As peak season approaches, many brands across the globe are shifting their focus to seasonal offers. This time of year presents a wealth of opportunities for marketers: global online sales reached $1.17tn across November and December in 2023, up 3% year over year, according to research by Salesforce. This year, sales across peak season are expected to be even higher.
Peak season has changed significantly over the years – and it is no longer confined to the two months ahead of Christmas. Research published in August by Think with Google describes the period as “a journey that stretches from October to early January.”
While this extended window offers more opportunities for marketers to promote their products and connect with customers, it also demands greater strategic planning and adaptability. Amid fierce competition in today’s challenging economic environment, marketers must pull out all the stops to create diverse content that keeps audiences engaged without overwhelming them.
What lessons can marketers take from last year and apply to the upcoming months? Three marketers share what they learned from peak season 2023, and offer advice for businesses preparing for 2024.
Like many businesses, Klatch Coffee experiences a surge in demand around the holidays. When demand changes suddenly, as it can during the holiday gift-giving season, we need to be prepared to ramp up production quickly.
Roasting the coffee in advance and holding extra inventory to handle spikes in demand would compromise quality and freshness, which is unacceptable. Instead, we make sure we’re meeting our promised delivery timelines by occasionally adding in extra Saturday shifts for coffee roasting as needed.
Consumers remember merchants that promptly help solve their problems
We do everything we can to ensure a perfect experience and meet our targets, but even when something goes wrong, there’s still an opportunity to delight the customer. That might mean a replacement product, upgraded shipping to help meet a deadline, or even just a welcoming smile. Consumers remember merchants that promptly help solve their problems.
Because we offer subscription products – and great coffee – we’re lucky to have very high customer retention. This has allowed us to build an active email and SMS opt-in marketing list that is highly engaged. We relied heavily on marketing to those lists in 2023 during the holiday season.
Given the success of this, we’ve rolled out an updated version of our rewards program for the new customers we’re anticipating in peak season 2024. We’ll give out points for purchases that can be redeemed on future orders, so customers will have a compelling reason to return to our store in 2025.
We’ve also made changes to allow our customers to self-manage their email marketing profiles. They can let us know how often they’d like to hear from us, the categories they are interested in and how they prefer to brew their coffee. This data is combined with purchase and browsing history to create segments we can use to send more relevant messages. Customers seem to appreciate these highly relevant, closely-targeted marketing pieces, which serve them better compared with the shotgun approach.
During the 2023 holiday season, we leaned heavily on email marketing to maintain strong engagement with our existing customers. We sent out newsletters with curated gift recommendations and exclusive holiday pricing, and focused on showcasing seasonal collections and limited-time offers. This was particularly effective, as it ensured our brand was at the top of customers’ minds during the gift-giving season, and helped to drive direct conversions.
For new customers, we ramped up our social media presence. This involved promoting targeted content that highlighted our holiday specials, as well as visually rich content designed to attract potential buyers who might not have known about us before. Perfecting our social media experience to attract new customers was more challenging than targeting existing customers. While we saw engagement from those who already followed us, cutting through the noise to attract entirely new audiences was tougher than anticipated given the competitiveness of the marketplace during the holiday season.
Preparation was key to maintaining a high standard of service during peak periods. We ensured that our processes – from order fulfilment to customer support – were thoroughly streamlined and that our staff were well-trained on these procedures. This allowed us to handle the increased demand without compromising on the personalised service we’re known for. We prioritised clear communication with customers regarding delivery timelines, which helped manage expectations.
We found that sticking to a consistent approach for each seasonal event worked best
We found that sticking to a consistent approach for each seasonal event worked best, with minor adjustments in messaging and content to suit each occasion. During the holiday season in 2023, we focused on promoting readily available, classic designs like diamond studs and pendants, which are perfect for gifting. These were paired with time-sensitive offers to create urgency, ensuring customers could find high-quality pieces without the lead time required for custom jewellery.
Our key takeaway is the importance of starting early. This year, we’re initiating our holiday outreach even sooner, focusing on exclusive offers for our existing clients before the peak season kicks into high gear. This not only helps build loyalty but also spreads out the influx of orders, making it easier to manage fulfilment. We also plan to further refine our social media strategy to improve reach among new audiences by leveraging collaborations with influencers who align with our brand’s values.
It’s no secret that the holiday season provides a real opportunity for brands to ramp up sales during the most profitable time of year. Given the competitiveness of the marketplace, we realised we needed to take a customer-first approach and use data-driven insights to reach a diverse audience of new and existing customers to help drive purchases.
Throughout 2023, we used these insights to tailor user experiences to reflect preferences, purchase history and browsing behaviour. A tailored approach is key, as each shopping event brings different customer expectations and shopping behaviours.
We adjusted our marketing strategy and created product bundles for different events. For Black Friday, our messaging focused on discounts. For New Year, our messaging focused on harnessing the demand for resolutions related to healthy eating and fitness. We started our messaging for New Year as soon as Boxing Day, in an attempt to capture early ‘New Year’s Resolution’ shoppers.
To cut through the noise and reach customers directly, we prioritised our SMS channel, which makes up 25% of our sales channel mix, by rewarding them with exclusive discounts. We also set up an email marketing strategy that used data from past purchases to provide personalised recommendations and exclusive offers, tailored to each customer. We spent the summer period growing these subscriber lists to prepare for the peak season.
We will continue to make decisions based on data
Social media and fitness influencer partnerships and challenges also helped us reach new audiences in last year’s peak season, and we saw a lot of success as a result of user-generated content. For instance, launching the Warrior TikTok shop quickly led to our Warrior Crunch protein bar becoming a viral product. We capitalised on this by releasing referral discounts designed to encourage our loyal customer base to refer their friends.
Maintaining a seamless, user-friendly shopping experience was an essential part of keeping customers satisfied during this busy period. We invested in developing enhanced inventory management tracking systems so we could better anticipate demand spikes throughout the season. This helped to ensure popular products, like our Warrior Raw and Crunch bars, were in stock. We also streamlined the checkout process and enhanced mobile-friendly options, and increased customer support capabilities to handle customer queries promptly.
Our social media and personalised email and SMS campaigns were extremely effective, as we saw an increase in social media engagement, conversions and uplift in repeat purchases. We had a particularly strong response to the Black Friday and Cyber Monday early access email campaigns, which offered special discounts to our most dedicated customers. Analysing customer purchase data has helped us refine marketing for personalised email promotions and SMS messages, which has proved crucial for maximising conversion rates.
As we approach peak season 2024, we will continue to make decisions based on data. We’ll also continue to focus heavily on customer feedback to guide improvements in our products and services as we strive to deliver the best service and online shopping experience possible.
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