Keren Shlush, marketing and content manager, Zoomd

The coming holiday season will look different from previous years due to the growth that digital commerce has experienced over the last 18 months. These include a range of new shopping habits, which bridged the gap between online and offline commerce, such as buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) and shopping bots and shoppable ads.

And while the 2021 holiday season will be very different from 2020, there’s no going back. This means marketers must prepare to take advantage of these developing opportunities to optimize sales and advertising performance during the coming holiday season.

So, what should marketers do to prepare for holiday shopping?

1. Prepare for a holiday shopping season that will start earlier

If you’re waiting for the holiday shopping season, then I have bad news for you. It has already begun. With people home much more, shopping doesn’t have the same peaks as people are now buying all the time. But that doesn’t mean that it’s too late to fine-tune your marketing. Though holiday shopping traditionally revolved around Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Cyber Monday, data now shows that in addition to starting earlier, holiday shopping is more spread out across a broader period. For example, last year, according to data from Commission Junction, retail sales climbed steadily through the week of November 15 to achieve 40% YOY growth, the highest one-week growth for the entire shopping season and before Thanksgiving.

The earlier start of the holiday shopping season is good news for marketers. You now have more time to optimize campaign performance and take advantage of lower ad prices versus expensive media buys in the days leading to the Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday weekend. All this considered, shoppers are always online and shopping, so start promoting your items and catalog earlier and have an always-on media strategy, so people will see your products earlier and consider adding them to their shopping bag.

2. Invest in product discovery

According to research from Google, 91% of feed users took shopping or product-related action immediately after discovering a new product, service, or brand. With holiday shopping beginning earlier this year (see below), many shoppers won’t have a specific product in mind when starting their holiday search.

That’s the reason why mobile searches beginning with “best affordable” have grown 60% year on year. The way to increase the likelihood that your product or service appears when users search within a category is by investing in product discovery. That way, your product will be ranked higher across relevant search terms and appear across social media and the press in content related to the product or service category, enhancing discovery and, ultimately, sales.

3. Focus on mobile

Whether your customers are showrooming your product catalog on your app while visiting a retail location selling your products or co-browsing with friends while traveling, consumers increasingly make purchase decisions on mobile devices. According to data from Statista, in the 2020 shopping holiday season, mobile retail commerce in the U.S. had the strongest growth experienced over the last five years.

Zoomd’s research shows that mobile marketers are increasingly working with more platforms/media channels to address the challenges of the increased focus on privacy, such as Apple’s termination of IDFA app tracking, Platforms taking such action include Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram Rolls. Marketers also are using more demand-side platforms (DSPs), mobile software development kit (SDK) networks, and the traditional favorites: Google and Facebook.

DSPs allow digital ad buyers of digital advertising inventory to manage multiple accounts through one interface. An SDK is a piece of code that lets mobile apps connect to third-party services.

Our research also showed that nearly 40% of user acquisition managers worked with 10 or more media channels, proving the move to a more inclusive marketing mix.

4. Offer flexible payment options

Though the pandemic accelerated the decline of cash as a payment option, this does not mean that payment has consolidated around debit and credit cards. Today, shoppers seek a broad range of contactless payment options, including credit/debit cards, prepaid cards, buy now and pay later, bank transfers, e-wallets, mobile payment options, and even cryptocurrencies.

Ecommerce companies must go beyond credit cards and PayPal. They should offer ” buy now, pay later” options like Klarna, digital-first payment services like Stripe and Square, foreign currency transfer options like Payoneer and platform-specific payment options like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Amazon Pay. This strategy will ensure that their global users will find a payment option to address their needs.

5. Launch a loyalty program

Business consultants have long advocated for effectively managing customer retention because the cost of a new customer is 5x the cost of retaining an existing one. And with the current app privacy changes, retargeting existing customers is more difficult.

Therefore, if you haven’t done so already, now is the time to roll out a customer loyalty program to strengthen the relationship with your current customers. Each company should address its shoppers’ needs when formulating the incentives used in its loyalty program. For some (companies/shoppers), points, money back off the next purchase, or specific deals might be the best loyalty incentive. In contrast, for others, a gift catalog, free shipping, or even being on an exclusive call with the CEO or a celebrity endorser might be best. From the company’s perspective, peer-to-peer referrals should be part of the loyalty program.

A loyalty program needs to be judged by the reduction in customer churn vs. the program’s cost.

Perhaps it’s too late to roll out a comprehensive loyalty program for the coming holiday season, but there is still time to integrate loyalty marketing into your holiday campaigns. By focusing on product discovery, mobile channels, and a broader range of payment options, companies can have a more successful 2021 holiday season.

Zoomd offers a site search engine for publishers and a mobile app user-acquisition platform.