12 strategies to maximize your holiday marketing

For B2C marketers, the holiday season is the most critical time of the year. This guide offers 12 key strategies that will level up your holiday marketing campaigns for the “Cyber Five” and beyond. From expanding your mailing list to managing post-holiday fatigue, these recommendations from Cordial’s strategic services team will help you dominate the holiday rush and drive success for your brand.

1. Grow mailing sizes

If mailing to a larger audience is your goal during the holiday season, don’t wait until Black Friday to reach your lapsed users. This is a recipe for deliverability issues.

Best practice:

• Slowly increase your activity segments in the weeks leading up to Black Friday.
• We see success in expanding your active file by 3-5% above your normal “active file” size with each batch send to maintain health.

2. Increase quantity of messages

Prepare for “Cyber Five” – the five consecutive days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. This is when promotional mailing volumes reach the year’s highest levels. It’s smart (and often a required tactic) to increase above and beyond your usual mailing cadence to stand out from the competition. Let’s paint an example: if you’re a retailer who relies on one daily email, we suggest 2-3 daily emails during this period, but there is more to discuss here…

Audience criteria:

• One method of safeguarding against unsubscribes is to filter out morning/afternoon non-engagers and purchasers from sends later in the day. 

Message uniqueness:

• From a calendar planning perspective, use each mailing moment as an opportunity to message a varying product/offer.
• This allows each message to have a unique angle to capture your subscriber’s attention.
• It’s best practice to avoid sending the exact same creative with simply updating the headline.

Urgency:

• The deals won’t last long, but subscribers won’t either if they see repetitive messages that all state: “ENDS SOON!, ENDS SOON!, ENDS SOON!”
• Successful ways to avoid this are highlighting promotional starts with a big splash and then utilizing Ends Soon language when only a few days are left.
• Cap off the period with unique copy of “Ends Tomorrow” and “Ends Today”. 

Cordial pro tip: Reach out to your CSM to discuss using our new STO feature to optimize the time you send messages to drive demand at exactly the right time.

3. Leverage holiday shipping

If a retailer, you’re likely discussing how to effectively message shipping cutoff dates. These can be impactful conversion drivers. Here are best-in-class ways to incorporate these critical timelines:

Email banners:

• Utilizing a skinny top banner on emails 10 days out from the shipping cutoff and count down each day until “Two days are left to shop and receive your package before the holidays!”.

Dedicated emails/SMS/push:

• For the final two days of the countdown, we recommend creating dedicated campaigns messaging “Tomorrow is the Last Day” and “Today is the FINAL Day!”.
• This approach is the equivalent of shouting from the rooftop that a customer needs to shop ASAP to get their holiday shopping lists checked off.

Site/app pop-ups:

• Utilize Cordial’s Lightbox to alert customers of your shipping deadlines on your website or in your App.
• We recommend the Cart Countdown to message the importance of checking out.

4. Share opportunities after shipping cutoff

Creating messaging focused around expedited, two-day or overnight shipping remains an opportunity to deliver on the promise of packages in time for customers to wrap. Email banners or a dedicated send letting them know they can still get it under the tree are effective revenue drivers. Once all shipping options have ended, dedicated emails and SMS focused on e-gift cards still feel personal to the recipient and leads to strong performance. 

5. Utilize daily deals

Daily deals are a great tactic to drive return traffic to your site or store. Align with merchandising on 10 products that you can reveal daily during the promotional window at an attractive price point with a compelling offer to draw engagement and demand. VIP gifts and giveaways along with early access to sales are other fun ways to drive engagement within your CRM channels.

Thought starters:

• 12 Days of Deals, Cyber Week Deals, Channel Exclusive Deals!

6. Create gift guides

Consumers often need help picking the right gifts for those they are shopping for. Gift Guides are a great tool to employ. These can take several approaches but require advanced planning. What inventory did you buy deep to prepare for the holidays? Get the photo team together and create mini-shoots for each specific category you’d like to highlight. And don’t forget to create custom landing pages with your gift guide curations so you can drive traffic in these effective marketing and merchandising efforts. 

Successful approaches we’ve seen are: 

• Gender: Gifts for Him, Gifts for Her, Gifts for Kids, Gifts for Pets
• Price: Gifts Under $50, Gifts Under $100, Gifts Under $200
• Persona: Gifts for the Adventurer, Cozy Gifts, Travel Gifts, Gifts for the Skier, etc.

Cordial pro tip: Leverage holiday-themed user-generated content, i.e. testimonials, product reviews, as well as social proof points to help create gift guides around your most shopped, most gifted, and best sellers.

7. Plan for holiday fatigue

Post holiday, subscribers will have been messaged heavily over the previous six weeks and it’s important to give your mailing list a break. The key is to reduce your cadence to only the key drive times. Use your engagement metrics, including unsubscribes, to help monitor customer sentiment. Even with a break, it’s not uncommon to see unsubscribes increase at the end of December into early January.

For email:

• Some retailers give their complete list a break between December 25 until the new year.
• If you message 5x/week, you may drop to 1-2 per week.

From SMS:

• Optimize based on response rate and unsubscribes.

For push:

• It’s safe to stick to 2-3/days between each message if supporting a sale within your app.

Cordial Pro Tip: Recent purchasers can be your most valuable rebuyers, but also the most likely to unsubscribe. Have a unique holiday post-purchase plan ready during the season to maximize rebuy and limit unsubscribes. One recommendation is to remove 15-day buyers from all batch sends unless you’re sending a top tier promotion. 

8. Boost engagement with personalization 

The more personalized each message, the higher the engagement rates and, ultimately, the demand. As shopping patterns shift around the holidays, it’s still effective to use affinity models to orchestrate personalized content and promote gift-giving ideas, encouraging subscribers to shop for others.

Best practice:

• Use dynamic subject lines that change based on the email’s content or products.
• Remember to update your core automation’s creative imagery, assets, and banners with holiday themes—nothing says ‘Ho Ho Ho’ like a sunny spring image!

9. Optimize cross-channel communication

Every channel serves a unique role in your marketing stack, but many retailers default to using all channels to promote the same sale with identical copy on the same day. While consumers are used to seeing this during the holiday season, savvy marketers leverage each channel’s unique value proposition to tailor the experience.

For example during Black Friday, all channels should highlight the promotion, but each can do so differently: SMS might feature a special door buster, email could showcase top deals, and push notifications might encourage app users to shop in the app. While the overall message is consistent, the approach and focus should vary by channel. If you must promote the same message across all channels, consider tailoring your cadence to ensure multi-channel subscribers aren’t overwhelmed with a flurry of duplicative messages.

Cordial pro tip: Build your key holiday campaigns in Cordial’s Orchestration and leverage Channel Preferences to balance how many messages you’re sending to a customer in a given day.

10. Make a holiday playbook

Everyone has a plan until they get run over by the revenue sleigh (we think Tyson said that) should a particular day miss revenue targets. A holiday playbook is crucial for managing mid-week changes and should cover more than what days you’re sending messages out.

Key questions to address include:

• What actions will you take if you fall short of targets?
• How will you handle an incorrectly sent promotion?
• Who in your organization is responsible for making decisions and executing the plan? Being prepared will help reduce the stresses of holiday chaos. 

Cordial pro tip: Leverage Sculpt Blocks to make changes across multiple creative assets as easy as ordering a last minute gift card for Aunt Nancy.

11.  Elevate your automations 

Automations are a fantastic (personalized) lever to drive conversion, and ideally, you want as much of your revenue coming from them as possible. However, during the holiday season, automations can inadvertently add to the noise if they are mixed into your batch cadence.

As you enter peak season, review all your automation triggers to identify which ones are essential for your program (i.e., cart abandonment is must). Then pause your non-essential automations (such as homepage abandonment or category abandonment) to avoid pulling customers from your promotional streams.

Additionally, adjust the frequency and timing of your deployments. Should customers receive cart abandonment at a 30-minute delay instead of the usual 1-2 hours during the holiday period?

12. Take advantage of increased site traffic

As site traffic increases during the holiday season, so should your subscriber base. An optimized sign-up module with eye-catching holiday creative and a compelling offer will entice visitors to take advantage of the deal right away. It’s also good practice to change your creative treatments during the Cyber 5 week to maximize the urgency of seasonal shopping. Adding sign-up options for SMS and email at key touchpoints—such as the footer of your site, during account creation, cart checkout, and order confirmation—helps ensure customers have ample opportunities to stay informed and “never miss a deal”. However, consider adjusting or removing your typical sign-up offer for post-purchase interactions to avoid upsetting customers who have just completed a purchase.

Cordial pro tip: Cordial’s Lightbox allows for quick and easy testing of the creative, timing of your sign-up boxes, and placements on site. We see success implementing a cart countdown timer to encourage immediacy of checkout.

By implementing these 12 strategies, you’ll be well-equipped to stand out during the holiday shopping frenzy. Remember, success lies in preparation, flexibility, and understanding your audience. Stay agile, deliver value at every touchpoint, and watch your holiday campaigns shine. Here’s to a successful and profitable holiday season!