How to Maximize the Holiday Shopping Season
October 6, 2020
With Black Friday kicking of the holiday shopping season, many e-commerse businesses are planning their holiday season campaigns. The past years’ holiday season sales have been increasing for each year and 2022 will hardly be an exception.
As the Covid-19 pandemic and social distancing precautions have changed the way many consumers behave, this holiday season will definitely be unique. How this will affect Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas shopping?
Want to learn more on how to maximize the holiday shopping season? Get the full guide here!
Covid-19’s impact on e-commerce
It’s hard to miss that the coronavirus has changed how consumers behave online. With social distancing regulations (or recommendations) in place, more people are avoiding large stores and retail outlets. An increasing amount of consumers have taken to online shopping as their main channel for consumption.
In fact, the coronavirus has accelerated the shift to e-commerce by 5 years. This shift was happening before Covid-19, but due of the virus, 2021 is expected to see a 20% YoY increase in e-commerse growth.
The increase of revenue for e-commerce brands is partly due to the common online shopper’s online activity, but there is also something unique for 2021. Half of Baby Boomers have increased their online shopping and due to many avoiding physical stores many are now using it as their primary shopping channel.
People who have been nudged to new online behavior won’t go back to pre-coronavirus habits. This suggests that the online holiday shopping season will see new records.
Holiday Season Shopping 2021
The classic lines outside department stores starting from 5 AM on Black Friday seem to be back. Black Friday being stopped by the virus is hardly a possibility – but those expecting holiday shopping as usual will be mistaken.
According to a Google report, shoppers do not plan to significantly change their holiday spending compared to 2019, despite the effects of Covid-19. One thing that seems to change however is the amount of people planning to do their holiday shopping online. 66% of shoppers anticipate that they will increase their purchases online during the 2020 holiday season.
As countries start to open up – consumers will still be shopping more online. A survey also found that, even though more shopping will be online, consumers don’t plan to spend less on their holiday shopping than normal. This means that the 2021 holiday shopping season looks to be as busy as ever, and more hectic than ever when it comes to ecommerce. Online retailers will need to be prepared for probably the highest demand ever witnessed.
How to make the most of the 2021 holiday shopping season
60% of holiday shoppers start their shopping before Thanksgiving – but they keep buying until the 3rd week of December. By November you need to get your campaigns and offers ready but the real successful campaigns should be get going by October to gather momentum.
According to Facebook data, the single biggest conversion peak of the year is Black Friday, which falls on the 26th of November in 2021. This is when it’s time to increase budgets and, in turn, online sales.
3 Ways to Prepare for Black Week
When preparing for the holiday shopping season it’s important to have 3 main parts of the campaigns set up:
- Tech measurements and pixels
- Creatives/Ads
- Knowing your audience
Read the full guide for all tips and insights in detail by clicking here.
1. Prep your Tech
You’ll be driving a lot of traffic to your website during the holiday season – and you want to take advantage of that by retargeting these visitors during and after the season. With Match2One, you can easily retarget visitors with display ads and we’re happy to help you get set up with your pixel installation.
If you want to do Facebook-retargeting, you’ll need a pixel for that too. Here’s a guide on how to get started.
2. Create Relevant Ads
The holidays are different from the rest of the year because people buy primarily for other people, not themselves. This is something that’s worth keeping in mind when building your holiday creatives.
Top activities seasonal shoppers surveyed want to see from brands on Facebook/Instagram during Christmas:
3. Find your Audience
When shopping for the holidays, 51% of people enter a website or a physical store to buy something they’d already planned on buying.
Only 19% buy something completely unplanned – which means ideally you should start building your audience and do your prospecting before the holidays.
Fill your bucket through broad channels that automatically find your most relevant audiences. A programmatic display campaign is a good starting point, where the goal is to start building lookalike audiences based on purchasers or high-value purchasers.
Based on the conversion data you get from your programmatic campaigns, start building lookalike audiences with Google and Social channels.
Increase your budget with these lookalike audiences, still with the goal of prospecting, to get enough data to build custom audiences.
As your omnichannel strategy brings in increasingly relevant visitors and customers, start preparing retargeting lists in these channels;
– Display (programmatic retargeting)
– Email (Still one of the highest converting and cheapest channels)
– Search
– Social
Want to learn more? Get the full guide for free here!
Jonathan Olsson
Head of Marketing
