For consumer products, the holiday season is over. The high-energy two-month period that begins with Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) can account for 19 percent of a brand’s total annual retail sales, according to the National Retail Federation.
Even though brands have visions of profit dancing in their heads, there’s another side to consider during the holiday season. Vacation shoppers tend to be the worst when it comes to customer lifetime value (LTV). Too many consumers buy from your brand once and then disappear. In some cases, they may come back next year. Other times, they’re gone forever.
How do you take one-and-done consumers and turn them into loyal brand advocates? The answer lies in the inventory of business data you collect.
Let’s explore four ways your business data can help you craft the right pre-holiday strategy and drive repeat business after the holidays.
Pre-Holiday: Increase your marketing spend
Proper partitioning creates better privacy during the holiday season.
With growing uncertainty over the effectiveness of digital advertising, brands should carefully monitor their marketing spend data in November to see if they’re on track for success or failure this holiday season. Your ROI should increase the amount you get to BFCM. If not, you’ll need to adjust quickly to optimize your holiday profit margin.
At a higher level, you want to track the effectiveness of each marketing channel around the holidays. One of the most helpful metrics to track is return on ad spend (ROAS), a barometer of effectiveness that shows how much revenue you’re generating for each marketing dollar. Cross-channel your ROAS and see if there are any sudden fluctuations or red flags so you can make real-time adjustments.
To see if your marketing efforts are driving profitability And You can go one step further by conducting group analysis that measures LTV:CAC ratio by bringing the right customers to your website. This calculation gives you valuable insight into your customers’ lifecycle so you can determine the ROI for every dollar you spend on customer acquisition.
To do this, you need to create time-based “customers since first purchase” and compare them year-over-year. Since the exact dates of BFCM are fluid, we recommend starting with Black Friday as 0, then counting backwards (-1, -2) pre-BF and forward (+1, +2) post-BF. This works to create an LTV:CAC group analysis for Christmas sales using Christmas as day 0.
