Is It Too Early to Start Planning Your Holiday Campaigns?

Spoiler alert: the answer is “No!”  This year digital sales during the holiday shopping season will be bigger than ever. As noted in this Entrepreneur article: 

“Insider Intelligence’s U.S. Ecommerce Forecast sees digital sales growing by nearly 18% in 2021 compared to 2020. Brick-and-mortar retail is also predicted to grow, but only by approximately 6%. The forecasters believe that the growth will continue after the pandemic subsides as it is likely to be a permanent shift in consumer behavior.”

Every year, most retailers see a majority of their sales during the period leading up to and including Cyber Week, the days around Thanksgiving and the following Cyber Monday.  With this expected growth for e-commerce, digital marketing strategies during the holidays should be defined and developed as early as possible.  This article highlights the importance of this for a few specific channels.

• Search-engine marketing (SEM): Unlike search-engine optimization, or SEO which often has a long lead time to deliver results, it’s not too late to start optimizing SEM campaigns for holiday. As noted in the article, “Generic keywords will be useful throughout the year, but during the holiday season, it is important to narrow them further and target customers even better than normal.” 

• Email: This tends to be a large channel for retailers during most of the year and they should be designing compelling content now for their holiday communication. Inspiration is a big part of holiday shopping, including finding unique gifts or great deals, and retailers can be optimizing email content and messaging to capture customers when their intent to spend is highest.   

• Social Media: As this article states, sales this channel is expected “to increase by more than 35% this year to more than $36 billion.” This is another opportunity for retailers to target the right customers during the holiday.  To do this they need to analyze where their campaigns perform best with their target customers because the same campaign may not be effective across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.  

As someone who has worked in ecommerce for the last 10 years, I can confirm that retailers are thinking about holiday tactics as early as June and July every year.  Black Friday through Cyber Monday is basically the “Superbowl” of retail and companies would be best served by focusing their holiday messages on relevant content and in the right channels for their business. 

Social media holiday marketing campaigns by Macy’s and Target

As Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming, retailers are ramping up holiday marketing campaigns by all channels, including social media.

Macy’s is running campaigns with elements that track and retarget users across Instagram and Facebook, taking advantage of their shared ad platform. Macy’s also coordinates with marketing efforts between Facebook and Instagram, to target the customers who engaged with the first ad unit.

Target is raising its social media budget 30% for campaigns on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. And advertising on Snapchat will becomes the first choice for Target, with a Thanksgiving-themed geofilter for US users and a new holiday-themed geofilter each day through Christmas.

In terms of social media, Facebook and Instagram also lauched some new functions to better promote holiday campaigns. Facebook’s new “Shopping” sections on the site and app can curate advertisers’ products in a single place side by sede with its familiar News and Groups. 

http://www.retaildive.com/news/macys-and-target-are-ramping-up-their-social-media-holiday-marketing-campa-1/409786/

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/how-macys-will-target-its-facebook-and-instagram-ads-holidays-168243

Retailers' Digital Initiatives to prepare for the Holidays

With the holidays approaching, retail brands have reached its annual climax in unleashing marketing creativity. Given the growing popularity of online and mobile platform, brands like Sephora and Net-A-Porter have invested heavily on digital this year to forge an omni-channel shopping experience.

Sephora, the subsidiary brand of LVMH, has rolled out its first Flash Boutique in Paris, which served to ramp up its consumer experience through a mobile-connected experience. Consumers will be able to shop from a digital catalogue featuring more than 14,000 items from approximately 150 beauty markets in addition to its usual makeup collections. Should shoppers unable to locate certain products, they could virtually add the merchandise to their digital baskets that enable them to pick up the desired cosmetics from Sephora in the future.

In addition to digitalize its product catalogue, Sephora has opted to experiment its digital perfume testers, allowing shoppers to pick up a Communication tag for the scent so that they could scan it on a nearby screen to smell the fragrance and explore more about the product. Of course, if they are interested in purchasing the fragrance, they could simply add it to their digital basket.

Moreover, the Flash Boutique offers a selfie mirror to allow consumers snap photos whilst trying on new items. Sephora even offers customers the opportunity to win a 1,000 Euro gift card should they disperse their selfies across social media with appointed hashtags.

Net-A-Porter, the British online retailer, made use of Sky’s Adsmart platform to target ads at viewers based on a number of demographic factors so that different consumers will see different versions of its video campaigns. For example, for its most recent “All For You” advertisement, viewers who prefer to watch long and HD videos on YouTube would be shown the long version that delineates the retailer’s stellar service and transparency. On the other hand, should users demonstrate a viewing preference for short and catchy ads, the short 30-second version would appear.

Net-A-Porter has previously implemented multiple mobile initiatives this year. The social media app it launched in April – The Net Set, is now available for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. The app enables designers, brands, fashion personalities and consumers to interact with each other real-time, sharing inspirations and their own sense of style in a two-way dialogue. Consumers will also be able to scroll through a feed of trending fashion items from across the world, give friends shopping advice, share images, interact with style icons, and view personalized “love lists”.

According to the 2015 GPShopper Holiday Mobile Shopping survey, 35 percent of consumers plan to create shopping lists and 24 percent intend to check product inventory from their phones. Pinterest has upgraded Product Pins so that they allow retailers to automatically update their merchandise inventory information through their product posts. Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr have planned to implement similar initiatives such as collaborating with fashion bloggers to make social media channels the forefront of fashion enthusiasts’ discussions.

Given the current social media trend, brands should perhaps learn from Sephora and Net-A-Porter, and to synthesize digital and Brick-and-Mortar shopping experience by allowing greater transparency of their product inventory and pricing information, creating target contents for different customer segments, and fostering long-term customer relationships through interacting more with followers.


Links:

http://www.luxurydaily.com/sephora-blends-mobile-with-bricks-and-mortar-for-first-connected-boutique/

http://www.luxurydaily.com/net-a-porter-mr-porter-sway-holiday-shoppers-in-new-campaign/

http://www.luxurydaily.com/checking-product-inventory-goes-mobile-this-         holiday-season-report/

Looks like digital ad agencies will be happy this holiday season…and so will shoppers at Kohl’s

US sales during the holiday shopping season are predicted to increase 4% to nearly $490 billion this year. This is a huge number – and holiday advertisers want to capture as much of the pie as they can. Retailers make up the biggest share of ad spending during the holiday period according to Kantar Media (ad tracking firm owned by WPP). In the 2013 holiday period, retailers accounted for 15% of total ad spend – almost $5 billion of the total $32.5 billion. During Black Friday, retailers spent almost $790 million during that week alone (omg).

Guess which retailers spent the most on ads last year?

Wal-Mart, Macy’s, Target, and Sears – not surprising. Wal-Mart spent the most: $300 million. See the chart below for other top spenders.

I don’t know if this is surprising to anyone else, but last year retailers spent 45% of their November and December ad budgets to television ads. I personally would have guessed it would be a lower portion. I’m going to go ahead and guess that this number will drop this year, and much more significantly over the next few years as retailers move more advertising to digital. Internet advertising was just 17% of total spend last year, and I bet that will be much higher this year.

Now that we’re on the topic of the holiday season and Black Friday, I’d like to highlight an article from WSJ about Kohl’s. Maybe this is not so related to digital marketing, but I found it interesting. In such a competitive environment, Kohl’s has spent the last year trying to reach a deal to undercut competitors’ prices. Kohl’s took the approach of working backward from the price they wanted to offer, and then to find a product that fits the price. $5 is that price – and this year Kohl’s will be offering toasters, coffee makers, blenders, and slow cookers at five bucks a pop. Yes, you heard it correctly!

Kohl’s was able to reach an agreement with Select Brands to manufacture these products. You might be wondering “why would Select Brands agree to such a thing?”. Well, even though the margins will be quite slim, the volume and one-time shipment makes it worth it. Also, the $5 price tag is after a $10 mail-in rebate – which many people won’t even bother to redeem so they’ll actually be sold for $15.

Happy Holidays!