One of the factors that separates holiday marketing pros from the also-rans is how they plan for—and achieve—success once the season is over. Here are three strategies to use to get more mileage out of your holiday marketing efforts in the new year and beyond.

#1: Assess Your Success to Optimize Your Efforts Moving Forward

Get a full picture of what did and didn’t work this time around, so you're ready with learnings and ideas to make next year's holiday marketing campaigns—as well as other customer engagement efforts throughout the coming year—an even greater success. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

• What did you do right? What could be better?

• How can you employ these insights quickly and see even more success during the next 90 days? How can you leverage them during the next holiday season?

Hold a proper postmortem internally to discuss the entire process around your holiday efforts with your key team leads. Make sure all of your core team members have an opportunity to share their insights on the process, collaboration, and ultimate output and provide thoughtful action items. Collate and distribute this feedback to all of your relevant stakeholders. This feedback loop will help your organization formalize these critical learnings and apply them in the future.

There's no need to wait to analyze your efforts until the end of the campaign. You can start this process after Black Friday and Cyber Monday to help inform your entire seasonal marketing and demand management strategy going forward throughout the rest of the holidays.

#2: Keep the Conversation Going With New and Existing Customers

Researchers have found that brands that manage to boost customer retention by just 5% see gains in profitability of anywhere from 25% to 95%. That's why it's important to continue your customer relationship building efforts after the holidays are over, whether through ad retargeting or via owned channels like email and SMS.

The good news is, new customers acquired during the holidays have the potential to become very active and very loyal.

Check out our guide 6 Cross-Channel Messaging Campaigns to Build Retail Customer Loyalty for ideas about campaigns you can roll out after the holidays wrap up to keep your newly acquired users engaged. For starters, keep them in the know about your brand's:

• New products or services

• Rewards and perks

• Loyalty program

#3: Get the Data and Insights You Need to Drive Future Outcomes

Data is vital to your organization's marketing success. If you want to set yourself up to achieve even greater results during the next holiday season, then you need to be able to optimize your marketing campaigns in real time, using predictive insights to uncover your winning combination of campaign messaging, channels, targeting, and send times to drive customer engagement.

Check out our guide: Key Measures for Customer Engagement for expert insights on what your brand needs to measure and analyze to drive business growth.

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.