Make This Year’s Holiday Shopping Season Your Best One Yet
Posted on: December 16, 2021
With the pandemic hitting the world unexpectedly last year, many companies scrambled online as they had to improvise their digital marketing plans during the holiday season. Fast forward a year later, and with the situation improving, the impending Christmas and New Year present new opportunities and challenges for businesses aiming to achieve a post-pandemic comeback.
According to research done at Deloitte, while they expect physical retail sales to increase by 7 to 9 per cent, they expect online sales to shoot up to at least an increase of 15 per cent. However, with the latest announcement by Apple about the privacy-related changes on IOS 15, stating that the company wants developers to be open in their user tracking data, these changes in privacy limit third-party data, which makes campaigns far more expensive.
Adding on to the woes of digital marketing campaigns, the pandemic also resulted in more consumer start-ups, which led to an increase in private equity dollars and pent-up venture capital being pumped into such businesses. This, in turn, led to a rise in digital marketing costs.
Fortunately, businesses with limited campaigns budget need not cry in despair. Follow these few key strategies that we will discuss in this article. They might help your business grab a portion of the market pie and create genuine connections with your customers that will last for a long time.
It’s quality over quantity when it comes to acquiring customers
It’s easy to develop the mindset of not being selective when you know that other businesses are fighting for the same pool of customers. As more and more tech companies are targeting to limit third-party data acquisition, this leads to complications for digital marketers who looks into these data to optimise ad targeting campaigns better. The increasing customer acquisition cost also causes businesses to steer clear of once only customers.
The upcoming holiday seasons should not only be utilised as a time to target as many customers as possible but to, more importantly, source quality customers who can be converted into loyal customers with the right nudge. By carefully manipulating business intelligence tools and data analytics, you can then pick out the loyal ones from the pool of customers, focusing on them in your future campaigns.
While most organisations would try to throw their net to capture as many customers as possible, it is even more crucial now for you to stand out and find potential with an excellent customer lifetime value (CLV). Once you have identified them, do personalise future campaigns that target them.
Develop genuine relationships
The number of online shopping consumption has been increasing rapidly with the pandemic. While that has taken away a considerable portion of the physical aspect, customers still desire the business-customer relationship. The key factor of online shopping allows customers to make better choices in purchasing items. It increases the convenience of comparing similar items across different brands.
The upcoming holiday season should be the time for businesses to renew their focus and target optimising customer experience. It is the optimal time to develop the genuine relationships customers look for with a brand, whether it be on your website or social media.
A powerful example is maximising data that customers share to understand their thoughts and personalities better when purchasing your product or services. This will allow your business to better market your brand by offering personalised and interactive recommendations. Ultimately, we all want to achieve success in our marketing campaigns. And that means being an engaging and interpersonal brand that attracts repeating customers rather than just closing many one-time-only sales.
Leverage First and Third Party Data for maximum results
With recent announcements across multiple brands such as Google and Apple regarding privacy changes, the digital marketing industry is now in disarray with the impending reality of a cookie-free world.
With these changes expected to be implemented over the course of this season, it is crucial now that businesses target first-party data that is provided directly from the customers. These first-party data includes contact and transaction information, and conversational marketing that helps identify the customers’ behaviour.
Using then first-party data as the basis and then mixing it up with third-party data provides businesses with a better general understanding of their customer’s information such as purchasing behaviour, available purchasing budget, and demographic and interest.
Conclusion
The upcoming Christmas and New Year holiday season is indeed the best time for your business to grow its pool of customers, especially those of high CLV. While the change in the digital world poses new challenges, it also means that we need to adapt to new and unique solutions to stand out. Only by doing so will we ultimately achieve success for a long time.