Getting ready for the holiday season can be hectic. That’s why having a strong holiday marketing strategy in place is key. As your team starts curating last year’s historical data, it’s important to consider previous marketing challenges and overcome those issues this year. Equally important is identifying previous successes and optimizing those strategies for scaled success.
Tapping into Historic Data
Historic data is valuable, especially in holiday advertising. This helps in predictive analysis insight that can successfully drive your efforts. By using past data, you can better concentrate on optimizing and creating campaigns that work instead of wasting time and money.
How does this help?
Previous year’s data for holiday campaigns provides a bigger picture of what you should expect in the current year by:
Predicting Consumer Behavior
When you use data, you can gauge what customers will do, especially online. You can better pinpoint how they will act throughout the customer journey and predict how to increase customer retention. In marketing, one of the biggest obstacles is churn, which refers to the rate at which customers stop interacting with a company after a given period of time. Churn can be a huge problem for many companies during the holiday season, so using last year’s data can help better position your campaigns to reduce that churn. Data analysis helps in crafting a successful holiday marketing strategy and retaining customers for longer periods. For example, you can establish a guide as to the types of products that sell the best each week.
Detecting behavioral nuances
Although most people can be quite predictable during the holiday season, there are a few customers that fluctuate in their behavior. Your data should provide insight into these nuances and provide adequate time to prepare. These are opportunities to craft quick decisions within your marketing strategy that address these issues.
Segmenting audiences
There are different target audiences within your marketing strategy, but historical data allows you to nurture and segment audiences based on demographics, purchasing behavior, and other key metrics that will drive content.
Evaluating Data Effectively
To be effective in how you handle this, here are a few things you must do:
Make sure you have the right tools
You won’t be able to capture historical data if you don’t have the right tools. Using these tools in conjunction with other marketing channels, you will be able to target and communicate with the right audiences throughout your campaigns. Using a cross-channel strategy instead of focusing on one area makes a difference. In fact, brands that engaged customers on more than one channel during the 2021 holiday season had 24.8 times more purchases per buyer, 58% increase in likelihood of making a repeat purchase, 10 times the lift in retention, and 36 times the likelihood of making a purchase.
Get personal
Consumers are spoiled and love customization. Historical data will give you information on what they like. This helps in guiding those segmented promotions and communications the right way. Get creative with how you personalize to deliver huge results. You’ll find more engagement and responsiveness from your audience.
Decide your channels
Your historical data should drive the channels you use to engage your audience. This data should be clear and succinct on the best performing platforms, the best campaigns, and the best types of products to market. It should also give you a clear direction on when you should be sending different types of promotions to these audiences. Determine early who engages better with email, on social media, through SMS, or digital ads, and determine which ones will benefit the most (newbies, loyalists, etc.).
Drive your content
Your data should indicate how your campaigns performed. This is a good baseline for creating the content for this year’s holiday marketing strategy. While personalization is important, taking a deep dive into the creative aspects of your former campaigns will tell you a lot about your consumers – how they like to receive content and the types of content they like best. Some may want video, while others may like getting in-app coupons or incentives.
Conclusion
Using historical data can beef up your holiday marketing strategy if you’re making the right decisions and measuring the right data. Make sure you have your goals clearly outlined before you start analyzing the data, so you’ll be better positioned to strategically align your goals with the data you’ve captured. Once you’ve got this solidified, you can tackle every holiday with a good idea of how successful your ROI will be.
