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The holiday shopping season is coming: How are growth marketers preparing?

Miranda Halpern 2 years

Because we’re just 22 days from the official start of the holiday shopping season, we reached out to several growth marketers we’ve gotten to know through our TechCrunch Experts project to find out how this year’s supply chain issues are effecting their planned campaigns.

We spoke with:

The global supply chain disruptions we’ve seen so far this year will take time to repair. Even as vaccinated employees get back to work, a kaleidoscope of bottlenecks remain: truck driver shortages, congestion at shipping ports and the scarcity of empty shipping containers and the vessels that can carry them.

In quarterly earnings calls, “there were adjustments made to projections based on the fact that there’s no telling what challenges we might face going into Q4, as far as supply chain,” said Lopez. To maximize order flow and meet customer expectations, Dick said her company moved up its campaign start dates by 2-3 weeks and plans to lean more heavily on SMS and email campaigns than in the past.

“As I look at what’s happening with these companies from a marketing perspective it’s all good, solid fundamentals,” Toy advised. “A lot of this frankly is what you should be doing year-round.” Considering the marketing basics, and learning how to pivot at a moment’s notice, these marketers are ready for the holiday shopping season. Are you?

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Julio Lopez, director of client strategy, retail practice lead, Movable Ink

Not only is the pandemic a big consideration and supply chain challenge, but we’re also faced with some natural disasters. There’s been flooding; there’s been fires. There are many things that are impacting retailers’ ability to control their supply chain. We’re hearing everything from products not being manufactured to things being stuck at ports of entry, because there isn’t enough staff, or there aren’t enough shipping containers to get things over here from China.

This is something that is very much top of mind for a lot of retailers and listening to some earning calls in the last quarter, there were adjustments made to projections based on the fact that there’s no telling what challenges we might face going into Q4, as far as supply chain.

I think it’s very important for retailers to be aware that their marketing plans and the SKUs or lines that they were looking to feature at a particular point in time in Q4, may or may not be available. They’re going to have to be ready to pivot their marketing calendars to account for inventory that may or may not be in stock. So that’s another place where data and the value of data become even more important.

I think retailers need to be prepared to tailor or filter their messages based on inventory availability because we’ll see a significant lack of available SKUs, and if we want to deliver that best-in-class customer experience we need to filter on at least the key things that that can break that experience and more of them being, whether or not you can get the product that’s actually valuable to you.

Chris Toy, CEO and co-founder, MarketerHire

I know that there’s a lot of discussion and questions around this. In some cases, brands already know that they are going to be low on stock or lower on stock than they would like to be for the holidays. There’s a lot of proactive work, “if we’re lower on stock or potentially out of stock during peak holiday season, how do we continue? What is our marketing strategy? How do we continue to generate revenue, or, what do we invest in, so that we can generate that revenue when we do have stock again?” It is a lot of looking at more content, more lifecycle marketing, email and database marketing. How can we build up our brand, build up interest, capture that first-party data in our own database or CRM?

Then, how do we sell to our customers on our own time, potentially not through the holiday? In other cases, they are depending again on the brands. They are thinking about how to leverage a sold-out strategy. You get something like Supreme or other brands who do very well generating buzz and interest from being sold out. In many cases, you’re transferring that demand to what you do have in stock. So try to figure out how to build out, make adjustments in the website or adjustments to the marketing funnel to say, “OK we’re going to bring people in and our best stuff is going to be sold out, but how can we redirect them to other products, how can we create a story and demand for those other products that maybe we wouldn’t have to previously?”

A lot of this frankly is what you should be doing year-round. As I look at what’s happening with these companies from a marketing perspective it’s all good, solid fundamentals. There’s nothing really unique to panic about here; this is just how it works. If you have experienced marketers working on your company, on your brand, these are not new issues. They may be a little more dramatic because of COVID and just a new cycle, but these are things that every experienced marketer has a bag of tricks for and has experienced numerous times.

I think for us because of the level of talent that we have, and the companies coming to us, it’s less of a, “what do we do?” it’s more, “well here’s the one who knows exactly what to do and off you go.” I understand that there’s a lot of drama to it because it’s a very, very extreme supply chain issue, but the playbook to respond to limited supplies is the same as it was five years ago.

Kristin Dick, head of operations and growth marketer, Tuff

I think the pandemic and corresponding supply chain-related issues are nudging people to start their holiday shopping sooner. Because these trends are super widespread, we decided to start increasing spend for the holidays 2-3 weeks earlier than originally planned. We’ve seen that October has been an incredible month for several of our e-commerce partners, and we’re actively testing ways to make sure we carry these revenue increases through Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

We’re also getting more involved in email and SMS campaigns. Historically, Tuff has focused on email and SMS automation as a tool to increase conversion rates post lead capture, but this holiday season, we’ve started helping our partners run more sales/promo-focused email and text message campaigns. Once you’ve acquired a new lead, it can take weeks or even months for them to purchase. How are you staying top of mind for them in their inboxes? And how does that uplift your paid social, YouTube and PPC messaging?

Dipti Parmar, founder, Dipti Parmar Consulting

Many of my clients fear their “hero products” might be sold out earlier. I’ve advised them to start producing/stocking up earlier. We can try to offset the increase in warehousing costs by encouraging people to order early — running pre-order specific campaigns (FOMO, time-limited, etc.). That said, it’s next to impossible to get last-minute shoppers (I am one myself) to change their habits and buy early, so we’re planning to promote/upsell products that are complementary to the hero products.