3 Tips for Q4 Holiday Marketing Performance
How eCommerce Retailers Can Drive Success this Holiday Season
Expectations are that Q4 2021 will be another record year for online shopping. Even after new benchmarks were set last year, analysts expect 2021 ecommerce sales to grow 18-23% with a 9% increase to come from holiday shopping. But there are obstacles this season that will challenge retailers’ ability to perform. For a second consecutive year low inventory and shipping delays are causing buying friction leaving shoppers with a sense of urgency. Common shopping channels are flooded with offers leaving retailers looking for alternative channels to reach shoppers and acquire new customers. Finally, conversion windows are increasing and retailers need to rise to the top of shopper attention. Find more insights about 2021 market expectations and what Connexity is seeing in the campaigns we run read “Are You Too Late for Q4?“.
So, what should eCommerce retailers be doing? Below Connexity offers 3 key tips for advertisers to improve marketing performance in Q4.
1. Enhance Promotional Detail
Give yourself the best chance of capturing shopper attention at peak buying points by getting your product offers into the hands of a performance marketing provider. Sharing product offers and providing regular updates to promotional offers can help a provider like Connexity prime retail content publishers and product influencers to promote your offers at the right time. Timely prompts combined with robust offer detail that includes sale prices and dates, item and manufacturer data, along with shipping costs and multiple images, means your offers have a higher chance of being picked up for promotion.
In a sea of product offers, retailers need their promotions to compete for the short attention span of shoppers. Those offers need to reduce buying friction to give shoppers the confidence to click on ads and make a purchase. Offers need to communicate availability & fulfillment options. Be sure to set up your local inventory ads to include shipping and curbside pickup details. Consumers will respond to limited supply and placements can be quickly updated with new offers when supply runs out.
2. Be Contextually Discoverable
While most eCommerce retailers focus large portions of their budget on common shopping ad services like Google, Amazon and other walled-gardens, native content advertising in editorial and social traffic shouldn’t be ignored. In a market flooded with offers, retailers need more than ever to be discoverable within contextual content where consumers spend their time and on channels where shoppers may be inspired and influenced to buy.
>40% of US consumer time online is spent with editorial and social content
Ensuring your brand and your offers are discoverable in highly contextual, retail-oriented content drives on-going visibility enabling significant sales and new customer growth. A good performance marketing service should be able to scale your campaign by securing product placements across an array of diverse sources of retail-oriented editorial content that generates significant shopping traffic.
With Connexity, retail partners enjoy access to thousands of commerce content sources across top publisher groups as well as nearly 6,000 active social creators driving influence. Whether placements built into on-site shopping showcases, placements in product comparisons or placements deep-linked in editorial articles, Connexity enables content developers to drive traffic to specific offers or to key sales and category landing pages with deep linking. The type of rich publisher and influencer relationships we’ve developed delivers over $2B in incremental sales annually for retail partners across the countries we cover.
3. Use Multiple Touch Points
While shopping began even earlier this holiday season, some of that urgency has likely been due to consumers wanting or needing more time to make buying decisions. Recent 2021 retail holiday insights from Microsoft indicate conversion windows of >30 days increased 38% in 2021, suggesting prolonged shopper research and the need for multi-touch advertising.
So what can retailers do to increase consumer touch points and cut through shopper indecision? One way is to enable marketing budget outside of the most common spending in Google PLAs. Bing Shopping Ads provide another opportunity to influence shoppers in high-intent search activity and more than 75% of shoppers have a probability of engaging with a retailer’s search ad after exposure to a native ad.
Connexity enables eCommerce retailers to double down on their search exposure with high-value placements in Microsoft Bing Shopping Ads. As a comparison shopping service partner, Connexity is able to win you competitive placements that are incremental to your direct campaigns. We generate additional differentiated Bing PLAs that effectively increase your overall shelf-space and add to the share of impressions your offers achieve in product search results being reviewed by shoppers.
For more information about these and other opportunities to improve your ecommerce performance marketing register today and a Connexity team member will work with you!
