Greg Rice

For most consumers, the “holiday season” means the joyful last two months of the year celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Hanukkah holidays with family and doing some holiday gift-giving. For e-commerce retailers and brands, Q4 is often the make or break chance to capitalize on the massive amount of digital traffic, fueled by a shopping frenzy and low-price offers. If a tactful e-commerce strategy is implemented properly the holiday season can result in not only increased short-term sales, but also sustainable growth into the new year.

So what key elements are needed for a winning holiday strategy? It all has to do with the timing, laying the groundwork ahead of time with rich content, balancing the promotional calendar, and capitalizing on any momentum generated. 

Get the Timing Right

                                                                                          Source: BazaarVoice

The number one critical component, before getting into the individual e-commerce strategy tactics, is timing. As with anything, the right action taken at the wrong time can be ineffective, and nailing the timing for each activity can make or break the Q4 holiday season. 

Getting the right timing for Q4 marketing strategies is especially important when considering the short amount of time that the holiday shopping season is made up of, putting the best holiday tips through a trial by fire. 

Considering the vast majority of the entire holiday shopping volume takes place between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday (collectively called the “C5” or “Cyber Five”), the window of time for capitalizing on the traffic influx starts long before the turkey makes its way into the oven.

Components of a Winning Holiday Strategy 

Laying a Strong Foundation with Content

Prepping for Q4 begins long before the calendar strikes October. Like professional athletes, savvy brands and retailers do the bulk of their training and heavy leg work in the off-season. While some elements of the holiday strategy can be implemented ad-hoc, developing a strong content strategy requires time to put the pieces together, execute, and see the impact. 

With the growing digital clutter of banners and advertisements that consumers face on a daily basis and diminishing customer attention span, e-tailers need to cut through the noise to deliver high-impact, unique content. This not-so-new trend of content marketing which drives home the value for customers, departs from the traditional price-based incentive, opting instead for organic representation of the benefits, uses, experiences, and dynamics of products. 

Editorial product reviews, buying guides, how-to guides, and videos explaining product use are among the most popular types of content for delivering rich experiences to consumers, with a long-tail SEO benefit to surface pages in Google searches without paying for placement. Additionally, these types of unique content are often shared by other individuals and organizations, helping to add to the organic exposure and driving traffic back to the product pages. 

The tactic of providing rich content for customers isn’t just limited to blogs or videos, which do carry their own resource requirements, but product pages can also (and most definitely should!) be a home for providing in-depth detail about the products and use cases. This not only helps customers become more informed when they are in the purchase phase of shopping, but lifts the product pages in organic search during the awareness and research phases of the funnel.  

According to the Adobe’s State of Digital Advertising Summit 2018, more than half of people think online ads are easy to ignore, and the same amount of surveyed respondents indicated they had only ever accidentally clicked on ads as those that intentionally clicked ads. That, with increasing CPCs makes developing a strong content strategy pre-Q4 a tactic that not only adds value in the short-term, but sets a foundation for extended growth into the future. 

 For most consumers, the “holiday season” means the joyful last two months of the year celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Hanukkah holidays with family and doing some holiday gift-giving. For e-commerce retailers and brands, Q4 is often the make or break chance to capitalize on the massive amount of digital traffic, fueled by a shopping frenzy and low-price offers. If a tactful e-commerce strategy is implemented properly the holiday season can result in not only increased short-term sales, but also sustainable growth into the new year.

So what key elements are needed for a winning holiday strategy? It all has to do with the timing, laying the groundwork ahead of time with rich content, balancing the promotional calendar, and capitalizing on any momentum generated. 

Promotional Pricing: A Strategic Twist on the Default Tactic

                                                                                                                            Source: Adobe Digital Price Index

Promotional pricing is no new holiday strategy, but far too often retailers get caught in the “race to the bottom”, slashing prices to the bone in hopes of netting high volumes of orders. While it may succeed in driving high quantities of orders, the margins become sabotaged and the competitive edge can easily be overtaken by someone else who is willing to make even less per sale. 

For brands a price reduction can be detrimental to the long-term value of the product, often for the remainder of the product’s lifespan. However, that isn’t to say that promotional offers are bad by any means, and with the right pricing strategy it can be a huge boost that drives widespread awareness of the product, contributing to increased revenue down the road. The key to promotional pricing is all in the strategic approach with a key focus on the timing. 

Holiday shopping starts not with Black Friday, but the beginning of November, which means that your holiday strategy should kick off at the beginning of November as well (if not sooner). Early shoppers start scoping out deals on things they want to receive as gifts from their families, and eager shoppers are taking advantage of some of the early bird deals. 

                                                                                                                          Source: Adobe Digital Price Index

In fact, 48% of customers purchase for themselves while shopping for others, which means that even if products aren’t the lowest of the season they will be getting increased traffic before the peak shopping days, with chances for conversion. This gives retailers an opportunity to start slowly discounting prices, making their products appealing to the early shoppers while still maintaining margin as much as possible. As you can see from the Adobe Digital Price Index charts above, once Black Friday hits the market price drops and price competition is extremely stiff. 

One way around a straight price discount is to offer value bundles, creating a unique offering with core products and accessories or peripheral items. This tactic works well for retailers who want to discount certain hot items but find themselves bound by MAP restrictions, but also for brands who want to differentiate their holiday deals across channels. 

While many in retail have been letting out a collective sigh of relief for making it through the holiday shopping season, and throwing together an afterthought of an “end-of-year/clearance sale” for the remaining days of the year, the focus is often not on maximizing opportunity but on simply “filling the gap”. 

The fact is that there is an inherent spike in traffic on sites the day after Christmas, as the hectic nature of the holiday has relatively subsided, consumers might have heavier pockets from extra gift cards or cash gifts, and all those unfulfilled wishlists get a second look.

A One-Punch Knockout is Never Enough

Very rarely in e-commerce strategy development do we see a “one-punch knockout”, which accomplishes every goal in the first iteration. With that mindset, e-tailers should not think in terms of dedicating all the strategic holiday marketing towards one area in hopes that it will be enough. Chances are, a multi-faceted approach is necessary for a robust holiday strategy. 

Part of developing a deep strategic approach to e-commerce is by diversifying your sales channels, and list on e-commerce marketplaces like Newegg if you have not already. In the Internet Retailer consumer survey, 60% of customers plan on purchasing from online marketplaces during the holiday season. 

The value of marketplaces is that each one caters to a different demographic, and while everyone is well aware of Amazon’s coverage of the digital shopping space, there are numerous other specialized or niche marketplaces that might be a perfect fit for your products, with potentially much less competition. Additionally, when considering a marketplace strategy for Q4 it is a good idea to not just have one set promotional deal calendar for all the different channels or marketplaces you are selling on, but to stagger the offers to have some channel exclusivity to maximize the impact of each placement.

While the main focus of the holiday e-commerce strategy is of course the time leading up to the holiday, the massive influx of shoppers is a perfect opportunity to capitalize on Q4 sales as a stepping stone for increased consumer engagement and future sales into the new year.

For brands or retailers with access to consumer and purchase data, leveraging that information for digital remarketing campaign with supporting products, services, or programs is a strong tactic to establish a relationship with customers which can blossom into a fruitful endeavour. Sources cite the cost of acquiring a new customer as five times higher than retaining a current customer, and thinking about the new holiday shopper as a potential long-term customer can pay dividends long into the future. 

Holiday Planning and the Changing E-commerce Landscape

Alt Text: Retail overall is booming, lifted by an increasing strength in e-commerce, which is taking up more and more ground from brick-and-mortar shopping.

Image Source:

                                                                         Source: Internet Retailer

Q4 and beyond is bright for online retailers, with the upward trending growth of U.S. e-commerce sales as a percentage of total retail sales hitting 11.6% in 2016, 13% in 2017, and 14.3% in 2018, paving the way for continued opportunity. Rapidly developing mobile commerce and a 3% annual growth in consumer comfort purchasing gifts online helped contribute to an overall 19.2% growth YOY from 2017 to 2018, totaling $22.55 billion during the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. 

Even though consumer confidence projections for the rest of the year are slightly dampened by the expected tariff increases on Chinese imports (although at their highest levels in 18 years), and there is apprehension about a potential recession, the flurry of shopping from holiday shoppers will be a monumental opportunity for brands and retailers to maximize their sales. With an established e-commerce holiday strategy, merchants can prime themselves for immediate growth in Q4 and long-term compounding success for the new year ahead that capitalizes on emerging trends.