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The holidays are always a crucial time of the year for marketing teams. For some companies, the entire year depends on a successful holiday season. It’s a period of increased demand, more in-store staffing, supply chain pressures, spikes in orders and more.
There is even more on the line this year due to the global coronavirus pandemic’s disruption to the retail space. Many of these aforementioned challenges (more demand, staffing, etc.) are minimized or altered due to the “new normal” of the COVID situation.
Throughout the year, companies have experienced temporary and permanent closures, limited inventory, supply chain interruptions, substantial shipping delays and much more. All eyes seem to be on the Internet this holiday season, which means online competition will be through the stratosphere.
This discussion will look at retail marketing strategy examples that are sure to help you prosper during this hyper-competitive time.
Without any further delay, let’s get started.
While the pandemic has stirred the pot and forced the hands of many businesses to turn to ecommerce in order to stay afloat during these times, it arguably only fast-tracked the inevitable.
Every year, the balance between online and brick-and-mortar sales tipped more heavily in favor of ecommerce. Prior to the pandemic, ecommerce sales were growing higher and faster than in-store sales.
There’s no doubt that this trend would have continued, with or without a global pandemic. However, with nearly all Americans preferring to stay and shop from home, traditional businesses are scrambling to adapt to an ecommerce business model.
That said, this shift shouldn’t be seen as a survival strategy. It’s about adapting to the future and the expectations of the consumer market. These are changes that started to occur long before anyone was talking about the coronavirus.
When the holidays rapidly approach, retailers need to plan strategically on how best to approach the heavy online competition during this time. With the right plan in place, you’ll generate sales with plenty of new customers to make it a brighter year.
Ecommerce is a different beast compared to in-store retail. This means that you need to develop a marketing plan and set goals unique to the online environment. These goals will dictate what you want to achieve and how you’ll complete these set objectives.
When you have a clear direction set, it is easier to implement strategies that will drive the performance and results that you want. It’s about focusing on what matters most to the growth of your business!
Here are four goal-setting steps to get you started for the holiday season:
1.Define Your Goals: You should have an overarching, primary objective for this holiday season. It may be a sales number you want to reach, or how many new customers you hope to convert. You can make your goals broad or very specific. A common technique to setting goals is to use the SMART system, which makes sure that your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based.
2. Set Your Metrics: Once you have a goal, you need to think about what it takes to achieve that objective and what sort of figures you need to look at to measure progress. Your chosen metrics need to align with your goal. For example, if your goal is related to generating new customers during the holiday season, then your metrics would be things like first-time website visits, counting sales from new customers and looking at the value of those transactions.
3. Start Planning: Now you have a direction and the ability to measure progress. It’s time to start planning and figuring out what you need to be successful. This step includes deciding who will be responsible for what and how each team member will participate in the holiday program. You should collaborate as a team and start brainstorming what strategies, tactics and actions can be taken to help the company reach its goal, as well as when these steps will be performed.
4. Analyze, Learn, Adjust And Optimize: Ecommerce marketing and sales have the benefit of showing near-instant results. This means that management is a big step in the process. You need to monitor your results every day and see how your goal progress is coming along. Pay close attention to what products, keywords and offers that your customers are using the most. Also, be sure to test new strategies! The fast results of ecommerce allows you to test and compare things like call-to-actions, ad messages, email subjects, landing pages and more.
The typical vision of shoppers lining up for the hottest new toys and deals for the holiday season isn’t quite. In one report, a third of US shoppers that normally would shop in-store for Black Friday said that they won’t this year.
Moreover, many of US shoppers said that they would shop online more on coming years compared to previous years. This also included browsing for gift ideas and doing research online, rather than in-store. So, when customers do shop in-person, you can expect that they’ll go right for the products that they need and not browse other aisles.
Here are some specific challenges and trends to be prepared for in this unique year.
You could expect Black Friday to be followed up by Cyber Monday, the online shopping equivalent. With more people turning to their computers and other devices to shop this season, you can expect that the usual Cyber Monday will become “Cyber Week.”
How To Capitalize: Don’t put all your eggs in one box, or one day. Instead, plan your cyber sales to extend deeper into the holidays. You can capture early and late holiday traffic by spreading out your ad budget and marketing strategies throughout the season. For Google Ads users, make sure that you have enough budget to keep your Smart Shopping Campaigns and Smart Bidding strategies going for the entire month.
Many consumers are entering the holiday season with a particularly tight fist on their wallets. A lot of people have lost jobs or had their income reduced dramatically during this time, which means they aren’t going to be as willing to spend unless it’s a very good deal.
How To Capitalize: Be sure to heavily promote sales, price drops and other tactics. People are going to have a keen eye on social media, online ads and other messages to find the best deals possible and save the most money. If your on-sale items aren’t easily discoverable, you will miss out on valuable transactions!
Some of the shoppers that are making the change from in-person retail to online ecommerce are relatively new to the digital shopping experience. These are people that have shopped online a few times before, but are much more comfortable with the traditional retail experience. This presents a few challenges that your business needs to adapt to.
How To Capitalize: Simplicity is key. If your online shopping experience is overwhelming or includes too many steps, it may get in the way of customers completing sales, especially if they are already uncomfortable with the online environment. Eliminate friction wherever you can by reducing the number of steps it takes for visitors to checkout with their items. It’s also crucial that any shopping or search ads you may be running are connected to the right product pages on your website. You don’t want customers to have to go digging for what they want!
It’s also worth mentioning that recently Google Ads made product shopping listings free. This is a great tactic to take advantage of this holiday season. Since Google is a trusted and popular search tool, even inexperienced online shoppers will feel comfortable buying products they’ve connected to through these product listings.
Just because there are a lot of new customers hitting the online stores instead of the malls and brick-and-mortar shops, that doesn’t mean you should forget about your existing customers or experienced online shoppers. With more and more sales occurring online each year, the vast majority of your audiences are well-versed in what to expect and know what to look for.
How To Capitalize: Mobile is always an important area when it comes to online sales. The holidays are an incredibly busy time, pandemic or not, which means that a lot of customers are shopping on-the-go via a mobile device. Be sure that your online shopping experience is flawless when browsed with a mobile device. This means paying attention to mobile site speed, load times, interactivity and more.
Unless your area goes into a lockdown in the next month and a half, you can still expect to see some shoppers arriving in-person. However, as mentioned, these customers will not be browsing, researching and comparing prices like normal. This hybrid shopping experience turns your physical store into a transaction point. By the time the customer walks through the door, they’ve already decided what they’re buying. They may have even purchased online and have only come to the store to pick up their order.
How To Capitalize: Pay close attention to your online sales and website activity. What products, brands and categories are customers looking at the most? These activities will also influence what items are most popular at your physical retail locations. If you’re running shopping ads on Google, the best sellers report will let you identify these top items.
It’s also a good strategy to update your business profile on Google with any new information, especially if you offer additional services during the pandemic, like curbside pickup, contactless transactions, etc. Utilizing local inventory ads will further blend the online with the in-person and allow you to sell in-store items to nearby audiences through the Internet.
One of the most interesting consumer trends is what’s known as purpose driven shopping. This is where consumers use their purchasing power as a means of supporting businesses with shared values and ideals. In the ecommerce world, customers have so many options to choose from that simple price and quality comparisons are no longer the only ways to measure products. Today’s customers look for businesses that support causes, commit to sustainable practices, get involved in the community, etc.
How To Capitalize: Let customers know about your business beyond its products. Develop site pages, social media content and other materials that showcase some of the qualities of your business that are not immediately seen on the surface. Adding these details to your Google My Business page is also a huge benefit. What do you do for your community? What causes do you support? How do you run your business? Answering these questions will help customers feel attached to the purpose behind your brand and products. Need some inspiration? Try to get involved in a toy drive this holiday season. It’s a perfect way to give back and demonstrate to your customers that you’re fully invested in the giving spirit!
There’s plenty to speculate about how this holiday season will go and what sort of consumer trends to look for. However, if the previous year has taught us anything, it’s that things can change very quickly and unexpectedly. There is no way to tell exactly what this end of year will look like, but adapting to the challenges listed in this section should help you handle the majority of the coming obstacles.
How To Capitalize: Here are a few more details to help you prepare for this holiday season.
Despite all of the aforementioned challenges, the biggest one is still the gigantic elephant in the room: COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, many small businesses have discovered just how fragile their organization is, especially with lockdowns forcing these companies to shut their doors for extended stretches of time.
Unfortunately, COVID-19 continues to put pressures on the entire globe and, with cases rising again, we could see more rules and stricter guidelines implemented during this holiday season. Take a look below at some of the ways you can manage the biggest challenge of all and offer your customers a safe shopping experience that abides by all of the latest rules.
The earlier you start planning, the better. If you haven’t begun making preparations for the holidays, you’re already behind! However, it’s not too late to start now. Plus, with COVID thrown into the mix this year, any preparations can go out the window. This means that even existing plans will have to be adjusted as the season progresses. As you’re making your plan, always have contingencies in place. For example, what happens if your supply chain becomes interrupted? Or, shipping costs suddenly spike?
This is not easy considering the relative nightmare that 2020Â which means your business was having its busiest time of the year. That’s a good thing! Even though your brick-and-mortar sales may be down, your ecommerce business will be booming! Plus, with talks of a vaccine coming soon, consumer confidence is rising.
With the majority of consumers reporting that they will increase their online shopping this holiday season, it’s important that you reinforce your ecommerce strategy. It’s like getting your house ready for a holiday party; you need to make sure everything is cleaned, prepared and ready to begin receiving guests.
Here are some steps to get your ecommerce site ready for the holidays:
Convenience and safety are the two most important factors. You want the shopping experience to be as easy as possible, whether it takes place online, in-person or a combination of both. And, when shopping does happen in-person, you want it to be as safe as possible for both your customers and your staff.
Yes, ecommerce is going to take center-stage this year (and probably for years to come). However, that’s not a reason to neglect your physical stores. Brick-and-mortar retail is not going anywhere. It will undoubtedly play some role in this year’s holiday shopping. Again, it’s important that your store locations follow all of the local, state and federal guidelines with regards to safe shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the ways that customers feel safest during these times is a clean environment. It’s not just about following all the guidelines, but also showcasing that you are invested in the safety of everyone that enters your store. Here are a few ways you can achieve this:
This point has been stated before in this guide, but it is worth describing in greater detail. Even without the impact of COVID, managing inventory during the holiday season can be a real problem. You want to take necessary precautions well ahead of this crucial shopping period in order to be absolutely certain that you have enough stock.
A lot of the concerns that people have regarding COVID have to do with being confined indoors in a space filled with strangers. Individuals are much more at ease when they are outdoors. If possible, think about how you can create an outdoor shopping space in your parking lot, curbside or sidewalk area. You may have to check with local regulations beforehand.
If you have limited space to work with, opt for a curbside pickup booth. Remember, most shoppers already know what products they are interested in. If you can offer a service where they can order online and pick up outside the store, that’s an awesome shopping experience during these times.
This concept of curbside pickup can be a great way to minimize foot traffic inside your store, which will ensure that you stay within the capacity guidelines. For instance, you could offer a service where a staff member retrieves the items for the guest and brings them outside to a mobile POS to complete the transaction. This keeps them from having to enter the store and offers a very COVID-safe experience.
Other strategies to consider are:
You’re making all of these extra efforts to produce a convenient and safe experience for customers that still want to shop in-person. Don’t forget to let your customers know about them! Update your website, send out a newsletter and publish social media content that communicates how you’re approaching safety and cleanliness during the pandemic. This will encourage customers that are on the fence about holiday shopping to feel comfortable with visiting your store.
This is another strategy that is effective even without the COVID situation. Many customers rely on social media to get the latest updates about their favorite brands and businesses. This is particularly true during the holiday season. They want to get the latest deals and special promotions. Social media is incredibly effective at managing relationships with customers, whether they are new or old, ecommerce or in-person shoppers. For this reason, you should post regularly on your social media accounts and tailor content to all of your audience segments.
Similar to posting regularly on social media, you should also communicate effectively through your email newsletter. This is great for re-engaging past customers that have signed up to receive email communications from your business. Let them know about the COVID-safe environment that your stores offer, as well as any sales or promotions available on your ecommerce site. Emails are exceptional because your customers are much more likely to see these messages. Social media sites, on the other hand, use algorithms to make your posts less visible to users.
To help retailers prepare for the upcoming holiday season, here are some key digital strategies to make a success!
There is an unpredictability about the COVID-19 situation that will continue to impact the entire world. For retailers, this could mean significant shifts in buying patterns, preferences, purchasing power/confidence and more. Ecommerce has the unique ability to keep your retail business agile. It’s this speed that can counteract the unpredictability and reduce costs in the long term.
There are three things to consider when it comes to having an agile and cost-efficient ecommerce platform.
1. Choose Your Ecommerce Platform Wisely: There are a lot of ecommerce services that all promise to make your online sales more manageable and successful. That said, not every ecommerce platform is built the same. You need a system that is reliable, efficient and built for scalability. If your business changes, your ecommerce platform should have the ability to match your most current needs, whether big or small.
Some business owners opt for a cheap ecommerce service because they undervalue just how important online shopping really is. This will be a costly mistake. If you don’t have time to change your ecommerce platform this holiday season, it should be your number one priority in 2021.
2. Effortless To Scale: The boom of holiday shoppers can easily put a strain on your ecommerce site, which results in slower page loads and other issues. It’s a well-known fact that the vast majority of shoppers, as high as 91%, will leave a website if the pages are taking too long to load.
If you’re still operating with an outdated system, your site will suffer greatly with the added strain of your holiday site traffic. It is time to move from your current system to the cloud. Cloud infrastructure is undeniably more flexible, especially in terms of scalability. When traffic spikes, the system adjusts and doesn’t crack under the pressure.
3. Reduce Costs: The flexibility that cloud-based systems offer isn’t just about scalability, but also costs. You shouldn’t have to invest in fixed hardware to handle the influx of website traffic for a single month. That math just doesn’t add up!
You wouldn’t buy a car just to drive for a two week vacation. You rent a car instead. In a way, a cloud system is like renting the resources you need, when you need them. You can dial up your cloud resources at the start of the holidays and then return to your normal needs once the rush ends.
This is a significant way to reduce your costs during this hectic time, while still ensuring that your site visitors have the best experience possible.
One of the easiest and most substantial ways to damage the customer experience is not having enough inventory of key items. Inventory management is especially crucial during the holiday season. Not only do products move very quickly, but customers don’t have the luxury of waiting a week or two for you to receive more inventory. They need items now to have them ready for the holidays.
The best way to protect your retail business from running out of inventory is with an insight-based inventory management solution. With modern inventory management tools and analytics, you can see real-time stock levels and track your inventory across all channels. This level of visibility offers exceptional accuracy and allows you to correct any potential out-of-stock items well before the inventory is actually depleted.
While you can find a successful retail marketing strategy example that still relies on traditional inventory tracking methods, these businesses never had to deal with holiday shopping during COVID-19. This year, the lines between offline and online are going to blur as businesses need to offer creative fulfillment options that allow customers to shop and receive items in a safe way.
Largely what this means is that customers are going to be reserving or buying items online, before making an in-store appointment or curbside pickup to receive the items. This blending of online and offline will create inventory management challenges that require a more sophisticated tool to track and monitor.
Otherwise, you could end up with customers arriving curbside for items that are not available. That’s a great way to ruin your holiday business!
With the majority of people spending the bulk of their time indoors and even working from home, there’s more time than ever before to commit to shopping online. This also means that there is more time to research and compare products and companies. In order to stand out in this hunt for value, you need to have a deep understanding of your customers. This will help you distance yourself from the competition by offering an exceptional customer experience.
Understanding your customers on a deep, individual level is a three step process that starts with your data and ends with developing personalized communications.
1.Unified Data Strategy: Your data can tell you everything that you need to know about your customer. However, accessing that data, understanding it and implementing the insights gained is a significant challenge. This is a significant distinction. The majority of retailers report that their data availability is good or very good. Yet, 65% say that their use of data to improve decision-making is poor or very poor.
The problem that many businesses run into is that you have data from multiple platforms, tools and channels. If this information isn’t unified into one, cohesive strategy, it is very difficult to use. Once you gather your data into a single place, then you need to prepare it for analysis. This means getting data from different channels to “talk” with one another so that they can exist in the same analysis.
2. Optimize Search And Recommendations: Once you have your data collected and unified, you can begin enhancing your shopping experience by providing customers with more of what they love. Pay close attention to overall customer tastes at a large scale. For instance, you can see what items are typically purchased together or most often.
These insights are not very deep within your data, which makes them easy to bring to the surface and use. That said, with baseline product recommendations, you can significantly improve your customer experience and even increase the value of each conversion by encouraging customers to add additional items to their carts.
3. Personalize: As your data and your understanding of that data and how to use it sophisticates, you can dig deeper and find insights that allow you to personalize your strategies for each unique guest. Offering personalized customer experiences is one of the leading trends that business executives and professionals often cite in retail marketing strategy examples.
When selecting a brand or company to do business with, customers are far more likely to choose the one that offers personalized messages and content. It’s like the restaurant that remembers your name and your favorite order, which you love coming back to. Individual insights are harder to obtain, but they will produce hyper loyal customers with extremely high lifetime values. A personalized shopping experience ensures that your previous 2020 customers will  return for 2021, 2022 and beyond.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a lot of new customer service challenges. Wait times are higher, stores have queues just to get in, supply chains have become disrupted, shipping times have increased and so much more. These pressures will only heighten when the holiday season kicks into fifth gear. If you can’t rise to meet these increased customer service expectations, you’ll struggle to gain a competitive advantage. Luckily, there are a few retail marketing strategies to implement that will empower your customer service at scale.
There are so many different ways to prepare for holiday season that knowing where to start can be very overwhelming. Leaning on the support of partners like Google can be a great start that will help you in both planning and executing your retail marketing strategy. Combining Google’s services with your existing technologies and strategies will be your recipe for success in coming years.
Why Google? With all of the tools, services and platforms under the Google brand, it is easily the most robust suite of marketing tools to bolster your ecommerce and brick-and-mortar business. In this section, we’ll look at just some of these tools and how they can be the star on the top of the tree for your retail marketing strategy.
Ready to take your business to the cloud? Remember, a cloud-based infrastructure offers the exceptional agility, scalability and reduced costs that every business could use during these uncertain times. Google Cloud is a broad platform that includes over 90 products. These industry solutions will help you succeed this holiday season and the next.
What can you find within the Google Cloud platform? Not only will you receive cloud management solutions that will help you operate more efficiently, but the Google Cloud is also where you’ll find APIs for things like Google Maps, Assistant, Images and more.
The sheer size of Google Cloud’s offerings mean that there is a solution for any and all of your business’ problems. When it comes to the holiday season, the biggest benefit is the peace of mind that your ecommerce business won’t collapse under the weight of this busy shopping time.
When you want to reach prospective customers directly with your products and services, there are few channels on the Internet as powerful as Google Ads. Deep targeting options allows you to find almost any audience segment, no matter how niche or specific.
Not to mention, Search and Product Listing ads allow you to capitalize on Google’s mammoth search engine. Meanwhile, you can use Display Ads to reach audiences on YouTube and Gmail. Essentially, Google Ads allows you to turn some of the Internet’s most popular websites into a powerful channel to connect with target audiences and convert sales.
Google Ads also brings a lot of useful features to marketers. Smart Bidding options, for example, mean you can spend less time agonizing over your ad placement bids. Ad extensions are another great feature that add details like a business address, phone number and other information to your ad messages, thereby giving customers more ways to connect and interact.
There are many instances where customers are not searching for specific products, but general information about your business. There’s no better way to collect and share this information than with a Google My Business listing. When a customer searches for your business on Google, they’ll see an organized breakdown of all of your business’ essential details in an info pane at the top of the results.
A Google My Business listing includes basic information like your business address, phone number, website link and hours. It also displays other important details, such as frequently asked questions and answers, peak hours, reviews, pictures and special services, like in-store pickup, curbside pickup, delivery and other options.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, these extra details are crucial for drawing business to your brick and mortar store. Customers want to know that you’re open, but they also want to plan their in-store shopping trips carefully to maximize their safety. With your Google My Business listing, customers can see your business’ off-peak hours, as well as what services you provide to create safer transactions.
Finding success in the holiday season this year and moving forward will be based on your ability to adapt to the uncertainty and unpredictability you had experienced in 2020. The lingering effects of the pandemic indicate that shoppers will continue to prioritize ecommerce. But, there will still be shoppers that show up in-person, too.
The best retail marketing strategy example to follow for the holiday season is a hybrid approach that incorporates ecommerce and brick-and-mortar business into one, cohesive strategy. This means allowing customers to research and shop online, but then receive their purchases and interact in-person at your safe and convenient brick-and-mortar store.
These are trends that will persist long after the holiday season. So, even if holiday business doesn’t boom this year because of COVID-19, adopting the strategies discussed in this guide will help you into the next year and beyond.
At the end of the day, holiday shoppers still expect many of the same things that they always do: great offers and sales, amazing customer experiences, flawless service, etc. If you can deliver those, while also blending your online and offline experiences together, you’ll overcome many of the challenges that the pandemic will inevitably bring to the holiday season.
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