Shopify merchants just had a record-breaking Black Friday Cyber Monday in the past weekend. This weekend was nothing short of astonishing – Shopify merchants reached $9.3 billion in sales over Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend, up 24% from the $7.5 billion in sales in 2022. As we are just done with the frenzy around early Black Friday access, Black Friday, and the Cyber Monday frenzy, we are now entering the holiday gifting season peak – it’s time for the next act!
Black Friday and Cyber Monday inevitably attract one-time shoppers that are incentivized often by heavy discounts and most of these newly acquired customers will be soon gone without a solid retention strategy for your brand for the holiday season.
According to Shopify, 40% of U.S. consumers begin researching their holiday shopping by the time November rolls around.
It’s going to be a massive year for holiday shopping – based on responses from 3500 consumers in the US and Canada, a new survey from Klaviyo and Qualtrics finds that 65% of consumers plan to spend either the same amount or more on holiday gifting.
All great marketers eventually are realizing that acquisition is critical and doing this right is even more key, however it’s important to understand – that this is just the starting point, a focus on retention and increasing lifetime value is where all of the real money is made.
Here is the exact template followed by the world’s best direct-to-consumer brands to create holiday magic and maximize profitability for their store during the holidays.
1. Nail Your Holiday Strategy: While the goal of your early bird sale and Black Friday is to continue to maximize your Q4 margin outcome. Cyber Monday focuses on pushing the highest sales volume and AOV, with your maximum discounted offer. Holiday Gifting, however, is the perfect time to move excess inventory and push out old collection SKUs. Create urgency with shipping cutoff and offer a deal on expedited shipping. Let’s begin to talk about the six aspects of your strategy that you need to build on:
a. Merchandizing strategy: your offer strategy needs to demonstrate value, be profitable and focused on boosting AOV. This is achieved through personalization, while embracing a tiered limited time bundling strategy with discount thresholds. Your ideal Q4 end – Q5 offer must be crafted after a deep understanding of your business. To build a customized offer strategy, get in touch with us here.
Make the offer clear. Ensure you have consistent messaging on your ads, emails, pinned posts, SMS and other social campaigns.
b. Omnichannel Strategy: Building an omnichannel presence is critical for the success of your holiday gifting campaign. With newly acquired customers, consuming media cross-devices and cross platforms – your holiday offer communication needs to continue to focus on an omnichannel presence with paid media, creative, email + SMS, social media coupled with on-site optimisation strategies. Continue to target 80% of paid ad traffic to your store but also 20% of traffic to facebook and Instagram. Both these platforms are excellent discovery channels to attract new audiences for your brand.
Implement live chats via a Gorgias integration, with a view to maximize conversion. If a customer accesses live chat from a product page, for example, use that information to retarget them with additional ads for that item. You can also use live chat interactions late in the sales cycle as a chance to upsell or cross-sell to increase the overall value of each order.
From conversational commerce chat campaigns (which highlight reviews, remove barriers to purchase and offer product specific discounts) through to rapid responses within Messenger, it’s important to make sure your Customer Support team is on hand to help across all sales channels.
c. Creative Strategy: As we know, we need great, socially native ad creatives, to lower your CPA. It’s especially important to refresh your creatives and add the holiday spark both in terms of offers, value as well as look and feel leveraging UGC and social influencers. The easiest way to get micro-influencer content at scale for your ad account is mini social. They are a great influencer platform – with mini social, you get both organic distribution from vetted content creators as well as control on costs, as these are pay per project. It’s a good idea to introduce gift guides, along with newly created bundled offers exclusively for holiday gifting. Introduce your hero products with their bundles and benefits via testimonials and product demos. You could also layer in use cases for the product ads with specific holiday occasions to warm up audiences to both the product bundle and the season!
Ad Creative Options:
-Launch Evergreen Ads!
-Build on How To’s
-Testimonial videos
-Tips, Tricks and Listicles
-Explore Gift Guide Ideas
-Social Media Roundups
d. Promo Peak Strategy: Post Cyber Monday, focus on identifying your peak promo days and build additional mini campaigns around them.
Here are some of the promos offers you could consider:
-Site Wide Discount
–Single Item Promos
–Limited Time Bundle
–Discount Free Shipping
–Limited Time Offer
–Deal of the Day
-Category Special Discount
e. Paid Ads Strategy: Focus on Google Ads, facebook and Instagram re-targeting – this is because you would be simply spending more money to get in front of audiences you’ve already reached earlier. If you are prospecting around this time, only focus on people who have been considering a purchase.
Double down on multi-channel re-marketing, use both video and image, leverage separate audience sets for each audience type and ads for each sub-campaign. Why? Because as per Triple Whale data, brands spend on an average 70% more on Meta and Google vs Pinterest or TikTok. Don’t turn off your evergreen ads if they are continuing to work. Layer in your holiday ads and keep going.
Instead of turning off evergreen ads consider making changes to your offer landing pages instead. Use separate ad sets for audience types. Retarget your early bird lists, all time buyers, non-buyers, page engagers, lookalike audiences and page engagers on Instagram and facebook.
Facebook and Instagram feed work well for new visitors. Ensure you have specific creatives for every sub-campaign. Leverage Disco Audiences to solve for the high CAC. When it comes to CPA and AOV or ROAS you can essentially pull two levers.
Low price entry offers to prioritize a lower CAC with the data-backed understanding if the CAC: LTV ratio is to be favorable to hit your goal. Prioritize AOV to boost ROAS by advertising bundles and other high-value items. Along with pulling these levers, monitor Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER, total sales/total spend) to confirm that your marketing mix is having your desired high-level outcomes.
With Disco Audiences, brands can leverage the power of the disco network learn more here. Retarget audiences leveraging PostPilot using SiteMatch, MailMatch and CartMatch.
f. Leverage affiliate marketing to control customer acquisition costs:
For DTC brands, affiliate marketing is great for macro-ROAS balancing, in addition to driving awareness for your brand. When you spend over 50% of your AOV acquiring a single customer, the 10% of revenue affiliate charges help increase your overall ROAS and keep your margins healthy. There are five types of affiliate marketing sites recommended:
There are five types of affiliate marketing sites recommended:
– Coupon Sites: Coupon sites are the high-volume, low-quality sites you want to make sure have their own designated code. Sites like retail me not or savings dot com. While these are the lowest quality sites, they do have incredible SEO and will end up taking credit for a good amount of purchases.
–Regular Affiliate sites: With “normal affiliates” you can expect to receive good quality customers, traffic, and expect to pay them fairly (10-12%). These range from online marketplaces, to earned media mentions, to “offer” sections of your credit card portal. Examples are Skimlinks, Cartera owned by Rakuten.
–Ambassadors: These are creators, influencers, bloggers, vloggers, or “influencers” who have a following interested in what they use, consume, or purchase. Having an ambassador program, living on top of the affiliate platform gives them the ability to earn money back from anything they push. Leverage GRIN, Mini Social etc.
–Premium Affiliates: These are your high-quality affiliates. They will usually require some kind of flat fee, in addition to a commission, or they’ll simply demand a higher commission structure (sometimes 25-40%, instead of 10%). You typically don’t find these on marketplaces, but you can reach out directly and get deals set up. Companies like Reward Style have created their own ecosystems to manage the monetization of bloggers/creators with high reach. Companies like Reward Style have created their own ecosystems to manage the monetization of bloggers/creators with high reach.
Get setup with Pantastic Apps Refersion.com or socialsnowball.io to manage your affiliate and referral programs.
2. Personalize your on-site shopping!
Spruce up your website: focus on conversion rate optimization, optimize your website for site speed. Add new offer pages that align with your holiday merchandising strategy.
-Add bundles top of fold
-Add Order Bumps
-Product Highlights
-Timers
-Social Proof/ Hover
-Add Reviews + CTA + Discount Details
Leverage ReBuy or CartHook to build your cross-sell and up-sell personalized bundles.
Enhance your merchandising strategy with hyper personalised product recommendations. Upsell or downsell products the moment a credit card is charged . Drive increased LTV via ReBuy’s reorder landing pages.
Sell one click bundles via dynamic bundles . Unlock best of breed shopping experiences via ReBuy’s smart cart. Convert shoppers via checkout customisations and upsells
Get most out of each Shopify sale with CartHook post purchase offers
Pro Tip: Use badging showcasing an extra special discount, product benefits or highlights.
a. Optimize PDPs:
-Add high quality images in carousel / Buy Box
–Create product video guides
– Consider adding add to cart CTAs + Multiple CTAs on Page
– Add an On Page Order Bump Up
– Consider adding product descriptions
–Include a section on product specific FAQs!
–Add limited stock indicators can give a sense of perceived scarcity
–Add Trust Badges
–Add Live Chat Fly Out
–Add Customer Reviews and UGC videos.
-Detail a generous return and shipping policy with price savings
b. Think strategically around your product, specific to shipping costs, delivery times, returns policy.
c. Keep customers in the know. Provide information on last day to buy and shipping delays !
d. Maximize your sign-up form experience! – use sign-up forms (ideally two-step forms) and gather profile properties.
e. Use flyouts to keep customers in the know on the latest offers and discounts.
f. Personalize via Bundles to boost AOV!
g. Create gifting guides depending upon holiday use cases/occasions.
3. Segment Your Audience
a. Create winter holiday segments! Focus on last year’s holiday shoppers, BFCM window shoppers, product specific shoppers, engaged customers, VIPs.
b. Exclude these segments! – non-opted in shoppers, shoppers in the EU/UK
4. Create a Holiday Sending Strategy:
a. Build winter holiday automations – customize flow content for holidays
b. Incorporate festive messaging. Remove deals that conflict with holiday deals
c. Update welcome series, abandoned cart, and browse abandonment flows to reflect holiday deals
d. Other holiday deals, include price drop, back in stock, post-purchase and buying guide
e. Create winter holiday campaigns
5. Build Your Content Calendar:
Go heavy on email and SMS, send at least 3 campaigns per week. Strategically, use email + SMS side by side to keep customers engaged without filling up their inbox.
6. Take it to the next level:
i. Lead Nurturing: now that you are past BFCM, its important for you to nurture all the leads you acquired leveraging opt-in forms, email, SMS and social.
Inline with the omnichannel approach, focus on heavy usage of email + SMS + CRO + social media campaigns.
ii. Post Purchase Emails That Convert & Retain: Focus on doubling revenue every day. Focus on 2X-3X email frequency. Leverage Klaviyo for email and SMS marketing for your holiday season.
–Founder Thankyou email – send a personalized thankyou note on behalf of your founder
–Review Collection Request email – focus on really solid emails in your post purchase flows, its time to get aggressive with review requests. Having thousands of reviews is good for any business as more reviews means more credibility. Moreover, reviews can be repurposed into ad copy, integrated into your website, or be added onto social media. Leave a photo/ review and get a gift discount off your next purchase.
Leverage Okendo for data rich reviews for richer experiences with attribute ratings, customer profiles, email & SMS integrations – collect deeper insights, unify customer data in a single profile and streamline email and SMS marketing workflows. Embrace higher quality reviews with Yotpo reviews smart review prompts, capture unique customer review insights through targeted feedback. Ask customers if they made a purchase as a gift or for themselves personally.
Why zero-party data is a powerful springboard to catapult DTC growth
–Gift Guide Email – showcase your best curated gift guides on email making it easier on customers to accelerate their decision journey and accelerate a purchase.
–Product Education Email – this email focuses on helping potential non-buyers understand benefits of key product SKUs with the goal to get them into the consideration phase.
–Collection Launch Email – focus on showcasing your latest holiday bundled collections, with cross-sell and upsell opportunities both pre-purchase and post-purchase.
–Limited Edition Holiday Bundle Email – launch limited edition bundles to drive up AOV and boost newly launched SKUs with unique complementary bundling opportunities.
–Transactional Emails – on average, a customer will check their order 4.6 times per order. At minimum, it is critical to edit your Shopify Shipping confirmation email and set up five flows to capture the majority of use cases for communicating with customers on order progress such as just shipped, out for delivery, delivered email confirmation, be available for pickup, exception emails such as delayed delivery, erroneous delivery and return to sender.
Learn more about Smarte Digital Inc’s email marketing services here
Supercharge your store’s post purchase experience with Malomo
iii. Loyalty Program Update or Launch: DTC brands usually see an uptick in first time customers during BFCM. By creating a timely loyalty campaign, brands can keep them engaged even after the holiday shopping season is over. Here are four use cases of post purchase emails to promote and engage with your loyalty program
-Motivate Loyalty members to use the loyalty points for BFCM purchases offer rewards too
-Incentivize Holiday referrals with both points and gifts!
-Offer Loyalty Members early access to holiday sale!
-Incentivize customers with points if they upload offline transactional receipts!
Leverage Yotpo for reviews, referrals and loyalty or tools such as Loyalty Lion to launch a loyalty offering. Make your referral program a revenue powerhouse by treating customers as affiliates and providing them with powerful incentives by leveraging socialsnowball.io.
iv. SMS Holiday Campaign Approach: SMS marketing works as a complementary channel to email and allows you to do more with less. Its important to keep newly acquired customers engaged post BFCM, to build trust and credibility with your brand.
Leverage Klaviyo, Attentive or Postscript to streamline your SMS Strategy along with Klaviyo depending on your goals. Learn more on how to scale DTC growth with SMS marketing here.
7.Social Media Approach: focus on facebook and Instagram as they are an excellent discovery channel to attract new audiences. Your FB and Instagram Ads must include a benefit CTA, an affirmative statement, a controversial statement, and a content filled CTA or alternatively end with a question. Also, if sample packs for new SKUs is part of your merchandising strategy, then add the sampling offers top of funnel. Add both images + videos and amplify the same on YouTube.
8. Invest in influencer marketing: The influencer marketing industry is worth $21.1 BN, according to Statista. 36% of brands say influencer content outperforms branded created content on social media. Tools like Grin and Hype Auditor help brands to spot whether an influencer has fake followers. A good DTC team knows that you should be testing new creative every couple of weeks at the minimum, but you also need to be pushing new messages, testing new benefits/value props, and getting more creative. One thing that we see do well, almost always, is properly crafted UGC videos. UGC stands for “User Generated Content” or put simpler, just a video testimonial/review from a customer or user of your products. Ambassadors and influencer marketing, vloggers, bloggers, influencers, work incredibly well for high AOV products as well as high consumption products.
Manage and automate all of your influencer partnerships in one place. Take control of the experience you give influencers from product seeding to payouts with socialsnowball.io. Social Snowball is the premier affliliate and referral platform for leading DTC brands. It enables you to identify loyal customers and turn them into affiliates and influencers for your product. We love social snowball as it incentivizes and automates word-of-mouth marketing driving healthy reputation and reach as a result.
9. Offer subscription gifting to your VIP customers! Offer your VIP customers to “gift” a subscription for 1, 3, 6, or 12 months depending upon your margin goals. When a loyal customer gifts a subscription of products to a new potential customer, the odds of them converting and continuing that subscription is high. Leverage Yotpo subscriptions or Recharge subscriptions to execute the best subscription strategy for your store.
Learn how to reduce churn for subscription for your DTC store
Leverage Yotpo Subscriptions or Recharge subscriptions to execute the best subscription strategy for your store.
Why holiday subscription gift guides matter for ecommerce growth
10. Shorten response time via CS Automation: Happy customers are the best fuel for growth. Don’t just leave upselling and cross-selling for individual agents to figure out, either. Identify the most impactful ways customer support can impact revenue for your brand and train them accordingly with Gorgias. Some of the Gorgias automation use cases are as below:
Enable live chat and proactively engage with customers who have a best-selling product in their carts! Embed agents’ signatures with dynamic product recommendations based on the customers’ previous product searches!
Encourage agents to engage with your customers on social media and share discount codes. Instead of incentivizing closed tickets, make satisfaction score (CSAT) the top priority for agents (through OKRs and rewards). Offer your support agents Amazon or PayPal gift cards for strong performance.
11. Double down on post-purchase feedback: Leverage fairing to launch post purchase surveys and channel customer feedback back to inform your product strategy and spur innovation around new product extension ideas or enhanced methods to reduce customer friction across the purchase journey through returns and customer support automation as the need maybe. Ask your customers if they made a product purchase for themselves or was it a gift.
12. Standout with Direct Mail Marketing Gifting Catalogue: end one-off or triggered postcards or Cardalogs™️ to customers & prospects. Convert email leads with MailMatch™ & anonymous site visitors with SiteMatch™. Get hyper-targeted prospects with our AI lookalikes + thousands of exclusive attributes leveraging PostPilot. Leverage Shop Drops, Shared Cardalogs, Lookalike audiences and target life events and attributes with PostPilot – to know more about these features and how you could acquire audiences here.
Learn why direct mail marketing rocks for DTC brands here. Also, learn more about how direct mail, email and SMS marketing work together for DTC growth below.
At Smarte Digital Inc. we offer irresistible Q5 holiday offers that will help you and your team get to a winning start in 2024. To know more, book a free 30 min introductory call with us at https://www.smartedigital.com/contact-us.
