As the 2019 retail season is winding down there are some lessons to be learned from this shopping season that your brand can implement into your first quarter marketing plans.
Did you know: Close to 170 million people shopped from Thanksgiving through CyberMonday? Estimates point to this year's Black Friday sales hitting all-time highs with more than $7 billion in sales. With numbers like this, it only makes sense that those numbers will rise before years' end.
How Retail Sales Trends Can Benefit Your Brand
Whether you're in the pet industry, if your brand is pet-friendly or if your brand wants to expand into a new market and grow a community of pet-loving customers, this is information you will want to be aware of as you move into 2020.
SoftwareAdvice.com found:
Email marketing was a close second for reaching clients. Email marketing delivered the highest ROI. The Data and Marketing Association estimated that for "every $1 spent on email marketing business can expect an ROI of $32."
Social media was the most-used channel for shoppers looking for holiday promotions.
Discounts, free shipping and coupons were top incentives for increasing holiday sales.
As you're preparing to meet 2020 and increase year-over-year sales what methods did your business employ to reach new and current customers?
1. What are you doing to grow your email list?
2. Did you earmark some of your marketing budget for ads on social media platforms? If so, what was your return on investment? What was the cost per click? Did you bring in new customers?
In 2018, marketers earmarked close to 25% of their annual marketing budget on year-end promotions. Of that, more than $25 billion was spent on holiday marketing during Black Friday to Cyber Monday. What portion of your marketing budget did you allocate for that busy shopping time?
Don't wait until the last few weeks of 2020 to work on your business promotions and allocation of your marketing budget.
Here are some promotion and marketing ideas to implement in the first quarter of 2020:
1. Segment your email list. Not everyone on your list needs to receive everyone of your enewsletters. Targeting and segmenting will help assure higher open rates.
2. Look at social media, email marketing and ads as working hand-in-hand and supporting one another in your marketing efforts.
3. Don't offer discounts for the sake of offering discounts. Tie it in with a focused marketing campaign. Make certain you can track where the customers are finding the discount codes (a separate landing page or different code for each social platform, for example). You want to spend your marketing dollars on the platforms on which you're seeing results.
4. Use hashtags for your specific campaigns. Jump on a trend or a holiday. Look for user-generated content (that is your highest form of social proof)
5. As you're putting your marketing and marketing strategy into place for the new year, gather your metrics from the past year so you're making smart spending decisions going forward.
PrideBites connects brands to dog owners in a way that forges an amazing emotional connection and converts customers to loyal followers. PrideBites’ turnkey solution helps you differentiate yourself from your competition in a way that your followers won’t stop talking about.
For information on branded and promotional products for your business, contact PrideBites today and corner your market on the share of consumer dollars spent on pets by pet parents.
Join our PridePups Facebook Community.
Pridebites, Stories Of A Pet-Loving Brand.