Holiday Marketing: It’s Not Too Late to Ensure the Optimal Channel Mix

The holiday season is rapidly approaching, and with increasingly volatile performance across paid media channels like Facebook/Instagram, it’s never been more important to have a strong, diversified channel mix — all so you can ensure you have ample opportunities to mitigate risk and optimize your holiday marketing in the weeks to come.

By working with hundreds of leading DTC e-commerce companies, we have a unique vantage point at Rockerbox. We want to share some of the biggest trends and make a few recommendations as you prepare for the holidays. 

The good news? It’s not too late to implement any of these tactics!

1. Start Now!

It’s critical for companies to pull forward demand and have consumers place their holiday orders earlier. This is all driven by the trends across supply chain issues causing lower inventory and expected shipping delays to consumers.

To drive this new consumer behavior, brands will be launching their holiday heavy-ups sooner, earlier in October and November. This will be reflected across:

• Increasing overall media spend (budgets and bids)
• Launching top-of-funnel channels
• Deploying discounting earlier
  
  
  2. Expand Direct Mail Beyond Retargeting

Fortunately, there’s never been a better time to deploy direct mail. With rising costs and decreasing efficiencies across Facebook/Instagram and other social platforms, direct mail has become increasingly comparable in performance.

Here are the best direct mail tactics you can expand into, just in time for the holidays:

• Postcards: Great for prospecting with audience targeting and lookalikes
• Catalogs: Perfect for high-value prospects and reactivation against lapsed users. The catalog format is also best for content-focused creative and plays a top-of-funnel awareness role.

We have integrations with several of the top direct mail partners, including PebblePost, Postie and Belardi Wong, to make the setup of this channel turnkey.

3. Test Into More Offline Channels

OTT and Linear TV continue to be the fastest-growing channels for DTC brands, and for good reason—they work! (With the right creative and measurement, of course!)

The combination of high impact and ability to scale is the reason many brands will focus on testing these channels over the secondary social networks or programmatic display.

Here’s a testing plan that continues to deliver success for our clients:

• Start by testing one of the two (OTT or Linear TV), depending on your target demographic
• Then prove out the performance of that channel and optimize
• Make sure you scale that first channel before testing the other

If you’re looking to measure the real ROI and impact of your TV and OTT ads, watch this webinar we co-hosted with Tatari, one of our key integration partners for TV data and analytics.

Give Yourself the Gift of Marketing Measurement That Helps You Scale

We see firsthand how all of these tactics are much easier to test and scale with the right measurement solution.

And we’re biased, of course, but for the hundreds of leading e-commerce companies we work with, Rockerbox is that solution.

We’d love to talk with you more about how Rockerbox can help optimize your existing channel mix while re-routing those savings to diversifying your overall marketing efforts.

Reach out to schedule a demo with one of our attribution experts today.