Get Ready for a Roller Coaster 4th Quarter…Here Comes Santa Claus—Virtually?

What a roller coaster of a retail year! We have never seen anything like this in history. Ecommerce is on the rise, the in-store shopping experience has changed drastically, and the shifting cultural landscape has paved the way for the upcoming holiday season – the likes of which we have never imagined.

By the end of April, online shopping accounted for 27% of all retail sales. From April to May, ecommerce was up $52 billion year over year and even outperformed the 2019 holiday season. Consumers spent over $153 billion online, compared to $142.5 billion last November to December, amounting to a 7% increase over the 2019 holidays for Q1. So, heading into Q4, Creative Marketing Arts must be smarter and better at targeting what we post, share, and promote for every shopping center we manage. No longer can we rely only on our feeds. We have created additional online programs that inject fun store giveaways with hundreds of dollars in shopping sprees, store gift cards and partnerships with our merchants.

We created a particularly exciting program called Bounce Back Bucks in June and have continued the program through October 31. We have generated thousands of dollars in sales from retailers while encouraging and supporting our merchants. Merchants see us coming in to buy gift cards weekly, and then they see the customer return with the cards. After that, it is up to our retailers to upsell. For the most part they have done a fabulous job and have seen the benefits of giving a valued gift card to our shoppers for their purchases. The program is so successful that our agency will continue through December with Santa Bucks.

Additionally, we are providing a virtual Santa’s Village for children to explore that includes visits with and letters from Santa. Of course, the sponsoring shopping center will feature their directory of stores, in-store offers and Santa Bucks link, and each time parents accompany their children through Santa’s Village, they are invited to sign-up to win a gift card.

Online feeds and social media knowledge are the lifeblood of combining brick-and-mortar with digital. It is important to understand Google, Yelp and Facebook have new products online to assist with better ads. These direct response style campaigns are high traffic and high impact for our shopping centers. What I thought would take three to five more years to implement and educate is happening now. The need to go all digital is now. No time to wait. No more print or direct mail.

“Google is a retailer’s best friend to create online tracking exposure. ”

Google is a retailer’s best friend to create online tracking exposure. Merchants should be sure to expand keyword coverage with targeted keywords [“mattress sale thanksgiving”], build out new ad copy variants with holiday language [“$100 off – Thanksgiving Sale”], create ETA countdown customizers that begin five to seven days from a holiday or End of Sale event, and add themed landing page targets to dynamic search ad (DSA) campaigns [“domain/thanksgiving”]. Further merchants should schedule promotion extensions for major product categories [“All Bedding – 40% Off”], add seasonality modifiers on tCPA/tROAS campaigns for big ticket weekends, and analyze Google’s Time of Click report to adjust dayparting in anticipation of the holidays. Finally, retailers seeking to optimize online efficiency need to analyze mobile performance by campaign to adjust device modifications and run a marginal CPA analysis on top segments to gauge if there is room to scale before hitting diminishing returns.

The time is now for our marketing teams to work harder than ever and provide excellent service and ongoing events and programs to drive sales, traffic and ROI.