates high performers from the rest. The five most significant e-commerce concerns during the holidays are:
- Increased ad spending: 80.4%
- Customer service needs: 74.5%
- Inventory: 72.5%
- Shipping and delivery: 64.7%
- Returns: 56.9%
Increased ad spending is a bigger concern when considering that the average order value (AOV) doesn’t generally rise at the same pace. Flat AOV during the holidays results from the following reasons:
- Increased competition for holiday shoppers
- Deal hunters taking advantage of deep discounts
To increase AOV, experiment with the following holiday marketing strategies:
#1: Acquire New Customers
Start paid advertising to build your audience before costs go up (deferred placement model and a strong focus on retargeting).
#2: Engage Existing Customers
Use behavioral data such as past purchases and real-time personalization to segment your users for email marketing before and during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
#3: Offers and Deal Structures
Experiment with product bundles, tiered discounts, and shipping based on spending thresholds.
Acquiring New Customers
You already have something in common with high-performing brands; you likely target the same channels to acquire new holiday customers. Over time, the quality of all clicks will deteriorate, and your marketing performance will be affected.
The top five channels for new customer acquisition are:
- Paid Facebook: 72.5%
- Paid Instagram: 58.8%
- Paid search: 56.9%
- Organic Instagram: 41.2%
- Organic search (SEO): 35.3%
However, the unique ways that leading brands utilize these channels set their results apart. Other brands are targeting the same consumers on the same channels. Having a different approach to these consumers and channels is crucial. Remember that ad spending increases during the holidays while AOV remains flat. To combat this phenomenon that shrinks margins, high-growth brands implement different strategies in several key ways:
A) Buy Traffic Early to Build a Social Audience
Run engagement ads during the few weeks leading up to Black Friday to build an audience that’s familiar with your product and ready for your holiday e-commerce campaigns. You can also do this by running click ads to build a retargeting audience.
The goal is to generate early interest so that new customers come back and buy from you during the holiday. Keep prospective customers excited with online gift guides showcasing your offering. Stay top of mind by retargeting regularly.
Investing in PPC several weeks before the holidays will initially negatively impact your ad returns as you spend more money early on. However, starting early, when paired with an offer that boosts your AOV, can increase conversion rates and maximize the profitability of paid traffic.
For example, the handcrafted sunglasses brand DIFF uses tiered discounts to increase AOV. Discounts increase as shoppers add more to their carts:
- Buy
- Buy 1 and get a 30% discount
- Buy 2 and get a 40% discount
- Buy 3 and get a 50% discount
The more a customer buys, the more they save. The result was a 17% increase in AOV and a 150% increase in ROAS.
Discover how you can replicate the product bundling strategy during Slick Products’ holidays that increased sales by 397% in our Black Friday Facebook Ads guide.
B) Focus on high-intent keywords
Narrow your AdWords ads to include phrases that indicate purchase intent such as: “buy [blank product]” “best deal on [blank product]” detailed product inquiries: your brand’s and your competitors’ specific products (for example, red canvas women’s shoes)
C) Customize your holiday offer
Provide customers with a holiday deal they can’t get at any other time of the year. Uniquely bundle products and highlight the package with a custom branding for Black Friday. This can increase several key performance metrics even if the products you offer are not necessarily in season.
For example, the online baseball bat brand Axe Bat integrated a unique bundle with a custom holiday landing page to achieve:
- 11.49 ROAS
- 18% increase in AOV
- 93% increase in conversion rate
Retaining Existing Customers
73% of American North shoppers buy from brands they know. You should leverage the relationships you’ve already built with existing customers to increase repeat holiday purchases.
Top five channels for existing customers:
- Segmented email offers: 80.4%
- General email offers: 74.5%
- Facebook retargeting for general site visitors: 64.7%
- Facebook retargeting for pages or products: 62.7%
- Instagram retargeting: 51.0%
Not only is email the preferred channel, but it is also the most effective for existing customers. For brands supported by Shopify, email is the highest source of conversions during the holidays.
Maximizing email’s potential during the holidays requires segmentation. Alicia Thomas from Klaviyo, which provides a growth marketing and email platform, recommends the following three steps:
“If I had to choose where a large organization should invest, I would say the first and most profitable category by far is the VIP customers.
“Identify a specific dollar amount or number of purchases that is 2-3 times higher than your average and send this group a discount or additional exclusive offer. Make it exclusive and big.
“Second, focus on users who opened an email from you in the last 30 days. They are already engaged subscribers, so be clear and direct about your holiday event.
“Third – and perhaps I should have mentioned this first – make sure to set up a cart recovery series that only includes the specific products someone left behind, apply your Black Friday offer directly to those items, and remind about the extended sale for anyone who hasn’t completed their purchase by Monday or Tuesday.”
Separately, Chase Fisher, founder and CEO of Blenders Eyewear, discussed how email segmentation helped increase Black Friday sales by 10 times in a recent AMA webinar:
“As you grow and as your audience grows, people shouldn’t receive the same messages as everyone else. Some messages should be segmented for your VIP customers who spend more each year. Messages should be segmented differently for men and women.”
Fisher revealed the “expanded” email he used on Black Friday for segments of the email list that opened previous messages but hadn’t purchased yet:
First comes the email, then comes the retargeting.
Since
Because this channel ranks between third and fifth, we asked Reda Khodjafi from Shoelace – who manages retargeting ads for top brands – how to stand out:
“During the rush, consumers will be exposed to repeated targeted ads.
“Differentiate yourself from others by making your ad experiences exciting and relevant to each customer based on their place in the buying journey with your brand.
“We are big advocates for retargeting the customer journey, which is a strategy that tells your brand’s story and builds emotional connections with your customers through more personalized (and less intrusive) retargeting experiences.
“This holiday season, take advantage of increased traffic to create intent-based segmentation in your retargeting and tailor your ads to speak to customers at different stages of their lifecycle.
“To keep your audience warm and stay top of mind before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we recommend starting your retargeting early to gradually move your audience down the purchase funnel.”
It’s important that the channels leading brands choose to use contribute to their holiday success:
The top five channels “not to be used” for current customers:
- Amazon Retargeting: 84.3%
- SMS Messaging: 72.5%
- Direct Mail: 70.6%
- Loyalty or Rewards Program: 58.8%
- Facebook Messenger: 52.9%
But be ready to test new channels. SMS Messaging and Facebook Messenger can be used to engage current customers during the holidays, but only by treating them as planned. Use them sporadically to communicate with customers for whom you have strong behavioral files, and you can provide logical cross-sell opportunities and recover abandoned carts during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Pura Vida founder Griffin Thall said, “ShopMessage has been a game changer for Pura Vida. The abandoned cart series via Messenger outperformed email and gave us a deeper relationship with our customers. I already recommend ShopMessage to every Shopify store owner I talk to.”
High-performing brands have been shown to share many of the same strategies and tactics, but your target market may respond differently. Experience is the key element – you know your buyers best. Integrate best practices that have proven successful from leading brands, then adapt them according to your target market.
Your E-commerce Holiday Marketing Plan
The ideas listed here can complement your strategies.
Source: https://www.shopify.com/ca/enterprise/holiday-marketing-ecommerce
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