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4 CDP-powered holiday marketing ideas

September 16, 2021

The holiday season is usually the most hectic sales period of the year and the one with the most significant impact on retail businesses. This year, just like last year, as the Covid 19 continues to shake up the status quo, e-commerce and online shopping are expected to take center stage.

As the world rapidly moves to digitalization, digital competition in the retail industry remains at an all-time high. This means that any customer-focused retail business must develop new strategies and marketing ideas to stay ahead of the pack. These strategies include personalization and data-driven marketing ideas to help brands maximize profits from the busy holiday season. Read on to learn more.

4 CDP-powered holiday marketing ideas

  1. Identify customers who are likely to buy gifts.

Using your customer data, research your customers and identify those who are highly likely to purchase gift cards or those who are evidently motivated by gifting. For instance, men who buy women’s products, women who buy children’s products, or customers who purchased gift cards during the previous holiday season are all demonstrating clear signs of gifting behavior. Focus your digital gifting campaigns on targeting these specific customers.

It’s not uncommon for most businesses to run gift campaigns a week or two before the festive season. This is often aimed at attracting and acquiring new prospects to make the most of last-minute conversions as Christmas draws near. Most of these campaigns usually run on an “it’s not too late to get a gift card” slogan, and they remain effective as far as customer engagement and capturing last-minute sales are concerned.

This year, due to shipping issues and adjustments caused by the pandemic, you want to launch your gifting campaigns a bit earlier to minimize any delays in order fulfillment. And the good thing about digital gift cards is that they require no order fulfillment making the process easy for your team and the delivery services you use.

  1. Segment customers by their likelihood of buying at a discount.

Big data in retail can help you understand the different types of customers and their purchasing behaviors and preferences. Some loyal customers make frequent purchases at full price, discount customers purchase just as frequently but only when items are on sale, while impulse buyers come once, then disappear, and so forth.

Discount customers are likely to make frequent purchases of low-priced products or because of discounts offered on the same products. Identifying and categorizing these customers into specific segments will enable you to target your audience accordingly. You’ll know which customers are likely to buy at the total price and which ones to attract with discount-related messaging.

Customer data platforms, such as Lexer, combine transactional data and predictive analytics into a single customer view to help accelerate this process. With these platforms, you can segment customers based on their buying behaviors and overall lifetime value. With the use of CDP, separate the discount buyers in your database from the buyers who are likely to purchase at full price. Send out contextualized messaging to each to encourage the most sales at the highest margins.

  1. Feature your “hero” products to acquire new customers.

As a retail brand, you have in your stock various products that have different performance levels. These may be categorized as:

  • Hero products: Products that record the highest number of first-time purchases by high-value customers.
  • Niche products: Products with a low first-time purchase volume and high customer lifetime value.
  • “Fool’s gold” products: Products with a high first-time purchase volume but low customer value.
  • Poor performers: Products with below-average value and below-average volume of first-time purchases.

Your “hero” products are the acquisition magnets for high-value customers. Using your CDP, analyze and identify your high-value customers who are highly likely to purchase these hero products and develop lookalike audiences around their profile. To help you evaluate your customers by value, your segment should look like this:

  • One-timers: Customers who’ve only made a single purchase. Leave these out.
  • Gender: Is the hero product a favorite of both genders, or is it limited to a specific gender? Perhaps you need to personalize it to make it a high performer, which means including gender.
  • Email engagement: Customers in your emailing list tend to be more loyal, higher-value customers. Include them in this segment.
  • Recent buyers: Target customers who have purchased recently and therefore still have your brand top-of-mind.

The more you continue to filter out different customer attributes, the lower the volume goes and the higher the value rises. From there, you’ll be able to identify your hero products responsible for the most high-value customer acquisition. Use these hero products to target, attract, acquire and retain new customers this holiday season.

  1. Automate “last chance” campaigns to send at the right times.

The delivery services industry has borne a major brunt of the pandemic with huge logistics issues. These setbacks are further compounded by the hustle and bustle of the holiday season. As such, shipping delays can adversely impact your customer services if not appropriately handled. And since consumers can’t be relied on to change their buying habits, such as last-minute rush, it is your job to prepare early amidst the holiday mad rush.

“Last chance” messaging campaigns are an excellent approach to encouraging customers to make purchases with enough time to ship before the holidays and create a sense of urgency during the holiday season. And since most purchases will be made online, you can estimate how long it will take to ship products to their locations. Based on these estimates, you can use your CDP to segment customers by location and set up “last chance” campaigns to automatically send out at the appropriate times. This maximizes last-minute sales while reducing shipping issues.

Learn more about how you can communicate with customers regarding delayed orders and borrow professional tips from top brands.

CDPs can help you win this holiday season

For most brands and retail businesses, the winter holiday season is the most vital and profitable time for business. With the introduction of new, impactful tools like CDPs, in-store and ecommerce integration, and personalized experiences, you need new strategies for your holiday marketing campaigns to engage customers, improve customer retention, and make this year’s holiday season your most profitable yet.

Top brands like Quiksilver, Igloo, Nine West, Rip Curl, Supergoop!, etc., are making the most of Lexer’s Customer Data & Experience Platform and benefiting immensely from the results. As the only CDP built specifically for the retail industry, we support leading brands and retailers to drive incremental sales growth through improved customer engagement.

This article was adapted from Lexer’s guide, “2021 Retail Holiday Marketing: 9 Campaigns You Need to Plan Now.” If you liked this, you’ll probably find more value in the original, in-depth version too. Click here to read the full version of the 2021 retail holiday guide.