With the holiday season around the corner, are you ready with your marketing strategy?  You are expecting the largest portion of your annual revenue in the next two months.  Does this also mean a large hole in your pocket in the form of discounts and marketing spend? What are the new marketing strategies you plan to adopt this year beyond plain discounting?  This is the first in a series of posts where we share some data-driven marketing ideas that you can adopt this season to sell more, sweat less, and save money.

Discounts do drive a large percentage of purchases, and consumers have got used to looking for the best deals. But this is also the time when people naturally spend money for gifting, stocking up winter apparel, catching up on their shopping or indulging in just plain impulse shopping.   Let’s take a look at some facts:

Fact1 1: Holiday shopping is a serious pain


(Most) people would trade the convenience of getting gift suggestions with 1-click purchase options, for just a better price. So get your content marketing team and product experts to put together gift suggestions for every persona out there!

Post gift suggestions on social media and through newsletters through all the digital channels that your customers respond to.

Gifting through your site opens doors for referrals and influencers.  Link referral programs and influencer marketing rewards to gift suggestions. For example, offer additional gift coupons for the friends that receive the gifts.

Fact 2:  People do not like to waste hard-earned rewards


This is the time to reward the people with high affinity to your brand. While everyone is throwing blanket discounts, give the special ones what they earned. They are likely to not want to “throw ” away earned discounts and consider these to be more valuable than the general offers. 

Here are some example user segments to reward:

  1.  frequent buyers
  2. high-value buyers
  3. top reviewers 

Fact 3: People like to know that they shopped “smart”.


Use deep product insights to selectively discount products and let your customers know why these are discounted.  In short, add credibility to your discounting so people know that they are actually getting a good deal and not being fooled with an artificial “markdown”

These are usually the product buckets worth discounting:

  1. Premium Products that are not performing
  2. High margin products that are not performing
  3. Best products in specific categories with a lot of quantity in stock

Fact 4: Procrastination is a natural tendency – something needs to break the inertia. 


Decision making is stressful. People come and view your products, add them to wish lists or to the cart, and go away for no apparent reason. The reason usually is that they are putting off the decision making. To spur them into action with the right information about the products, short term discounts that expire in two days, or more suggestions related to their taste. Break the inertia by adding more reasons for them to buy NOW.

Here are some campaigns that perform very well for immediate conversions:

  1. Abandoned Cart Reminder Series (plain reminders, with additional recommendations, with short expiry coupons)
  2. Product Recommendations following any action like add to wishlist or product page views 
  3. Reviews of products recently viewed

Fact 5: A good number of people still like the in-store experience and the idea that they can see and feel the product. 

If you are a retailer with a store and a website, you are in great shape to reap the rewards of omnichannel experiences.  Check out our blog on omnichannel strategies, here.

While you are focused on the campaigns for this season,  do not miss out on gathering rich shopping insights that can help smarter marketing for the rest of the year.  Make sure you plug in a good marketing automation tool and enhanced google eCommerce analytics to gather data during the naturally higher traffic on your website at this time of the year.

We believe that all is not lost for retail. Smarter agile marketing methods can save the day. What do you think about these marketing strategies?  Join our campaign to adopt data-driven marketing. Share your comments and campaign ideas!

We have built a multi-channel marketing automation platform for eCommerce marketers. It combines deep product intelligence with user behavior analysis.  It offers the simplicity of automation with the control needed by the marketer to run fresh and instant campaigns.  

For more details e-mail marketing@unthink.ai