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Hey, Scott Austin here.
I'm recording this episode in late August and Labor Day is coming. And this end of summer timing means that you should be locking down on your plans for your brand's holiday campaign for this year. So this episode is going to be a guide to walk you through campaign planning for those that have not done it yet. And if you have already planned out your holiday program, I'd recommend listening to this episode and using it as checklist to see if there's something here to add to your campaign.
In the US, holiday accounts for 17% of the total annual spend in e-commerce. And Black Friday / Cyber Monday accounts for 11% of the holiday spend. In 2023, Black Friday spend online was $9.8 billion and Cyber Monday was $12.4 billion. And these numbers are just in the US. Globally, holiday is worth around one trillion dollars online. And the global revenue through Shopify from Black Friday to Cyber Monday was $9.3 billion.
Now, everyone knows these revenue numbers and brands want to get their share of these dollars. So, you need be aggressive with marketing and plan ahead to get your share.
Holiday 2024 will be a bit different from other holidays for these three reasons.
Let me explain the main components of my proposed holiday campaign. As you already know, advertising is expensive and can quickly consume your margin. Ads get more expensive during the holidays as demand from advertisers is higher. And this year, advertising will be even more expensive due to brands saving their powder during the election advertising blitz. So my plan is aimed at reducing dependency on expensive cold audiences for holiday revenue. The program has three main components:
I'll now walk you through the program which will have these steps:
Let’s walk through it step by step.
A successful holiday campaign is going to start with good planning. Your plan should be a detailed roadmap that spells out all of the execution steps you will be taking. To get started, you should define a couple of personas that you are targeting with your campaign. For example is this gift for another person or a gift the customer gives to themselves. What are the demographic and psychographic attributes of your target. For example, a jewelry store may target lovers giving a gift to their significant others while a pet store may target pet owners giving a gift to their pets. Knowing the personas that you are targeting will help you create the messaging.
Next, you need to create your offer or offers. Consumers have been well-trained to expect big price cuts for Black Friday. I recommend that you make your Black Friday deal the biggest one that you do each year. That way, you'll be able to use that in your messaging. Consumers will be bombarded with messaging from you and all the other retailers out there. So you need to go big to get noticed. Many stores do this by offering a deep percentage off discount. But that’s not your only option. Alternatives include:
You’ve now got your personas and offers. Next, you want to map out all of the marketing activities that you'll do. And there will be many of them. These are the ads, emails, social posts, on-site promotions, landing pages, price changes, discount codes and more. To do this you will need to spell out all of the important dates for the program. Like the date of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And other important dates like your last day for regular shipping and your last day for expedited shipping.
Your plan should also ensure that you have the right pieces in place. That means ensuring you have the right inventory in place in time. And that you have the technical pieces in place like an email solution, advertising solutions, tracking codes, reporting and more.
A big task for now until your campaign starts is to build out your email and SMS lists and your social followers. You want to grow your lists so you have a large pool of customers to get your holiday promotion message in front of customers for little or no cost. There are plenty of ways to grow your lists and you should leverage the right ones for you.
One tactic that can be helpful is to plan to open your holiday promotions early to VIPs. And VIPs could be people on your list and your social followers. That way, your September and October email pop-ups could have a call to action that says 'Join our VIP list and get early access to our holiday sale.' And you can do similar promotions on your social channels.
Another tactic is to offer a free ebook or other digital tool for those that sign-up for your list. I like to make those digital goods actual products in the Shopify store. You can use the free Shopify app Digital Downloads to distribute them. Now because they are products, customers will go through the checkout process, without having to put down their credit card, and now you'll have more information about them to help with your email segmentation. Now this strategy works for those outside of Europe. You should ensure that purchasers in your store are opted-in to your list by default. You can control this setting in the Shopify Admin under Settings > Checkout > Marketing Options. Check to see if the 'Preselected' checkbox is checked.
Those brands selling in Europe can't use this strategy because Preselecting email opt-in doesn't comply with GDPR. In that case, you should use normal email sign-up forms.
Another important task for October is building out your Landing Pages. You'll want to create landing pages for the emails, ads and social promotions that you'll be putting out there. You'll want to use landing pages instead of product or collection pages to continue the conversation with the customer. For example, let's say you send an email to your VIP customers saying that they have early access to your holiday program. And that email has some holiday graphics and colors in it. In that case, the landing page should say 'Welcome VIP.' It should say that this is their early access and when that access expires. The page should have the same holiday graphics and colors used in the email. So, depending on the scope of your program, you can have several landing pages. Here's a tip for landing pages. For SEO purposes, you'll want to re-use the same pages next year if possible. So don't include the year in the URL or handle of the page. You can include the year in the title and copy. Just leave it out of the URL so that next year, organic search isn't pointing to a page that looks to be out of date.
Here's another thing to think about during October and early November. Many people save up during the fall and don't spend money so they can use that money for BFCM. And that can be for gift giving or for personal purchases. Because BFCM is known as a big discount day to consumers, they start planning their purchases ahead of time. They'll either have a mental list or a real list of purchases they will be making. So one tactic is to get your store on to those lists by letting your customers know ahead of time what will be in your holiday program. The reveal could be about products and / or about discounts. But let them know through your channels so they can include you in their planning.
Now let's move into mid-November and the running of our campaigns. Many, if not most, brands these days start their campaigns before Black Friday. It's very common to them start the weekend before Thanksgiving. And two weeks before is not uncommon. If you are going to provide early access, then you'll want to start things before Thanksgiving, say one week before. If you are not providing early access, you'll be kicking things off during Thanksgiving week. During this time, you'll be coordinating several tasks like publishing new products and landing pages, changing prices, creating discount codes, sending emails and making social posts. Hopefully, you defined all of these in your planning. Now here's a concept I want you to think about - feeds and queues. Feeds are generally time based. We see them in social a lot. People are most often looking at the top items in their feed and don't go deeper into past posts. So if they miss it in their feed, they are probably never going to see it. Most store owners understand this which is why they are comfortable making the same social post several times at different times of the day in order to increase the likelihood of followers seeing one of the posts. So when you launch your VIP sale, you'll want to promote it multiple times on each of your social channels on the day you launch. Queues work differently. In a queue, the item remains until the user removes it. Queues ensure that a person sees each item in their queue. Email was designed as queue. We have an inbox that can be managed. But here's the thing. Most people now treat their email as a feed and not a queue. The older the person, the more likely they are to treat it as a queue. The younger they are, the more likely they are to treat it as a feed. What this means is that you should be sending out more than one email for each event. You should send a few at different times of the day to increase the number of customers that are actually seeing your messages just like you do on social. I find that most brands are too conservative with the number of customer touch points they make during their holiday campaigns. If that's you, I encourage you to send out two or three times more than you have in past holiday campaigns.
In your planning, you'll be listing out all of the messaging that you will be doing. You want to maximize the number of unique messages that you can send. Instead of sending the same message to a customer 10 times over the holiday program, you'll be coming up with 10, or whatever number is right for your business, different messages.
The holiday shopping season is packed with several key marketing events and shopping days beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Personally, I think some of these are kind of hokey. But they may help your brand. Here's the list for 2024:
In addition to those pre-canned dates, here are some way to create even more unique messages for your campaign:
The desire for a unique message is what drives many brands to have daily or weekly deals. With or without weekly deals, you are still going to have plenty of messages to send. And don't forget that you should be sending each of those multiple times across multiple channels. One thing to note here. When putting together your emails, I recommend that you exclude any recent purchasers on those mail lists. Any customer who buys your product on November 20th is going to feel pretty bad if they get an email on Black Friday with that same product 40% off.
Your big holiday promotion is happening over BFCM. You may have an early access program too. Once Cyber Monday has passed you'll still want to be keeping your store top of mind. One of the main ways that this will happen is through re-marketing. Your remarketing should already be on throughout the entire holiday program. It just becomes a more important driver here. All of your earlier list building is meant to give you the most people to put your best BFCM deal in front of. A percentage of those people will be interested and come to your site. Regardless of how many people purchase, a majority of the people coming to site over BFCM will not purchase then. That's why you want to invest heavily in remarketing to those people that did at least engage by visiting your store. You want to keep your brand top of mind as they continue their holiday shopping in December.
You have now gotten through BFCM and the way up to and past holiday. You still have one more holiday campaign to execute on. You see, now that the holidays are over, not everyone has gotten what they wanted. And some people have gotten money or gift cards as gifts. Others will return unwanted gifts for cash. So your last holiday campaign is sent to your customers and letting them know that they should buy what they really wanted for Christmas. You want this campaign right after holiday. Before they get caught up in New Years and before they get their holiday credit card bills.
So that should give you an idea of what your holiday campaign should look like. There's a ton of work and complexity to any holiday campaign. So this plan isn't simple to execute. If this plan is too much for your brand this year, remove some of the things. But know that what is key here are these three pillars:
And each year, when you plan for your upcoming holiday campaign, you should start by review your last campaign. What worked? What didn't work? Use those answers to determine what to change. Successful brands are constantly evolving their holiday and never have the exact same campaign twice.
I hope this episode helps you build out and execute a better holiday campaign.
Thanks for listening.
JadePuma is a certified Shopify Expert. If you need any help with your Shopify store, we can help.
