Early Data Gathering for Smarter Holiday Marketing (4 minute read)

Efficient holiday digital marketing is the key to boosting sales during the season and beyond. Setting up your marketing plan in advance* can help you stay ahead of the competition and conquer early-bird shoppers.

To take full advantage of your resources and appeal to consumers with high conversion potential, it's vital to gather as much information as possible while Christmas is still 7 weeks away.  

Collecting data about your target audience right now doesn't just improve your upcoming holiday marketing effort - it can help you set up a stellar remarketing campaign to boost sales and increase ROI (Return on Investment).

The Importance of Remarketing

Only 2% of shoppers convert during the first visit to an online store. The rest leaves due to various reasons, from distractions to unexpected shipping and handling costs. Whatever the cause, allowing these consumers to leave forever hinders your marketing and sales efforts.

Remarketing allows you to target consumers, who visited your store and left without buying.  It's a follow-up technique that puts your offer in front of customers to bring them back to your website and finish the purchase. 

You could be running a high-quality advertising campaign only to have visitors gather the necessary information in your blog and proceed to the competitor's website to make a purchase. 

To drive a sale through, you need to design an efficient retargeting campaign since website visitors, who are retargeted, are more likely to convert by 43%.

To make sure your remarketing campaign proceeds smoothly during the holiday season, it's important to gather sufficient information about your visitors in advance. With the right data available, you can bring promising customers back while your competition is stuck generating leads.

Setting Up Your Retargeting Ad Campaign

A retargeting ad campaign is an important part of remarketing. It involves attaching a small piece of code to each visitor once they come to your website. Then you can use a special programme to put relevant ads in front of these potential customers as they visit other websites.

But setting up a retargeting campaign once the season arrives is too late! You need to master the tactic right now to make sure it starts showing results before December. Bringing customers back to your website doesn't just help drive sales, it allows you to build a loyal audience.

By the time Christmas comes around, you won't just have a successful retargeting campaign set up - you'll have a bigger audience to work with as well.

List-Based Remarketing: Gathering Data about Visitors in Advance

Remarketing doesn't stop with setting up a retargeting campaign, where all you have to do is attach a pixel to the visitors so you can follow them around the web. Another major part of your remarketing effort is list-based remarketing.

List-based remarketing involves creating highly specific ads for existing customers whose email addresses you collect during your previous interactions. For example, a customer, who purchased a school bag from you in the past can receive an excellent offer for pencil cases.

To run an efficient list-based remarketing campaign, you need to upload the list of email addresses you gathered into the remarketing advertising platform. The audience will start seeing ads as they browse the web.

Additionally, you can send personalised emails with specific offers and then take advantage of email remarketing. It works by attaching a pixel to the user who opens your email and places ads in front of them as they start browsing online.

Audience Segmentation

A personalised and optimised list-based remarketing campaign isn't possible without proper audience segmentation. By dividing your customers into groups or segments based on different characteristics (demographics, behaviour, interest, time on the website, etc), you can come up with highly personalised ads that have more chances of catching their attention.

Examples of segments are:

●      Customers who abandoned carts

●      Customers who downloaded the app but never made a purchase

●      Customers who visit your blog often

●      Customers who completed a purchase recently

●      Customers who viewed different types of products

The key to creating a top-notch remarketing campaign during the Christmas holiday season is gathering information about your customers in advance. Studying your target audience and existing clients' behaviour can help you create proper segments. For example: 

●      Customers who purchased cricket equipment will get an email about discounts on cricket bats.

●      Customers who left something in the cart will see an ad with a "free shipping" offer on that product.

●      Customers who have visited a certain product page but never made a purchase will get an email offering "10% off" on that particular product. 

With the necessary data and email addresses in hand, you can make sure consumers come back during the season to make a purchase.

Using Lead Gen Ads to Help You Build a Mailing List in Advance

While you already have some information about your existing customers, the new audience is still a mystery.

By the time the holiday season starts, it will be too late to study new customers even if they have high potential. That's why building a mailing list in advance is highly important for a successful holiday campaign.

Today, you can start setting up a lead generation ad campaign to bring as much traffic as possible to your website. With the right approach to SEO, digital marketing, and paid search ads, you can build a strong remarketing database and be ready for the holiday season before it comes.

Once you have all the necessary data available, you can build an email remarketing campaign and proceed with audience segmentation for list-based remarketing. Meanwhile, the new prospects can boost your store's profitability even before you roll out holiday deals.

The Takeaway

Remarketing efforts during the holiday season yield limited results unless you gather data in advance. In the race to attract consumers before the competition does, you need to set the campaign up as early as possible!

By collecting information about your exiting audience's behaviour, gathering email addresses, and generating leads, you are setting the ground for a top-notch advertising campaign.

Since only a small percentage of consumers convert after the first visit, by the time holidays arrive, you want them to have come back at least one more time. By doing that, you are increasing the chances of a successful season by more than 40%.

Would you like to learn more about how lead generation ads can help you build a Christmas-ready audience?
Don't hesitate to get in touch with us.

In our next blog, find out about the most efficient e-commerce digital marketing strategies to boost holiday sales. Stay tuned!