Deliver effective, targeted and segmented promotional messages early and often in the time leading up to, and during the holiday season. When it comes to holiday email marketing and paid advertising, I recommend launching initial campaigns roughly three weeks before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Doing this helps your brand gain momentum as it approaches the holidays and can reengage your audiences with your products or services, as well as provide adequate opportunity for remarketing. With inboxes becoming more crowded each holiday season, it’s important to get ahead of the competition by planting teasers and incentives.
Kevin A. Virant – Product Manager
Entertainment Promotions
First and foremost, you should start six months in advance preparing for the Black Friday weekend. Look at your demographics from last year and target them with display advertising on Google Display Network and Facebook with information such as “Be the First to Know about our Black Friday deals.” This should go to a landing page that will start an audience in both Google Analytics and Facebook. Hopefully, you drive the necessary 1000 visitors before the week of Black Friday, if you can, spend enough to do so at a minimum. Then I would engage remarketing campaigns in Google Display Network, Facebook, and RLSA within Google Ads.
Rich Barker – Digital Campaign Specialist
MicroD
Prep, prep, and prep! Before you hit the “Black Fiveday Weekend” you want to know, what your budgets are, what sells best, what sold well last year, what products make the most profit, how your prices stack up against your competitors, what are the buying trends like, what promotions will run, any stock/availability issues, and anything else that can be a factor in performance. Get this all together and map out the “Black Fiveday Weekend”, how you expect this to perform and benchmark as you go. The key part here is to know where your flexibility is, inevitability competitors will use different tactics/promotions/pricing this year, so be prepared to adapt and respond based on performance.
Steven Lambert – Paid Media Director
RocketMill
See more tips from Carusele, Namshi, and CG Life.
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and eCommerce webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
