7 steps to creating your holiday marketing crisis playbook

How to create a playbook for when the most wonderful time of the year is no longer wonderful

The holiday season is one of the most anticipated yet dreaded times of the year for marketers. While we carefully craft our plans, develop creative assets, and double down on cocoa-like beverages (both the AM and PM kind), the path isn’t always smooth sailing. The ultimate goal? Make it past the Cyber 5 forest, through ship cutoff lane, and down the chimney with a full bag of revenue. However, what seems like a straightforward path often becomes a harrowing adventure of promotional pivots, order delays, and continuously watching revenue.

If you read our “12 Must-Know Marketing Strategies for Holiday 2024”, you’ll know that we are advocates for creating a playbook that covers more than your promotional cadence. Now while we can’t promise a smooth holiday season, let’s dive in deeper to discuss the nuances of the playbook and ways to ensure your Holiday adventure is a bit more peaceful.

What is a playbook?

Your playbook is your go-to place for all scenarios that may occur during the holiday season. It’s more than the day, content, and channel for marketing messages. A playbook focuses on various scenarios and how teams should respond. What if we’re missing revenue targets? How do you navigate site issues? Include your baseline plans, then take it further to prepare for any changes or challenges your team faces.

Playbook scenario components 

1. What is the challenge to address?

Simply put – what could go wrong? Are you addressing a site outage? Maybe it’s a promotional pivot or contingency plan based on company/channel performance.

2. Who are the stakeholders?

Who needs to be involved in decision-making? The goal here is to be as nimble as possible. If it requires 4 levels of approval, then you have too many people involved. Ideally, you would have a small team that navigates all the complexities and then reports to leadership for a final decision. 

For example, if you were working on a promo pivot due to performance, you’d most likely want the channel campaign managers, creative members developing assets, a promo or ecomm team member driving the change, and any additional analytical support. The team determines where marketing support can be leveraged and then presents the plan to their marketing leadership for approval.

3. Who is on the RASCI?

RASCI: Responsible, Approver, Support, Consult, Informed

Having clear decision-making roles ensures maximum efficiency. This is one of the easiest parts to put into place, but hardest to enforce. This builds a chain of command and determines who is responsible for various actions. Having a defined RASCI will minimize the swirl that occurs in organizations where opinions are rampant.

Using our promotional pivot example, here’s a potential layout that you may see: 

R: Campaign manager

A: Channel owner/leader

S: Creative team, CRM operations

C: Brand/strategy, promo team

I: VP/C-level, director

4. What considerations should be taken?

Beyond the initial challenge are the circumstances within which the issue arises. If traffic has been underperforming your targets and impacting your goals leading up to Cyber 5, what details do you need to address?

Have these questions ready to streamline your response:

• What % are you missing targets? Is it a trending issue or one day?
• What promotional backups are already in place?
• What is the revenue target for a product if there are issues?
• If out of stock, can you get the product back before shipping deadlines?
• If the site went down, was the whole site impacted?
• How many customers were affected?
• How long did the issue occur?
• What is the potential revenue impact versus planned revenue for that day?
• What’s needed to correct the issue? Technical change or new creative assets?
• What level of marketing support is required?

5. What channels will be used to communicate to customers?

Not every channel can pivot quickly (direct mail, TV, print, etc.), and not all channels are relevant to every challenge. Know which channels can react fastest and how they can support your response. If a site outage didn’t impact your app, you wouldn’t want to send a push notification saying, “We’re back up and running”. Determine channel support for each challenge with appropriate actions planned.

6. What should messaging be?

What matters is how your actions are communicated to customers. Keep your brand voice front and center, but remember that proactive customer communication during issues requires empathy. Your goal is to provide the best possible customer experience. For promotional pivots, maintain your brand voice while focusing on seasonal excitement and energy to drive engagement and revenue.

7. What actions will be taken?

Clearly define potential actions for each scenario. If you’ve determined that missing revenue triggers an extra email with a stronger promotion, create these assets in advance so your team is prepared.

Cordial is a powerful tool for your playbook, as you can easily target customers with personalized messages based on the scenario. Struggling with revenue? Focus on the struggling segments and leverage Cordial AI to show categories that a customer has an affinity for. You can also retarget customers who browsed but didn’t buy an out-of-stock product with similar product recommendations based on attributes like style or color.

Develop an asset library for your playbook

Beyond building the playbook, create all necessary assets in advance. This includes:

• Templated emails with prepared copy
• Promo assets that can be quickly updated
• Interchangeable creative elements

With Cordial, you can store these assets as Sculpt Blocks to leverage across campaigns. This is especially helpful if you need to make changes across multiple assets at the same time. Having any contingency email templates prebuilt will also make it easier to develop an email on the fly.

Example scenario: promotional issue 

Let’s build a playbook example based on an incorrect promo being sent out.

Setup: It’s now Cyber Monday, sales have been fantastic, but a targeted email to your best customers went out with a bad promo code. Before panic sets in, we refer to the playbook.

Playbook: 

Challenge: A promo issue occurred

Questions to Consider: 

• What is the exact issue? A bad promo code was sent in email
• How long has the issue occurred? The code was sent at 5 am and has been available for 3 hours
• Which channels were impacted? Only email
• How many customers have been impacted? Targeted to top 10% revenue customers (150k)
• What is the potential revenue impact? What was the target revenue? Estimated revenue impact is $100k (10% of total revenue target)
• Can we correct the issue technically? We can fix the code for any entries later, but customers have already tried
• Stakeholders? RevOps, Marketing, Promo/eComm, Creative

RASCI:

• R: Email Campaign Manager [Name, Email]
• A: CRM Director [Name, Email]
• S: Creative and Promo Team [Names, Emails]
• C: Brand Manager, Performance Analyst
• I: RevOps Director, CMO, eComm VP

Channel Support: Email only with potential for SMS if performance lags

Messaging: Messaging needs to follow the “oops” email from the playbook asset library. Promo issues will be addressed with new codes if applicable. Additionally, we will add a contingency sweetener for any inconvenience caused.

Action: Final action will be approved by leadership, but the recommended course is to send a second communication to impacted customers with the above messaging needs. Channel outreach will be dependent on impacted channels.

Potential challenges to address

As you build your playbook, prepare for these typical holiday scenarios:

• Site outages
• Webpage issues
• Checkout problems
• Performance issues good/bad (revenue, traffic, conversion)
• Negative/positive trends (slow seasonal ramp, slowdown in revenue post-cyber 5)
• Promotional pivots
• Promo errors
• Shipping delays
• Inventory challenges
• Out of stock

No matter how much we hope the holiday season is like a Hallmark movie, we will often find that there’s a little Clark Griswold in our season which needs to be navigated. Through proper preparation and developing a quality “What If?” playbook, you will hopefully have the energy to slide down the chimney when the holidays arrive.