What separates the holiday shopping season from other days of the year?
The big difference between the holiday shopping season and other days of the year is in consumer sentiment. While, in general, customers are more inquisitive and open to making a new purchase in the lead-up to a holiday purchase, each specific event has its own nuance that business owners can use to inform their strategies.
For example, our Promo Period report shows that 67% of customers want to purchase candy for their special someone on Valentine’s Day. So any shop stocking sweet treats might want to adjust their marketing strategy to highlight their offer, perhaps bundling it with a card or flowers. It boils down to understanding the right promo strategy for the right event or holiday.
Top promo strategies to consider for special occasions
There is a wide variety of effective methods for promoting your products and services for the holiday shopping season. We’ve used the experience and data gathered during our real-world marketing campaigns to define the six most effective strategies for the holiday promotion period, whether it’s early Christmas gifts purchased on Black Friday or flowers for Mother’s Day.
Reacquisition/reinstall campaign
It is common for businesses to have a group of former customers who haven’t made a purchase in a while. These customers don’t represent lost business, but rather a promising pool of potential buyers who are already familiar with your brand. This group of users is particularly open to re-engaging with brands during promotional periods, with our studies showing that brands see 3.7 times more lapsed customers returning during events like Black Friday, compared to normal traffic.
A successful reacquisition campaign uses historical data about a customer’s previous activity with a brand to craft successful adverts to bring them back. This usually includes information that you have collected about how they previously interacted with your site, which allows you to make tailored recommendations or product promos.
Tailored promotions can make customers more likely to engage with your ads.
Reinstall campaigns follow a similar pattern, except you’re targeting customers who have uninstalled your application in order to convince them to install it again. This type of campaign allows you to reach customers that were once interested in your offer and give them reasons to rejoin your community.
To make a reinstallation campaign more effective, we recommend incentivizing these users to reinstall the app—such as a special voucher code for their first post-install purchase.
Teaser campaigns
This type of promo method taps into the anticipation that builds before a celebration. Teaser campaigns let you generate interest and excitement when people are preparing for the big day.
Teaser campaigns are great because they help you make early contact with customers. In a world where 42% of customers are making purchasing decisions for holidays earlier, this can be a big differentiator for your business, or simply used as a way to build anticipation for the launch of a new product.
A good teaser campaign provokes positive emotions and helps you engage with customers earlier. This provides more opportunities for them to learn about your product and ultimately boosts the likelihood of a successful sale.
We recommend building a special landing page for this campaign that contains exciting, engaging, and shareable content.
Low-valuation user campaigns
Window shoppers enjoy checking out products and comparing them, but they don’t buy a lot. However, once Christmas comes around, they feel more urgency to start making purchases. With the right marketing campaign, you can turn some of these users into actual customers.
A low-valuation user uses data about a potential customer’s activity to engage them over the long term. By understanding which products and categories are most frequently viewed by low-valuation users, you can efficiently transform these users into buying customers.
Deep Learning helps you automate this process and identify the best way to spend your ad budget for maximum return in real time.
Omnichannel campaigns
Customers don’t just exist online, and neither should your advertising. Omnichannel advertising can be a huge differentiator. This means covering a variety of online channels, such as both mobile and desktop devices, as well as social media and video. Businesses with strong omnichannel engagement strategies retain around 89% of their customers, compared to just 33% for companies with a weak omnichannel game.
Omnichannel campaigns help you reach your customers where they’re spending their time with ads tailored to each format. This can even be used to encourage in-store customers to engage with your ecommerce app, potentially spurring future online sales.
Remember to ensure that you use the right content in the right context to maximize the impact of your omnichannel campaign.
Featured category campaign
The featured category campaign allows you to tailor products to your customers. By analyzing your potential customer’s online activity, you can identify what categories they are most interested in and boost the chances of a sale by up to 76%.
You can take this further by also using targeted promotions to connect stock you want to sell with customers who really want to buy it. The key is to leverage the wealth of data at your fingertips.
The benefits of following the right holiday shopping season promo strategy
Carefully crafting a holiday shopping season promotion strategy is the key to success. Companies will typically leverage a combination of the approaches above and use solutions like Deep Learning to automatically balance their ad spend in real-time, maximizing the opportunities of the holiday season.
The benefits of a good holiday promo strategy include:
Increased sales in the particular period.
Better brand recognition
Improved customer experience.
If you want to learn more about how you can build a successful marketing strategy for the holiday shopping season, you can download our Promo Periods Report, or contact us today to discuss how we can help you determine the right approach for your company.
