Holiday Tips for a Changing Marketing Landscape, Part 1: Making Connections with Ad Personalization

It’s been a big year for eCommerce retail and this trend doesn’t show any signs of slowing as the next holiday season approaches.

Crafting a highly personalized digital marketing experience is necessary to attract new customers as their expectations for customized ad messaging continue to rise. Let’s dig into how this is done, and how it helps curate an authentic connection with your most loyal customers.

Get your ad personalization strategy right

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by how challenging and resource-intensive it can be to come up with a highly resonant ad experience for each of your potential new customers. But, the good news is, technology can be very supportive in both identifying the right new audiences to focus this attention on and also in getting personalization right in the first place.

Focusing on the right segment of your target audience is all about ensuring the hard work your marketing team dedicates toward crafting that perfectly personalized campaign is actually being optimized for and placed in front of potential clients who not only will make a purchase, but also will convert into loyal customers who return again and again—in other words, customers with a high customer lifetime value, or CLV.

Once you know who your high CLV customers are, focusing your ad budget on attracting more of them can be easier than you might think when you leverage supportive technology like lookalike audiences on Facebook.

Avoid spending too much to attract one-and-done customers. Instead, improve campaign relevance for the segment of your customer base with the highest CLV. This is the idea behind Retina Focus, which connects data from Shopify and Facebook to better inform your strategies for engaging with your next generation of loyal clients.

That brings us to our next major strategic recommendation for eCommerce retailers entering this next holiday season…

Don’t underestimate the power of an authentic connection

As more and more consumers are shifting from in-person shopping experiences to eCommerce retail options, that doesn’t mean consumers are any less savvy about spotting authenticity. People are increasingly craving an authentic experience with some real meaning behind it.

What’s more, shopping online gives consumers a lot more power of choice when it comes to ending the transaction before it even begins. It simply is a lot easier to close a tab and visit your competitor’s website instead than it is to physically leave a store and go to another once a customer has already committed to entering in the first place.

That means impulse purchases are a lot less likely and it’s more important than ever to fully win your customer over in order to earn their purchase. Focusing your marketing budgets on the audiences most likely to engage with your brand in the long run from the very beginning is the best way to ensure you’re not wasting your ad spend on clicks from people who are much more likely to exit your site than they are to make a purchase—whether that’s just one, or the first of many.

Gift wrapping it all up…

Ultimately, crafting a marketing strategy that will set you up for success both throughout and beyond this upcoming holiday season requires taking CLV into account. This metric is composed of a few different figures: how regularly the customer makes purchases on your site, how much they tend to spend per purchase, and how long they’ll be a customer before they ultimately churn.

Does your holiday marketing strategy include campaigns that promote all three of these areas of CLV? If so, are your campaigns focusing on the best possible segments of your potential customer base?

We’d love to work with you to help you answer questions like these and provide the insights your team requires to get tactical ahead of 2021’s holiday season. Get in touch with us to craft your holiday marketing strategy with the focus and insights your team requires.