Paid strategies for e-commerce success at Christmas

November can only mean one thing… CHRISTMAS IS COMING! Which means it's time to make sure you have e-commerce success this Christmas. For consumers, the Christmas countdown is finally on. For marketers, Christmas has been on the radar for some time! Christmas campaigns that you’ve been planning over the past months are being launched (or should be!). Therefore, your marketing activity is beginning to ramp up. But when it comes to paid social activity, it’s difficult to know the best approach to maximise performance. This blog post will help develop your paid social strategy for the holidays, giving you top tips for e-commerce Christmas success.

Launch early November & invest in prospecting

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet launched your Christmas campaign… get a move on! Early November is the time to start

driving awareness

of your brand and

product discovery

, as people start to think about

Christmas gifts

. Focus your budget predominantly on

prospecting activity

, focusing on building education around your products and relating them to Christmas gifting to appeal to new customers.

Maximise key trading periods (especially Black Friday)!

Black Friday is one of the

biggest trading days of the year

. With most brands and businesses launching the best deals of the year at this time, consumer’s

intent to buy is very high

and

conversion rates across channels are higher

too! To maximise this higher intent, this is a great time to run paid social activity.

However, with more businesses running paid activity this can cause the

ad auction to be more expensive

than usual, meaning it can be expensive to reach new audiences. To counter the higher auction, focus a higher proportion of your budget on

re-targeting activity

. If you’ve been investing in prospecting earlier in the season you should have a

bigger audience that you can remarket towards

. Try remarketing towards site visitors, previous buyers & social media engagers. This will help drive more sales in this period whilst maximising your ROAS!

One thing to bear in mind in November is that; as the years have gone on, businesses have

started their Black Friday discounts earlier and earlier

. To get ahead of the competition, you might even want to think about launching your Black Friday deals a week or two before the day itself. Although, from experience, Black Friday itself is when you see the biggest efficiencies due to such a high conversion rate.

Utilise dynamic campaigns with broad prospecting audiences

In the lead up to Christmas, there are a lot more

people in-market that may not usually be

. For example, lots of men may be searching for beauty gifts to buy for their other halves… when it might not be something they look for at any other time of year.

If you utilise

Dynamic Ads

and leave the

audience completely broad

(however ensuring your exclusions are in placei.e. excluding previous buyers/site visitors) then Facebook’s machine learning will do the work for you. Facebook will understand consumer’s

current

internet behaviours and interests. So by utilising completely broad audiences, these will reach the people that are currently interested in products like yours. These type of ads can be very efficient at driving

new customer acquisition

compared to other campaigns in this time period!

Adjust your messaging for last minute shoppers

As you get closer to Christmas, you’ll be wanting to change your messaging to drive higher conversion with last minute shoppers. By adjusting your messaging you want to

drive urgency,

and highlighting your last delivery dates can do this. For example, utilising messaging such as: ‘Order before Friday to get your gift in time for Christmas’ can help to drive higher conversion!

Then, even when your last delivery date may have passed, if you sell digital gift-cards you can advertise these to encourage last minute purchases. E-cards are becoming more and more common and are still a gift that appeals to many!

Don’t forget about Boxing Day onwards!

Often people will begin to reduce paid social activity in the period between

Boxing Day and New Year.

With most people out of office for the holidays, it’s simply something that isn’t as much of a focus. However, what this means is that the

ad auction is much cheaper

than usual (meaning

cheaper CPMs

) so you can reach more people with your budget! And with people being in-market for self-gifting with the money they got for Christmas,

conversion rate is usually high

too.

Make sure you have a mini-campaign planned in for this time. Pushing up your budget at this time and running sales activity can really help to

maximise your ROAS

before the new year begins and competitors start driving up the CPMs again!

We hope this blog has helped you with your business plan to e-commerce success this Christmas! Written by Kelly Birnie