*Updated January 25, 2024
With the Thanksgiving turkey practically on the table, the holiday shopping season is in overdrive, as should be retargeting your holiday digital marketing strategy. Along with Thanksgiving the most significant dates for the holiday shopping season are:
- Thanksgiving
- Black Friday
- Cyber Monday
- Christmas Day
- Cyber Week II (between Christmas and the New Year)
These numbers will certainly increase due to the pandemic, which makes every day important when ensuring that the items in your customer’s shopping cart become order confirmations. This is why retargeting should be a major element in your holiday e-commerce strategy.
In a nutshell, retargeting engages with audiences that have already visited your site and may be interested in making a purchase or already have items in their shopping cart, but left the site before making a purchase.
Retargeting mainly uses paid ads. Because 97% of people who visit a site for the first time leave without making a purchase, it’s imperative that you lure them back. When thinking how you can better use retargeting in your holiday strategy, try including these tips.
The Friendly Reminder
A potential customer goes into a brick and mortar store. They look around, pick up a few items, put them down and leave. That same customer browses your site. They click on certain items but leave before they make a purchase. Although the result of the physical and online visit was the same, you have an advantage because you know which items that customer is interested in. You can create a retargeting ad that features the items the customer clicked on. This increases the chances of a conversion. A friendly reminder can also be effective for reminding customers of any abandoned carts.
Push Notifications
If you have an app that your customers can install, push notifications are a great retargeting method that can boost conversion rates. Push Notifications are messages that pop up on a mobile device. They look like SMS text messages or mobile alerts but can only be seen by users who have your app. Push notifications is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies because you don’t have to pay for ads. When using push notifications remember to apply these best practices:
- Make it personal, use the customer’s name
- Be creative, concise and conversational
- Make it relevant to the holidays
- Nudge your customers by offering a sale or reminding them to complete their order by a certain date to have the package in time for Christmas
Tap Holiday Shoppers Using Social Media
A social media usage report by Statista stated that in 2023, Americans spent an average of 64 minutes per day on Facebook and Instagram. A festive, holiday-themed ad on a potential customer’s feed on one or both of these social media channels is another retargeting method that creates a personalized marketing experience for the user. When using social media, make sure that you leverage these channels to drive traffic to your site and that your site is mobile optimized to handle everything from browsing to checkout.
Tis’ The Season to Reach Out to Last Year’s Shoppers
One of the things that makes the holiday shopping season different from the other 11 months of the year is that shoppers who don’t have the need to purchase toys or candles, may do so when fulfilling a holiday wish list or secret Santa gift. This is the time to look at last year’s data and create a few branded ads to target shoppers who purchased from your e-commerce site last year.
Don’t abandon those “abandoned carts”
When a potential customer adds items to a cart, the likelihood that they intend to complete the purchase is high. If a customer abandoned items in their cart, they might forget about those items, but don’t miss the opportunity to push these customers to return to complete their purchase. Abandoned cart emails have an average open rate of 45%, which proves that customers find them to be of value.
It’s Not Over Until Cyber Week II Ends
Customers are still extremely active between Christmas and the new year—last year, 70% of consumers reported that they would be shopping after Christmas, taking advantage of the post-Xmas sales. The holiday season isn’t over until Baby New Year sings. Remember to allocate some of your retargeting budget to ads that are related to “after Christmas’ ‘ and “end of year” sales.
As you implement your retargeting strategy over the holiday season, remember to have someone who is savvy with data consistently check on the performance of your campaign. When done creatively, retargeting can keep your e-commerce site at the forefront of shoppers minds, provide a personalized connection to your brand, and bring a boost to your holiday sales.
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