Ahhh Christmas…
T’is the season to be jolly for many ecom brands right?
One of the best times of the year to be in the ecom space. As you’re probably well aware, Christmas brings a frenzy to online shopping.
There are a few categories that do extremely well such as – Toys, Clothing, Electronics, Food etc. But no matter what you sell during this time… you can always ride the wave of a Christmas sale to give your business an end of year sales spike.
In this case study, we wanted to tell you a little story of a client we worked with in the electronic appliance space and how we managed to ride the wave of the Christmas period.
Oh… and we had a little help from a Mega Sale on a third party site.
Running sales promotions is a fantastic way to bring a surge of traffic and sales to your store. This is especially true when you combine this with Christmas & a large third party eCommerce platform. It’s possible to get very creative in terms of garnering attention from your target audience.
We leveraged a very large third party ecom site (Lazada), where they offer frequent sales on their platform. Apart from running our own ads from the likes of Facebook & Google’s network (Youtube & Google Display Network), we also got help with Lazada’s organic internal traffic.
Let’s dive right in and share how we managed to produce our results.
Create a Goal To Target & Deliver Results
It all starts with a goal in mind. You need to find out what you want to achieve from your marketing campaign. It’s always important to set clear goals and develop a plan to achieve results.
So what was the goal for this client?
To drive more sales for the client using Lazada as the platform (third party platform that we used). We’d leverage their sales promotions on the site and sent traffic to offers.
An ad would usually run for about 3 weeks. The duration is divided into three parts which were as follows:
- Pre Teasing Period – This is usually a couple of weeks before the mega day sale. What this does is allow potential buyers to get a heads up about the forthcoming Christmas sale.
- The Teasing Period – This particular period is usually a week before the Christmas sale where we push potential leads to take action. These actions are to add items they wish to buy into their shopping cart.
- The Mega Day Sale – Lastly is the actual Christmas sale. This is encouraging them to shop and purchase.
Define Our Marketing Strategy
The next thing to put in place is the marketing strategy. How were we going to get traffic to the offers?
We use various traffic sources to achieve this by utilizing Google’s network as well as Facebook. We decided to use the following three traffic sources –
- Google Display Network
- Youtube ads
- Facebook ads
Our aim was to drive plenty of targeted awareness to cold audiences about the Christmas sale. To make that happen, we ran Facebook collaborative ads in combination with Google’s Display Network and Youtube ads to create awareness.
In order to get the attention of the right target audience we made sure that we only use keywords & interests related to our clients target audiences. Our clients audience are those that are interested in electronics, wide screen Tv’s etc.
Next up…
Strategy Overview
The strategy below has been used for other clients that we’ve worked with in the past to acquire brand awareness, along with funneling and segmenting the traffic down the sales funnel to generate as many sales as possible.
As mentioned previously, we combined the funnel with “teasing” stages designed to encourage excitement and suspense with our Christmas promotion. We did this to keep the sale “top of mind” with the segmented audiences and increase the conversion rate on sales.
Here’s how the strategy was broken down….
We’ve spoken about this strategy in the past. The first thing we needed to plan out would be budget optimization: Bottom – up approach. The aim was to spend the media budget on their best customer and going up the funnel every time we reach the plateau for the KPI.
The goal was to fill out the funnel with cold interested audiences using the likes of Facebook and Google’s traffic network. From the image above, you can clearly see how we segmented the funnel. We drove all the brand awareness traffic from the likes of Google’s Youtube platform and their display network as well as Facebook into the top of the funnel. We’d then segment the traffic based on actions taken.
Each segment was treated differently in terms of how we remarketed to that audience (different ad copy, creatives etc). This was all based on the type of action they took. ie. product views, add to cart, purchases etc
What Results Did We Acquire?
We were able to ride the wave of the Christmas rush which made life easier in terms of conversion. This is why running campaigns around holidays like Black Friday, Fathers day, Halloween, Christmas etc are great.
Even though ad costs are usually up at these times of year, we were smart in how we drove inexpensive cold traffic into the funnel and how we re-targeted warm traffic. We used Google’s display network & Youtube for the pre-teasing and teasing segments of the campaign and then for the mega day sale we used Facebook ads. Customer acquisition is easier to acquire during these frenzy times.
Below are some of the results that were acquired for this Christmas campaign. Please bare in mind that the data below is taken from all traffic sources used for the campaign. The date of this campaign was from December 1st to 31st 2019.
- $1,060,222 revenue generated from this sales promotion
- 6,357 add to carts
- 1,317 items sold
- $11,907 on ad spend for the duration of the Christmas period campaign
Anything That We Could Do Better Next Time?
It’s always great to get these types of results, but it’s also just as important to take a step back and reflect on what has been achieved from any sort of result that’s acquired. No matter whether it’s big or small, good or bad… it’s always good to digest the outcome.
From the results acquired on this campaign, what are some of the things we could do better next time around?
They are as follows –
- Add more adset’s to the campaign to drive even more awareness to the sale
- Test more ad sizes to really drive home more placement awareness about the Christmas sale
- Have a stronger push on reminders about the sale, which can potentially drive more sales
- Do more A/B testing on ads along with A/B/C adset testing
These are a handful of things that we’d contemplate again if we were to address a similar campaign. What’s important to note is to make sure you have your re-targeting campaigns in place so that you can market to the action takers within your sales conversion funnel. It’s important to focus on your most valued customer base as they give you the highest return.
What’s The Reason For This Campaigns Success?
Asking a question like this helps you to learn from the successes you’ve acquired. We’ve sat down and had a think about this and here is the conclusion we came to…
- At the time of running this campaign it was during a shopping frenzy which was of course Christmas. If you couple that with the nature of products our client sells (electronic goods), you can begin to see how this campaign “clicked” so to speak.
- For electronic products people are more interested in purchasing during the sales period because it’s cheaper. This is especially true for bargain shoppers.
- The combination of eye catching assets along with attractive products really helped to generate sales.
- As the Christmas season approaches, people are awarded Christmas bonuses in their pay check. So naturally this helps to encourage purchases as people have more spending power at this time.
- The consistent reminding of when the sale takes place was also paramount to its success
- We’ve talked about this in a previous case study. One of the key elements to the success of this Christmas promotion was leveraging off of Lazada. The amount of traffic this platform receives contributed greatly to the campaigns success. Lazada is the number 1 ecom platform for the geolocation we served.
Conclusion
This concludes the case study
Running Christmas promotions can be very effective for the reasons outlined above. We also ran some january promotions which served the client well in terms of revenue generation.
Hope you enjoyed the case study. Please reach out with any questions you have.
