You've done the work to lay the foundation for holiday marketing success. You've built out your holiday marketing campaign strategy. Now it's time to focus on launching your holiday marketing efforts. Here are three steps you can take to achieve success for your brand on launch day and beyond.

#1: Get Your Team Ready for Launch Day

Ensure your core team and customer-facing organization are set up to effectively collaborate on launch day and throughout the duration of your holiday marketing campaign.

Consider creating a war room (whether physical or digital) where you can track the progress of your efforts as a unified team. Hold daily standups to review your holiday marketing war room dashboard. This visualization of your holiday marketing campaign will become a physical (or virtual) manifestation of your team's work.

#2: Be Prepared to Adjust Your Holiday Marketing Strategy to Meet Your Goals

By now you should have defined your campaign goals—spelling out what success looks like for your holiday marketing efforts, stating your most important KPIs, whether they're related to increasing awareness or sales. Once your campaign goes live, your efforts should be driving those KPIs but there's always more you can do to move the needle.

While your team has likely already put a lot of care and thought into your overall strategy well in advance of the holidays, don’t be afraid to shift your plan on the fly based on real-time results of how your campaigns are performing in the moment. After all, savvy marketers know that marketing campaign optimization is a key component of any holiday marketing strategy.

Data-driven optimization can help you pinpoint:

• Top-performing campaign messages, channels, audience segments, and campaign send times

• Predictors of churn and retention

• Ways your campaigns can be tweaked to deliver a greater impact

We recommend creating a decision matrix as part of your war room that the full team can reference in real time as a single source of truth for optimization based on your KPIs, allowing for quicker, more decisive action.

#3: Optimize Your Holiday Marketing Campaign for Purchases and Retention

Boosting short-term growth in sales during the holidays at the expense of longer-term engagement and loyalty throughout the rest of the year is short-sighted. That's why it's important to keep a close eye on the performance of both your campaign as a whole but also individual messages and activations, in order to see where you’re tracking against your KPIs and important metrics. That way, you can potentially make in-the-moment adjustments to maximize purchases and stronger retention at the same time.

These kinds of thoughtful adjustments are especially important when you consider the volume of messages your customers will be receiving for all the brands they engage with. You have to be careful to not inundate them with too much content and to make sure the messages you do send are resonating.

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Methodology

All data presented is drawn from the Braze customer base of 171 Retail & eCommerce brands (for this purpose an individual customer may represent multiple brands, as certain customers may have parent and sub-brands) and has been anonymized and aggregated. The data was analyzed for the period of January 1, 2021 - January 1, 2022, with the holiday period defined as Thanksgiving 2021 to New Year's Day 2022.