By Brendan Almack on 19 Sep 2023
While most of us were on our summer holidays every retailer in the country was putting the finishing touches to their Christmas marketing plans. Some retailers refer to it as ‘peak’, or the ‘golden quarter’ and some simply refer to it as ‘Q4’. But for most retailers, sales performance over the next few months is critical to the success of their business.
There's a great quote attributed to Warren Buffett that I love - “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked.” The Christmas period does exactly that - retailers that have been thinking long term will reap the rewards of all their hard work and rest will, well, discount.
It’s obviously never too late to revisit your strategy and at Wolfgang we have 15 years of experience helping retailers to maximize the Christmas opportunity online, so our retailer experts have compiled 4 key strategies and tactics that retailers can action now, to maximse online revenue come Christmas:
1. Integrate your customer data
This is an absolute must. Whether you’re using Google Ads, Instagram or Tiktok to reach customer, each of these platforms has automated campaign types that use machine learning to serve your ads to the most relevant shoppers.
In order for you to have a competitive advantage here you need to feed that machine with highly relevant information about your business so it can make better decisions for you vs your competitors. A great starting point here is to overlay your customer data (CRM data) across the platforms you are using. You’ll get more relevant traffic to your website that converts more efficiently.
2. Optimise for new customers
What retailer doesn’t want to maximise the impact of their advertising spend over the next few months? A great way to do this is to focus on New Customer Acquisition. This allows you to grow your market share.
Following our first piece of advice can help you do this when combined with the New Customer Acquisition Campaigns available in Google Ads & Meta.
3. Know what’s trending
Understand real time trends throughout the Christmas period. At Wolfgang we’re big fans of the insights you can glean from TikTok Trending and Pinterest Trending reports. It allows us to see products or categories that are growing in popularity. This information can then be used by relevant retailers to help maximize their coverage in these areas and piggyback on the trending topics.
4. Set yourself up for 2024
The smartest retailers will be thinking beyond the Christmas period. There’s no better time to acquire new customers, but you can extend the value of this effort by thinking about how to reactivate these customers next year. Capturing first party data and growing your CRM throughout the period, will allow you to use email marketing and other reactivation strategies in 2024.
May the conversion Gods be smiling on all retailers this Christmas and hopefully some of our advice helps you have a great 'golden quarter’.
