In this guest blog post, BounceX recapped some of their biggest takeaways from Cyber Week. This is your chance to learn about some of the most successful holiday tactics and find out how your brand can iterate on holiday success and activate your customers in the new year.
As e-commerce professionals, we all know how important the holiday season is to ensuring seasonal inventories are shipped and yearly bottom lines are met. And for good reason too. We’re estimating that conversion rates on Black Friday and Cyber Monday increased between 23 – 36% year over year. Not only that, but we predicted that Black Friday will actually see a higher amount of online shoppers than will Cyber Monday. The bottom line is that the holidays mean big bucks for online retailers. But how does that performance translate after the new year has rolled around?
At BounceX, we’ve noticed some marketers will push all of their marketing spend into November and December without focusing on all of the ripe possibilities for success that Q1 brings. From new, highly relevant audience segments to better campaign performance, there are plenty of reasons to stretch holiday budgets for longer periods of time. Below, we’ll dive into why you should run post-holiday marketing campaigns and the strategies you can employ to help you do it.
The importance of extending holiday campaigns
Reach audiences when they’re looking to buy
You heard that right. Contrary to popular belief, your customers are not only interested in shopping on your site after the holidays are over…they’re actively looking to do it. It’s estimated that gift card sales have nearly doubled from $90B in 2010 to $160B in 2018. Beyond that, more than 60% of shoppers are willing to purchase gift cards for themselves, with over 33% of young millennials choosing to reload those gift cards again after making a purchase. If you’re one of the vast number of retailers that offer gift cards as an option, consider marketing specifically to these audiences as they can be a cash cow for purchasing additional products.
Take advantage of higher performance
The holidays can be incredibly expensive for online marketers. The increase in demand pushes up prices for everything from display, to search, and more. But this cost doesn’t last long. In fact, the price for running online campaigns often drastically lowers from January 1st on. Not only that, but impressions for online campaigns often increase from December to January—potentially because more people are online and working.
When both factors are combined, it results in lower costs and higher audience reach for online marketers. For those of us strapped with little to spend after the holidays, this is an easy way to stretch budgets while still maintaining high performance.
Set yourself up for success
By focusing on post-holiday campaigns, you’ll also be setting up your brand for success into Q1 2020 and beyond. First, the increase in impressions and lower costs will help get your brand out to a wider audience. Second, and just as important, you’ll be able to create marketing campaigns that either replicate aspects of your holiday efforts or reference the experience that site visitors had while shopping with you over the holidays. We’ll touch on this a bit further, but creating that cohesive experience is a great way to ensure your brand sticks in the mind of everyone who visits your site.
Strategies for reaching customers in the new year
From higher performance to better brand recognition and even higher purchasing intent, it’s easy to see why post-holiday campaigns are so important. But now it’s time to understand how. Here are a couple of easy strategies you can employ to engage with prospects and customers alike.
Triggered Email
Triggered email is a great way for marketers to do things like send abandoned cart items, grow their CRM list, and remind customers about deals or products that are going out of stock. Each triggered email that’s sent is essentially personalized to the recipient because the content is based on the actions that person took online. This allows marketers to send the right content at the right time. Marketers can send New Year emails to first time customers or emails with related products to convince them to return.
Here’s another example: oftentimes after the holidays, it makes sense to discount products to convince customers to convert. Triggered emails would be a great way to remind a visitor who may have initially been put off by price during the busy season to come back and purchase.
Website Personalization
Website personalization is a great way to send dynamic messaging to each customer that visits your site. Like triggered emails, website personalization is triggered on actions that a site visitor previously took online. This messaging can be triggered based on things like a person’s intent to exit a page or their previous browsing history. This can be used to create more brand awareness, push visitors to new or related products to what they previously bought, and even collect new emails to fuel future holiday campaign efforts.
SMS
You may see SMS and say, what? Wasn’t that in vogue 10 years ago? While SMS is an older technology, there’s no denying the power of it. In fact, in our Black Friday & Cyber Monday performance report, we noted that mobile is expected to surpass desktop for online conversions for the first time this year. People also love their phones and take them everywhere, so if you’re looking to extend your campaigns no matter where your customers are, SMS is a great option. Finally, if you’re a retailer with a brick-and-mortar store as well as an online presence, SMS is a great way to target consumers in states where your stores are located to convince them to make an in-person purchase. For holiday campaigns, SMS is a great way to reach audiences on their favorite device to remind them of their affinity for your brand.
Online Ads
Finally, online ads are a great way to increase the power and relevancy of your post-holiday campaigns. These ads trigger when someone leaves your site without completing a desired conversion and appear across publishers to reach prospects and customers wherever they may go online. Because these ads are related to specific actions that a user took on your site, this is a great way to remind customers who bought over the holidays of other products they’d likely want to purchase from your store. Because the ads often bid on available publisher space based on the customer’s likelihood to convert, this is also a great way to ensure you’re not wasting ad spend.
Post-holiday campaigns are more important than ever
With high performance, lower costs, and a plethora of opportunities to reach customers hungry to buy your products, post-holiday campaigns are more important than ever. With peak holiday season approaching and the new year just around the corner, consider leveraging the audience identification and targeting abilities of BounceX, along with Movable Ink, to kick off 2020 with a bang.
About the author
Elliott Moore, Senior Content Marketing Manager at BounceX
Elliott Moore is a Sr. Content Marketing Manager at BounceX. He has spent the last 5 years creating content for companies in New York, San Francisco, and Helsinki. He also loves the Oxford Comma…A lot.