Studies show that consumers are feeling increased financial pressure in these uncertain, post-pandemic times. They’re still shopping, but they’re likely to adapt their behavior. And that’s good news for businesses with robust Shop & Earn programs.
Whether through point-of-sale discounts, cash back, or loyalty rewards, people are looking for more value when they shop. They’re prioritizing their needs over their wants and making necessary trade-offs – like shopping stores they’ve never shopped before, searching for exceptional deals, and visiting shopping portals like Rakuten.
With consumers more mindful of how and where they shop and the holidays around the corner, it’s important to have a competitive marketing strategy to capture your audience spend.
Year over year, sales growth during the holiday season significantly outpaces sales growth during the non-holiday season (also known as the months that aren’t October, November, and December).
That’s why stores are doing more each year to capture a bigger piece of the holiday season spend. Namely, they’re creating more offers, more often. That’s just the kind of retail activity that will attract new people to your Shop & Earn program AND drive the repeat shopping that’s critical to growing your highest valued audience over time.
Here’s our Holiday Season Marketing Playbook, designed to maximize this critical shopping period:
- Follow the Retail Marketing Mindset. To capture valuable share of wallet in the competitive holiday retail environment, you need to keep your program top of mind. Your Shop & Earn program is a retail-centric experience and your marketing cadence should emulate a retail calendar. Retail calendars are all about frequency, which (again) means more offers, more often. Therefore, the holiday marketing cadence for your Shop & Earn offers should look more like a retailer and less like a traditional and less-frequent marketing plan.
- Start Marketing Early. While Cyber Week is the busiest time of all, holiday-centric “retail events” – when stores concurrently create spikes in shopping traffic – start in October, with pre-Black Friday, early-access sales, and competition with Amazon Prime Days. Those events will run through late December, since many consumers shop right up until the day before Christmas. To get the most out of these retail events, you’ll need to pulse marketing before, during, and after each so that you maintain a consistent presence.
- Embrace Cyber Days. Yes, we’re talking days, not just one day - Cyber Monday. Cyber days are larger promotional events that start as early as the Monday before Thanksgiving and run through a few days after Cyber Monday. The best offers are no longer available on just Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The retail event pulsing that started in October get more aggressive during this time. The most successful Shop & Earn programs run marketing communication strategies daily, and often multiple times a day, during key dates like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday.
- Choose Your Channels Wisely (aka, Email Matters). A multi-channel strategy is important, but not at the expense of cutting out email. Email can support merchandising reach (20+ stores at a time) and serve as an “evergreen” form of navigation back to your program. That’s important, since not everyone bookmarks a site and shopping portals don’t always have a memorable URL. Push notifications, social, SMS, website/mobile banners, browser extensions, and countless other channels all play roles in a successful channel strategy. However, none of those are as strong as email when it comes to breadth of merchandising AND persistent navigation.
- Merchandise Toward the Most Shoppers. While designer and/or high-priced brands engage some audiences, it’s the everyday and discount brands that drive the most shopping. This is especially true given the budget-conscious consumer mindset that prevails today. Here are some basic merchandising guidelines to ensure your marketing converts to shopping:
- Showcase your top 5-10 stores (determined by transaction numbers, not sales numbers) prominently and consistently throughout the holiday season. Those with Buy-Now-Pick-Up-In-Store offerings will be particularly successful.
- Complement your offers with holiday-centric brands from categories including specialty gift baskets, food boxes, and wine delivery, where engagement is 2-3 times higher during Cyber Week. Gift cards also make a big comeback the week leading into the holiday.
- In-Store card-linked-offer (CLO) merchandising is most successful on Fridays, and therefore should surely be in the mix for Black Friday. That’s because people will link, then shop over the weekend.
- Lean Into Your Earn Currency. Shoppers are looking for added value, especially during the holiday season. So give them even more rewards in the form of bonuses and boosted offers. Whether your currency is cash back, points, or miles, those promotions are powerful levers. Use them to influence behavior and increase shop rates, average order value (AOV), and transaction frequency during this highly competitive shopping season.
We’ve learned that following the above basics will ensure a strong and effective holiday marketing foundation and deliver results that drive sales and new opportunities, year over year. Layering in sophisticated targeting and personalization as well as timing and boosted-offer rates, will increase success exponentially.
To sum up:
During the biggest spending season of the year, savvy holiday shoppers look not only for deals, but for easily accessible rewards that change behavior and result in loyalty and engagement over the long haul. Cartera’s Shop & Earn programs are designed with those shoppers in mind.
We’ve built highly successful Shop & Earn programs for some of the largest airlines and financial institutions in the world. If you’re ready to begin a program (or re-boot or expand an existing one), let’s work together to customize the unique Shop & Earn strategy that will drive your desired results and grow sales and engagement – during holiday season and year-round – for shopping cycles into the future.