Holiday Campaign Guide: How to Make this Valentine’s Day Your Most Profitable Yet
February is here and with it the year’s first big sale holiday, Valentine’s Day. As the first major gift-giving holiday of the year, all across the internet brands will be cutting prices on their giftable items to accommodate. If you’ve been following our blog for a while you probably already know about our recommendation to take advantage of holiday sales when planning your marketing, but this week we wanted to dig down into the details of how to set up your holiday campaigns and give you the top to bottom advice that will make them perform their absolute best. The opportunity for huge conversion numbers is there, all you have to do is take advantage of it. Let’s talk about just how to go about that.
Step 1: Set up your landing page
The first step in any successful sale campaign is to make sure you have built a sale landing page that is well-designed, easy to navigate and most of all, shoppable. Many brands will incorporate seasonal sale imagery directly into their home pages, creating a sense of importance and urgency as customers become reminded that your sale is on and ending soon. Others will build out a separate landing page to link to exclusively with their FieldTest ads. This is a good strategy for those who want to run multiple marketing campaigns and measure their effectiveness against each other, A/B testing sales messaging and imagery on top of the creative testing capabilities of the FieldTest platform.
Whichever you choose, it is important that your page be well-designed, with Valentine’s day sale imagery front and center and your sales items prominently displayed for shopping. This will keep your customers engaged and on track, never forgetting exactly why they are browsing your page.
Step 2: Build custom sale creatives
Once you’ve built your landing page you’re ready to log on to the FieldTest platform and begin to promote it to your customers. This is as easy as logging in to your account, starting a new campaign and pasting your landing page url into the FieldTest ad builder. This will automatically create an ad using your branded imagery and language, allowing you to move on to the next step if you so please. Others may want to dig in a bit further, unlocking even better performance through highly customized ads and even custom designed banners. The FieldTest ad builder gives you control over your ads’ image and font allowing you to experiment with the format and create ads that fit your copy perfectly. Our default font is PT Sans, but try something a little less formal looking and a little more playful such as Montserrat. If that’s not your speed, try something like Playfair Display which gives a sense of chic and romance. These coupled with appropriate branded ad creative will help create a sense of brand continuity that helps push customers to convert.
Montserrat has a playful look perfect for holiday sales marketing
Playfair’s unique and chic look is a great way to entice your customers
If you want to go a step further, the platform allows you to upload custom-designed banner ads in all major formats. This means you can task your design team with putting together a suite of ad units promoting your sale and incorporating them into your FieldTest campaign is as easy as dragging and dropping them into our ad uploader. From there they act just as any ad built in the FieldTest Ad Builder, with all the same performance and tracking capabilities. Once you’re happy with the suite of ads you have created you’re ready to move along to the next step and get that much closer to publishing your holiday ad campaign.
Step 3: Select your audience
Most brands are unique in one way or another, and most people who manage those companies will understand that their brand is designed to appeal to certain demographics and interest groups. This becomes very clear when it comes time for the next step, choosing your ad campaigns’ targeted audience segments. Many brands who sign up to the FieldTest platform will build ads and target them only to audiences directly related to their brand, but that shouldn’t be where the audience targeting process ends. You may have noticed a theme to our campaign and platform guides, a recommendation to always be experimenting and trying new things. Audience selection is no exception to this recommendation, especially when promoting a holiday sale.
Our Ad Builder’s audience selector offers hundreds of thousands of high performing segments sure to be perfect for your campaign
We also offer custom audience targeting based on your past campaign data so your performance is always improving
Say you operate a running shoe company who exclusively sells online. You may be tempted to target exclusively to shoe buying intenders, and why wouldn’t you be? You’re here to sell shoes, after all! This is far from the only audience who could potentially be interested in purchasing shoes, however, and in fact you are limiting yourself by only targeting the most on-the-nose audience segments. This is particularly true in the upper-funnel where your aim is to reach new customers and foster new interest in your brand. In the case of your shoe brand try targeting sports intenders, yoga intenders, athletics and diet intenders. These audience groups that are tangential to your core customer base are just as important as the core and offer a great way to expand your customer base into new territory, giving you steady traffic to your site and a well-honed, Lookalike audience. Given that this is a holiday campaign, try out some holiday gift-giver segments as well! The FieldTest platform offers you access to hundreds of thousands of highly qualified audience segments from thousands of interest groups, DMAs, and demographic groups, if you think creatively you’re sure to come across groups who will be interested in your products.
Step 4: Budget appropriately and Follow up!
You’ve built your Sale page, designed your ads and selected custom audiences based on your own creative strategy, it’s finally time to set your budget and publish your ads! This poses a challenge, what exactly is the appropriate budget for a short-run sale campaign like this? This is a question we cannot give a concrete answer to, as it relies heavily on your own brand’s revenue and marketing budget. That said, many brands will up their usual budget for a shorter campaign and fund at 1.5-2x the usual amount for the shorter period of time. This will boost your ad deliverability and ensure that as many people see your sales ads as possible. Doing this with a shorter campaign ensures that this doesn’t create runaway budgets and is a great way to experiment with new audiences, hitting them with all you’ve got for a short period of time and gauging the performance against your usual audiences. You may also want to create a campaign that exclusively targets your previous customers and give it a slightly increased budget over your standard buys. By hitting your previous customers hard with sales messaging you can win back a ton of business.
This leads us to the final point, always follow up with your customers after they have purchased. One-time purchases are good, but building a relationship with your customers that keeps them coming back for more is great. The FieldTest platform allows you to build audiences composed only of the people who have browsed and purchased from your site, it is always important to follow up with them and make sure they don’t forget about your brand. This is especially true with holiday campaigns, just because someone didn’t make a purchase for Valentine’s Day doesn’t mean they won’t in the future. Refresh your drip retargeting campaigns following your holiday sale and watch as you foster renewed interest in your brand for months to come.
Don’t let the holiday go to waste!
Every brand is looking for effective ways to increase their sales and scale their business and few things offer a more effective tool to accomplish this than holiday sales. By building out custom shopping pages, messaging effectively, targeting the right audience and budgeting your campaigns appropriately, you can achieve surprising results for your brand. Some studies show that holiday sales drive between 3-10x the number of sales seen in evergreen campaigns. That’s an opportunity your brand likely cannot afford to pass up!