Zion talked about preparing for Christmas with a data-driven approach. First, he suggested understanding user behaviour around the Christmas period. One behaviour he pointed out was comparison shopping. It gets big during the Christmas season. Zion also advised people to make use of people panicking before deadlines.

Next, Zion talked about lead nurturing. He said it is the key for ecommerce businesses. Lead nurturing belongs to the middle section of the sales funnel. According to Zion, we are generally bad at this part. To overcome this, he recommended the re-marketing strategy.

At his company, they found that re-marketing for search ads works best. It works like the following. A potential customer goes to your site and then goes away. They search for an enquiry, and they find your website again. Zion said to create remarketing lists towards Christmas.

At Alyka, they create at least three types of remarketing lists. First is a list of all non-converters. Second, a ‘similar to’ all converters list. Both of them serve the purpose of nurturing potential customers. You make sure your website appears in front of them multiple times. When it becomes the Christmas shopping season, there will be a chance that they will buy gifts from you.

The last one is a list of people who visited the page of a specific ‘ABC’ product. The objective of the people on this list is to buy this product. Therefore, you can re-target them with ads that advertise the specific ‘ABC’ product. This is an example of dynamic remarketing. Zion showed the cost per acquisition (CPA) for a case study of laptop cases. The CPA was 35$ for the remarketing audience and 105$ for the non-converters audience. The cost per click (CPC) was also lower for the remarketing audience ($0.40!). Zion added that he almost always sees great results for dynamic remarketing. It is also much cheaper to market to your warm audience.

Zion and his team also create lists based on other demographics. He said it helped them identify the target audience and re-allocate their budget. For example, Zion found that parents with children didn’t convert well to selling games.

The next topic was Google Shopping. Zion shared that Google Shopping works best during holiday sales. His team helped a business and did a boxing day promotion through a Google Shopping campaign. It resulted in a cost per sale (CPS) of approx. $27. It was cheaper than the Display and Search campaigns.

The Alyka team utilised all of the mentioned tactics between January to June 2019 for a particular business. Stats showed that their Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) had grown from 301% to 839%! The data is there to show that these tactics work and pay off.

Zion summarised what to do before the Christmas season comes. First, gather as much data regarding your audience through analytics. Next, create your audience lists based on various aspects such as page views, cart usage, demographics, etc. After that, start your dynamic remarketing. Zion recommended adding a 50% budget for your existing audiences. Lastly, prepare your Google Shopping feeds and product catalogue for the holidays.