Lessons From Labor Day: How to Build an Effective ‘Sprint’ Campaign

Labor day has come and gone and with it summer is officially behind us. As we enter into fall and the start of holiday campaign planning, it’s a good time to reflect on the strategies that worked for our clients’ summer sales, and apply those learnings to our upcoming Black Friday and Holiday initiatives.

We’ve long been proponents of using holiday sales to drive conversions, they’re among your most powerful tools to push lower funnel intenders to convert, but how exactly do you put together a campaign to take full advantage of this opportunity? Holidays such as Christmas or Hanukkah require a longer-term commitment that spans a whole season, but holidays like Labor Day and Black Friday are much quicker and require a different strategy altogether. Labor Day in particular offers a great example of how to put short-term sale campaign into effect that lasts only a few days in order to yield great results. Not quite sure what we mean? Read on to find out.

First things first - Make them an offer they can’t refuse

Studies have shown that offering discounts is one of the best ways to push intenders to convert and our campaigns have born this out with data. Some campaigns on the FieldTest platform have seen increases of 2-3x conversions with something as simple as a 10% discount or an offer of free shipping. Tie this in with a holiday-specific landing page on your website and some holiday-specific campaign creative to promote it and you’ve already got a recipe for success.

Whether it's a mattress picked up on memorial day weekend or a television purchased on black friday, everyone has something around the house that they bought on holiday sale. Holidays have long been used as a basis for sales to convince consumers taking the day off to go shop a store and this continues into the digital realm today. Nearly 20% of holiday shopping occurred online in 2019 and, as we’ve discussed in previous blog posts, this is only trending upward. There’s a reason so many brands use the holidays as a way to drive conversions with discounts and sales: it works.

Second - Don't water down your evergreen campaigns

It’s important to think strategically when building out custom creatives with unique campaign goals such as short-run sales promotions. One of the biggest mistakes we saw made over the Labor Day holiday weekend was clients adding holiday ads to their existing campaigns. This can work for some clients, but it has a couple of negative effects. 

First, it makes it difficult to customize your audiences to properly promote your holiday creatives. You may have put together the perfect audience for your evergreen marketing campaign, but are those really the only people you want to target with your holiday ads? Many holidays such as Earth Day or Valentine’s Day have very specific themes that can be capitalized upon to connect with new customers and keep them coming back long after your holiday campaign has ended.

Second, it will water down your campaign spend and detract from your existing ads. This works both ways - making your intenders in your standard sales funnel see your evergreen ads less often as well as cutting into the deliverability of your holiday marketing. Ultimately, it is much better to break out your holiday advertising into its own separate campaign within the FieldTest Platform. This way you have complete control over your targeting and your budget level for your holiday marketing and your standard drip marketing can continue untouched.

Third - Think strategically with your campaigns and budgets

Labor Day is a great example of a holiday that can be used to boost sales over the course of a long weekend but doesn’t dominate an entire season like Christmas or Hanukkah. A campaign intended to run over this period of time won’t have as much of a “runway” o gain momentum as a longer-term campaign, and that’s ok! If your standard marketing campaign is a marathon run - paced out and with a long-term strategy - your shorter term holiday marketing is then a sprint where you invest a lot of energy up front and give it everything you have for the short time available to you. What does this look like when building out your campaigns? It’s all about the schedule and budget.

For example: If your budget for a standard month is $1000, consider upping that during holiday months and increasing the daily spend on your holiday campaign to 1.5-3x typical spends during the duration of your sale.

This will boost your ad delivery for a short time, increasing sale revenue through the life of your holiday sale. It will also help you deal with increased CPMs during holiday season (see our blog post here for more information about how costs fluctuate during the holidays).

As soon as your campaign is finished, go right back to the typical campaign spend having taken full advantage of the limited window for your holiday sale.

Another important move when promoting your holiday sales is to allocate more of your budget to your lower funnel than you typically would. In a standard evergeen campaign your top of funnel leads are important to cultivate as they lead organically down-funnel towards a standard conversion. This is not necessarily the case with holiday promotions. There is an urgency to short-run sale campaigns that is not present in evergreen campaigns, and this means you will want to prioritize calls to action and conversion over informative top of funnel ads. Some awareness and consideration is ok in these campaigns, but ultimately you’ll get the best bang for buck by promoting your holiday sales sprints with action creatives and targeting.

TL;DR? Here’s the Gist

As we begin planning our Black Friday sales, here are the key takeaways from our successful labor Day clients: 

• Build new campaigns for each holiday sale initiative

• Budget higher than your standard spend to boost performance and overcome CPM increases

• Prioritize lower funnel action ads during holiday sales

• Create ads that are unique and drive intenders to convert

Final Thoughts

There are many ways to drive campaign success in Q4 but few are as proven as harnessing seasonal promotions and holiday sales for your brand promotions. We cannot recommend enough that every one of our clients utilize the holidays in one way or another to drive traffic to their sites and scale their Q4 conversions. FieldTest offers all the tools needed to build not only an evergreen marketing campaign that performs well in the long term, but also the ability to experiment with new ideas in order to create discrete seasonal campaigns that boost your sales along the way.

To get started, reach out to your account manager and let them know you have a sale event planned. We can work with you to optimize your campaigns behind the scenes and adjust frequency and recency to ensure success. If you don’t have an account, get in touch below to find out how we can help you build your perfect holiday ad campaigns!