How Marketers Can Ensure their Brands get a Bigger Piece of the Holiday Pie

‘Tis the season for holiday shopping! With Black Friday right around the corner, marketers are already setting their strategies for successful holiday promotions. A good economy indicates that the holiday season will deliver significant rewards to smart marketers. According to an October survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers, consumers will spend $807 billion during the holiday season. That’s an increase of 4.5% over last year. It’s not even just gifts; $122 billion will be spent on food and beverage.

Read More: Marketers: Here’s How to Evaluate Your Campaigns Heading into the Holiday Season

So, how will marketers ensure that their brands capture a significant piece of the holiday pie? Promotions and incentives will play a large role in driving spending this year. Smart marketers will examine trends from last year to see where they can be most successful and where opportunities exist to increase their impact.

At RevTrax, we recently released a report on holiday promotions across digital channels. We studied data from almost 2,300 promotional campaigns from 180 brands that were delivered in October, November and December of 2016 and 2017. Here are some of the most interesting results for marketers:

• Search performed the best of all channels at the start of the holiday season, while Social posted a 40% redemption rate in December, far outpacing other channels in the last minute run-up to Christmas.
• Social promotions perform 12% better during the holiday season than during the rest of the year. Email also does much better, seeing a 10% jump in promotion redemption during this peak spending season.
• Social promotions are still an emerging opportunity for marketers, who thus far have underutilized the channel. While social promotions perform well in December, they under perform in November. In a month where we see frenzied shopping days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, social promotions fall 6% below the benchmark.

Read More: How to Attract Online Shoppers During The Holidays

As Black Friday and Cyber Monday quickly approach, marketers should be fine-tuning and polishing up their search, social and email promotions to ensure that the right offer is readily available to consumers on the channel of their choice.