Hey,

We are sure you are knee-deep in your holiday planning, so we are dedicating this Optimove product magazine to preparing, executing, and following up on your holiday marketing strategy.

If Memorial Day Weekend (the unofficial start to the holiday season in the US) is any indication, expect your existing customers to be a prominent part of your holiday business. With that being the case, keep in mind that it’s never too early to start promoting your holiday specials, and here are three perennial strategies to do so.

And if you are in the Gaming industry, don’t think the holidays aren’t for you. Research shows that you have your work cut out for you. If trends continue, you’ll see a spike in new players but a dip in retention, here are some benchmarks and a few ideas as to what to do.

Happy holiday planning to you all,

Shai Frank, VP of Product

Ensure you are ready for the holidays

In the past few years, existing customers have outperformed new ones during the holidays. Ensuring your customers prefer you are the key to winning the holiday season.

To prove that customers chose you, we suggest creating a holiday season experiment to measure the impact of your holiday journeys. Streams is uniquely built for this, either by testing your strategy versus a super control group, or running your customer and acquisition marketing strategies head-to-head.

By the way, if you already have started building for the holidays, we recently added the option to use existing target groups and campaigns in Streams. Just drag and drop these target groups into a Stream folder to add them to its measurement. Read more about Streams here.

Be (re)active during the holidays

Did you know that 70% of shoppers still have shopping to do in the last week before Christmas, so you need to be active and reactive throughout the holiday season? The same research found that 40% of shoppers would prefer more visibility into store inventory. That is only one of our six tips for your holiday season campaigns regardless of whether you are opening physical locations or going fully digital.

And if six tips aren’t enough, we have one more. If you have Track & Trigger make sure you are leveraging web and app activity to target customers with real-time event-triggered campaigns as well as relevant and contextual scheduled ones.

The holidays end, after the holidays end

If you think the holiday season ends on December 24ththen think again. Deal seekers continue shopping after Christmas eve. Make sure you are building segments of customers who bought during the holidays based on products, discount affinity, and order value to use as lookalike audiences across digital platforms.

You can also identify existing customers similar to your best-performing holiday ones, which haven’t made a purchase yet, to target them with clearance and other post-holiday campaigns. Think of it as lookalike audiences within your customer base. See how you can do it in Optimove with this step-by-step guide.

> From our blog

A word on holidays during COVID

If you wonder how holiday shopping is different during COVID, read our findings from Memorial Day Weekend.

> Webinar

More tips and tricks

Looking for more ideas and tricks? Watch this webinar from our Strategic Services team on Winning these Covid Holiday Season