The Holidays Are Not Over Yet
Keep the momentum going into the new year
Last year’s holiday season was marked by early shopping trends, with retailers adapting their ad strategies accordingly. Consumers embraced diverse shopping channels, making contextual marketing crucial. Ecommerce continued its strong growth, driven by mobile and AI-powered innovations.
Though last year’s holiday season has officially ended, it does not mean consumers have stopped shopping. The new year starts ripe with opportunities and we encourage retailers to keep the momentum going to avoid missing any potential revenue gains.
New Year, New Opportunities
Ease up after the holiday season and you will miss the window of opportunity within the first few weeks and months of the new year. There’s holidays and new year’s themes to capitalize on, so here’s our recommendations that are worth additional ad spend to drive revenue:
- Health and wellness sales: Every year consumers make new year’s resolutions that consist of improving their health and well-being. This is a lucrative time for retailers to capitalize on fitness, wellness, and related categories as they look to jump-start their new goals.
- Valentine’s Day: Last year, Valentine’s Day spending was estimated to have reached £2.1 billion. If there’s anything we learned in 2024 is that even with financial concerns looming, consumers are still willing to spend when it comes to their loved ones. We expect this to continue as consumers celebrate safely.
- President’s Day: This is the last national holiday for US based retailers until Independence Day on July 4th. That’s over four months until the next major holiday campaign to drive sales for your business. Typically home goods, appliances and tech items are discounted during this time.
Returns Can Provide More Opportunities
Consumers will return from the holiday break sorting through gifts, and will likely find items they want to return or exchange. In the UK, British consumers are expected to return £1.5 billion worth of unwanted Christmas gifts this year. As consumers are actively seeking replacement items, this creates an opportunity for retailers to get in front of them. While on the journey to find a replacement product they might find additional items or something of higher value they want to purchase on your site. Returns can also create in-store traffic, and similar results to online shopping where they might browse and find another item on-top of what they’re returning or exchanging.
Delayed Gift Card Purchases
Every year consumers forget about gift cards they received during the holidays. Pandemic worries continued into last year’s holiday season, so gift cards became a safe and easy gift to give. With a significant amount of gift cards given and unused, this becomes a great time to increase your ad spend to monetize gift card holders. In fact, a consumer survey found that 58% of gift card recipients plan to use their gift cards after the holidays.
Take Action Now
Adjust your budgets accordingly and don’t take your foot off the gas pedal just yet. Using performance marketing can help influence and connect consumers to more products in your catalog. When you utilize these tactics properly on high-intent users, a simple promotion or a best selling holiday item could be enough for them to convert. Users that are completing returns or using gift cards can actually end-up spending more overall.
Sights On Q2 And Beyond
The new year arrived fast and we expect the same for Q2/Summer. What we typically observe during this period is seasonality. However, what we know about seasonality has changed. It’s heavily dependent on ever changing consumer behavior, which has become even more unclear in recent years and is already very hard to predict. This can be frustrating for retailers and marketers alike, and in general a difficult task to get ahead of.
It’s all hard to say but the best we can do is follow the story the data illustrates for us. Stay tuned for our Q1-2022 Strategy Guide!
For more information about retail performance marketing, contextual targeting and empowering your first-party data, contact Connexity.
