Power Up Marketing at Holiday Season with These Retail-Ready Tips

The holidays are fast approaching. While consumers are still preoccupied with settling into back-to-school routines, forward-thinking marketers know it’s time to kick their efforts into high gear.

Cost-conscious shoppers will be flocking to savings events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday to take full advantage of the deals. Therefore, the effective promotion of goods at a discounted price will be crucial for retailers’ success.

To make the most of the holiday season and rise above the noise of a saturated market, marketers need to embrace relationship marketing strategies that put the customer at the centre of everything. Relationship marketing is about meeting customers where they are and treating them as a person, not a persona.

Getting the contact lists tidy and ‘warm’

Retail marketers should now be getting their contacts list in order. While it’s not the most exciting of tasks, it is essential. It’s also imperative to clean up contacts lists to improve email deliverability. According to Cheetah Digital’s 2022 Consumer Trends Index, email continues to sit comfortably as U.K. consumers’ preferred channel for receiving offers, content, incentives, and rewards from brands. In fact, when it comes to driving sales, email beats paid social and display advertising by up to 128% in the U.K.

Retailers can begin cleaning their database of stale or antiquated data and warming their contact list to stave off deliverability issues. Even more, they should be considering the implementation of a zero-party data strategy to load the database with opt-ins and the psychographic and preference data required to deliver better personalised offers that their customers actually want.

Crumbling the Christmas cookie

By next Christmas, Google will have comprehensively curtailed third-party cookie tracking (Firefox and Safari already have). Although a win for privacy-conscious consumers, it’s a headache for retail marketers wedded to this strategy to power their advertising. These sweeping changes to the martech and adtech industries reinforce the need for retail marketers to shift to a first- and zero-party data strategy.

The collection of first- and zero-party data will also help them navigate a world without third-party cookies. The good news is the majority of consumers are willing to trade personal and psychographic data when presented the right value exchange — especially if retail marketers promise to keep that data safe and private.

The brands that win this upcoming holiday season will be those that deliver truly personalised marketing and experiences that are timely, relevant and based on the customer’s own self-reported interests, motivations and desires rather than inferences or snooping via third-party cookies.

Connect with consumers with the right message on the right channel at the right time

When it comes to driving sales, email has always been one of the most effective channels, especially considering its ability for the hyper-personalisation of content and offers that consumers demand. It’s also still the preferred channel for older generations (Gen X and Boomers). However, younger consumers are being wooed by SMS, with rising numbers having made a purchase directly from an SMS they received in the last year.

Power up personalisation

True personalisation offers products your customer has expressed an interest in – derived from preference insights and purchase motivations that they have explicitly told you. This is zero-party data, and is the path this holiday season to increased revenue and customer retention.

At the same time, retail marketers can also begin leveraging interactive experiences to opt-in consumers. Questionnaires, polls, quizzes, contests and social stories can incorporate reward mechanics that give consumers a genuine reason to engage and submit their first- and zero-party data and opt into your holiday marketing campaigns.

It’s now also a prime time to re-engage dormant customers. Retention will always yield a far higher ROI than acquisition. So try and win back less engaged customers by asking them questions, offering deals and adding a personal touch. Segmenting by length of inactivity will help here too.

Deliver a true omnichannel experience

Omnichannel should put the customer at the heart of your strategy, where all channels and touchpoints revolve around them – not merely the product. Consumers interact with multiple touchpoints when engaging with a retail brand (social, web, wallet, SMS, email, etc.). Each of these channels must be integrated to deliver a truly consistent experience, letting your customer seamlessly move from one experience to another.

In the frenzied holiday season, consumers, of course, love a discount. But the modern consumer expects loyalty rewards that go beyond points-for-prizes. Engaging interactive experiences, exclusive access to products, personalised product recommendations, brand recognition and feeling part of a retail brand’s community are the key to retention and engendering lasting loyalty this year.

Get your discount strategy right

The days of retail marketers ‘casting and blasting’ one single message to their entire database are hopefully a thing of the past. Customers’ lives evolve. That’s why learning about them is a perpetual process. This is where progressive profiling comes in.

Forward-thinking retail marketers progressively profile customers’ interests, preferences, motivations and desires. This allows them to ask the next-best question to expand knowledge on an individual. New data gives marketers new reasons to reach out with a more relevant message or offer.

Now is also a great time to decide on a discount and value-exchange strategy. Unsurprisingly, customers will love — and be expecting — discounts next month. But retail marketers can also add value with early or exclusive access to products, the chance to win a prize, loyalty rewards and unlocking content.

Get your IP Santa-ready

With a couple of months left before Santa’s arrival, it’s important to make sure your IP is ready for big email send volume. ISPs expect a level of consistency in email sending. Therefore, it’s best to start warming up email lists with smaller batches before rapidly increasing the volume. Sudden and large increases in email sends may result in some providers marking emails as spam.

Prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still relatively new concepts in the U.K., the excitement for these big retail sales days is growing. And they will undoubtedly be the biggest days for email and SMS volume, transactions and revenue in the entire year. This is where marketers’ hard-earned first- and zero-party data shines.

To make sure marketers continue to dazzle consumers, they must zero in on the best time to send their emails. A quarter of consumers have felt frustration with brands because of communications sent at the wrong time of day. Between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m., email send volume is low and engagement metrics above baseline.

November is also a great time to ramp up email messaging with dynamic content, offering products consumers have expressed an interest in. It’s also important to note if the products fit within their declared budgets. At the same time, marketers will find great success when peppering in keywords they know will elicit engagement.

Finally, marketers should ensure their SMS and email campaigns aren’t identical. Rather than just mirroring email campaigns, SMS should be used as a follow-up to reinforce the message a day before an offer expires, serving as a time-sensitive reminder.

Getting ready for the rush

With a host of unique eCommerce days in December, there’s finally a little time to relax from the fervour of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Marketers can use this time wisely to communicate last-chance shipping days with customers in messaging as well as on owned channels. And get ready to assist them with additional options for purchasing like express delivery, click-and-collect, curbside pick-up, gift cards, etc.

It’s also a great time to analyse Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns. Decipher what worked and what didn’t and then formulate a strategy to optimise and improve December campaigns.

‘Wrapping’ it up

Finally, wrap up campaigns with a heartfelt “thank you”. Campaigns with subject lines, expressing gratitude from the brand, boast higher open and click-through rates than industry benchmarks.

​Cheetah Digital, a world-class product solution part of CM Group, helps marketers and brands look beyond transactional data to build thriving customer relationships at every touchpoint. With Cheetah Digital’s Customer Engagement Suite, marketers and brands have an entire platform at their fingertips to build the most relevant, integrated and profitable customer experiences. It’s the highest-tech, most effective avenue to start building lasting customer relationships in the holiday season and beyond.

Find out more by downloading your copy of The Relationship Marketer’s Playbook for Holiday Planning 2022 by Cheetah Digital.

Tim Glomb is VP content and data, Cheetah Digital