The holiday season is about to reach its climax. After the starters in Q4 were served with Amazon Prime Day (13-14 October) and Single’s Day (11 November), the main dishes are still to come. Last year Black Friday and Christmas dwarfed all other retail moments in the Dutch market, and there is little reason to assume that this year will be different. And with Cyber Monday and Sint locked in between them, it is no overstatement to say there is a lot at stake in this period.
What is different from last year is the dependency on online channels that the (semi) lockdown brings along. With main street being quieter than last year without a competitive online offer you are, to put it mildly, fucked. Labor Union FNV has already propagated to skip Black Friday as a whole and with the situation as it is, a crowded shopping district seems unlikely. All eyes will be on your online performance to replace the busy Kalverstraat or Lijnbaan. Is sweat already dripping down your arm pits, stress level reaching historic levels? No worries, Direct Impact can help you out.
At Direct Impact we help and inspire people to boost their conversion with Marketing Tech. Start small, scale fast. Helping them throughout the most hectic weeks of the year is what gives us energy. Three of Direct Impact’s marketing tech experts, Blanka, Davy and Tom, give their main insights for the holiday season to nail your campaign. If your online campaign is shitty prepared right now, it’s probably too little too late. But if you are heading for the most important weeks of the year with a decent amount of preparation, this article will give you insights to avoid some commonly made mistakes.
Davy (Growth marketeer, SEA specialist)
Work with scenario planning.
That competition will be fierce in Q4 is stating the obvious, but how you deal with competition is on you. One factor is certain: competitors will change their strategy during the holiday season. Whether it is on ad spending, pricing or product focus tactics will change. Getting your battle plan all sorted out without having the flexibility to consider competition tactics is a common mistake. Instead, working with several scenarios on advertising budgets allows you to stay flexible and make on the spot decisions without being committed to one inflexible overarching plan.
Beware for overheated servers
Campaign management on the day itself can be nothing less than painstaking. With Google’s and Facebook’s ad managers experiencing the same congestion as the shopping district at Black Friday, it often happens that adjustment on your campaign itself becomes impossible. Imagine the frustration and the hectic on the workfloor of not being able to adjust campaigns on the most important day of the year. Therefore, make sure you have your ad manager settings well prepped the day before, or even several days before the proverbial D-Day. That way you won’t run into unpleasant and unforeseen surprises.
Cost overruns will be there, but don’t panic with too stringent daily capping
CPM’s or CPCs will be, on average, 20 to 30 percent more expensive the weeks around Black Friday/Christmas than in a regular week. That doesn’t have to be problematic, your sales performance will often compensate for the cost overrun. But the first time you are experiencing peak season from the cockpit you will be blown away with the sheer amount of budget that is involved. Subsequently, with too stringent daily capping you risk losing huge sales opportunities on the day itself. We often have seen campaigns automatically stopping at 2 P.M. when lion share of the day’s traffic (and sales) still has to come. This is not complex, but at Direct Impact we still sometimes see that companies enter this essential time of the year unprepared.
Campaign management on the day itself can be painstaking.
Use unique product combinations
With multiple market players selling popular products at discounts, chances that you can stay profitable are slim. Creating original product combinations to avoid getting into the ‘bar fight’ with other sellers on one product is a solution. For example we are helping out an online plant seller who not only focuses on the plant itself, but also on plant pot combinations. Or go a step further and even think out of the box with product combinations that have a logical fit for your target audience.
Tom (Social Strategist and Advertising Specialist)
Many interesting insights are shared by Facebook in their Holiday Season analysis. Some takeaways that I think are especially worth mentioning:
Don’t forget, the holiday season is not only about gifts for another:
Although the season is known for giving gifts to your beloved ones, self-gifting plays a pivotal role. As research from Facebook points out, 74 percent looks for a small (or big) treat for themselves. Either to buy it for yourself, or to put it on wish lists that family members receive. This means that many pre-holiday shop visits won’t lead to a direct conversion, but function for the orientation phase. Having a good attribution model that values to those visits is therefore important.
Don’t overly focus on merely price, availability is key:
In the most important factors that people care about in looking for gifts, availability is seen as more important than price. Although the holiday season battle is often fought over pricing primarily, Facebook’s research points out that having your product on time is most important. With Covid increasing the uncertainty of supply chains delivering their promise, availability will be this year’s decisive factor. As a marketer you must incorporate this in your strategy throughout the channels and avoid focus on assortment that is thin on stock.
Availability is more important than price
Communicating the delivery date is crucial
Communicating when a product will be delivered is nothing less than crucial. This year, people possibly can’t go to brick and mortar shops last-minute to guarantee they get hold of the product. Then you want to assure the customer that the product will arrive on time on their doorstep. No one wants to take the risk of sitting next to a christmas tree without a present.
Black Friday is huge, for every demographic group
46 percent of the interviewed in all age groups purchased something online last Black Friday. The notion that online shopping is steered towards the younger target groups is becoming rapidly outdated. Gen-X and boomers dominated already YoY growth figures last year, now with a Covid-struck Black Friday and Christmas season coming up, their catching up will accelerate at an even faster pace.
Blanka (E-Mail and Marketing Automation expert)
E-mail is far from being dead, especially not in the holiday season
During the holiday season, paid search is the primary traffic source with around 24% of traffic. Last year however, email drove 16.8% of traffic in the holiday season,, which was a 9% traffic YoY increase. It is the fastest growing channel in 2019 and focuses on a commercially interesting target group. Whereas search campaigns are ideal to trigger new customers to your platform, email communication focuses on the existing, loyal customer.
Get people familiar with your offer
Letting your customers familiarise with your products is crucial in the weeks prior to peak season. Think of including featured products, product sets or shopping guides in your messaging the weeks previous to Holiday season. This will also help your brand stay top of mind without having to discount the products already too early.
Email is the fastest growing channel
The importance of the sense of urgency
One of the reasons email and the holiday season are a good marriage is that the tool is ideal to create urgency. Especially a fairly short-lived promotion like Black Friday is very well suited to include timing countdowns in your content. Make sure you can combine the main components: compelling, compact language in the text and subject line, and use the countdown properly and visitors will yearn to get that product as soon as possible to their baskets.
Use tier-based discounting to incentivize a higher average order value
Your promotional offer is crucial and there is more to that than classic single product discounts. Think of additional customer-friendly options you can add to increase your average order value and checkout rate. Offer smaller gifts and/or product-plus deals above a certain threshold, free shipping or use tier-base discount percentages ( 5% off for 25 euros, 10% for 50 euros etc) as long as you incentivize a basket that is filled to the brim.
Abandoned cart mailings will work
Abandoned cart emails are evergreen ecommerce tips at any season. If you haven’t done so yet, set up these emails to recover carts, they are extremely powerful. If you already have holiday season creatives running, include them in your abandoned cart emails to make it appealing to your shoppers. As an extra, don’t forget to offer an additional gift to nudge the checkout process in a second abandoned cart email. Have you got anything for the holiday season specific (Chocolate letter for Sinterklaas, Christmas jersey f.i,)? Even better.
Promotional offers can be more than discounts
With analytics in place, your learnings for next campaigns present themselves
Google Analytics can be one of your best friends during the holiday season. Double-check if your measurement plan, eCommerce tracking, funnel and goals are refined specifically for your main holiday campaigns. Follow UTM tracking protocol to identify the performance of your Black Friday/Christmas campaigns and after analysing your data learnings are to scale your upcoming Christmas campaigns.
Follow-up with non-openers
Are you running announcement campaigns for Black Friday, Cyber Monday Sinterklaas and/or Christmas? You’re not the only one. During this period, inboxes explode with sale campaigns, gift ideas or free shipping offers. To make sure your audience does not miss out your offer,check the results of your announcement campaign. Then, set up an additional reminder for those who didn’t open your first email. In all cases, stick to non-spammy, appealing subject lines, the market vendor who screams loudest doesn’t sell the most.
