The most wonderful time of the year is almost here! Holiday shopping season will kick off in a couple of weeks and promotions for the biggest sales have already begun. With audiences getting ready to start their shopping binge, brands need to buckle up and optimise the opportunities Q4 presents itself with.

Shopping is pretty much a part of holiday rituals. In the year 2019, Cyber Monday became the biggest day for online shopping in US history. It hit a record of 9.4 billion USD online sales with total holiday spending projected to cross over 135 billion. The season traditionally started with Black Friday that was primarily applicable only in the U.S. Now, we see the shopping spree begin from Single’s day on 11th November where Chinese shoppers spent over $100bn in 2020. All these events are relevant today in the Americas, EMEA and parts of APAC too as we see the seasonal shopping trend gaining momentum in these markets. The not so gradual shift to digital is particularly visible during this time, with most consumers majorly preferring online shopping channels across the world in 2020.

These numbers make it particularly crucial for e-commerce retailers to get their holiday marketing strategy right. While we know that you have already started to plan for your E-commerce client’s holiday marketing, we have listed how the Dentsu Marketing Cloud product suite can help strengthen your marketing plan this holiday season.

1. Audience Discovery

Along with volumes of sale, your e-commerce clients also need to drive sales from new customers. There’s a difference between knowing and understanding your audience. You must work on identifying the right audience and then understanding their interests thoroughly to be relevant to them. E-commerce retailers can do this effectively in two ways

i) Identifying high value prospects through CRM

With Dentsu’s CRM Sync you can leverage your CRM data in a secure environment. 

You can identify valuable prospects through D-Sync, where our machine learning identifies these leads from your CRM data.

Being a Facebook Marketing Partner, we’re able to transfer the traits of an interested lead for enhanced marketing on Facebook’s platform and generate a strong pool of high quality customers for the client. We create a custom audience of these interested leads on Facebook, making it easier for the client to target this audience for future campaigns. 

ii) Discover audiences through topic/keywords

As an e-commerce retailer, you have a better understanding of what your highly valued products and categories are. You should use these categories/products as keywords to understand the sentiment and the context around it. This will help you strategise creatives to be exceedingly relevant to audiences that are specifically interested in products/categories that are high value for you.

2. Preparing for Ad Fatigue

Remember that you’re not alone in trying to get a consumer’s attention, ad fatigue is at its peak around this time of the year.  So have multiple creative options ready to ensure your audiences don’t tune you out. 

Through DMC Campaign Manager [Creative Optimisation], learn which creatives are the best performing and work towards optimising those that are under performing. Our creative heat maps will also help you understand what aspects of your creative assets are likely to get the highest consumer attention, so you can optimise effectively.

3. Maximising those Seasonal Keywords

Leverage tools like Google Keyword Planner to understand which seasonal keywords are worth putting your client’s money on. Typically, you’ll use these keywords to plan around your SEM (and you should), however, with DMC Explore [Audience lens] you can find audiences that are interested in these keywords. You can further use DMC Campaign Planner to plan a campaign around these audiences specifically and activate them on Facebook, Programmatic channels or OTT (market specific).

Shopping is evolving beyond just online and offline as we see consumers adapt and respond to more sophisticated solutions, like using augmented reality while shopping. So be sure to visualise your consumer journey to plan more holistically and get the right audiences for your brand. 

In a nutshell, the holiday season is when consumers make more and more purchases and hence is a great avenue for your client to generate maximum revenue. Using Dentsu Marketing Cloud can give you the edge you might need to beat your competition. But don’t forget – ‘Tis the season of giving, so feel free to share joy and spread happiness by adding a splash of goodness to your marketing campaigns. Advocate values that are unique to your client’s e-commerce platform. With this, we wish you great success for your campaigns at the end of this year!

To know more about how you can leverage Dentsu Marketing Cloud this holiday marketing season, feel free to reach out to us : dmcsupport@dentsu.com.