6 Christmas Campaign Tips for Salesforce

Christmas: a time for family, festivity, food, and flat out, round-the-clock retail sales. From the boom of Black Friday in November right the way through to the last day of the year, shoppers surge to online and retail stores in search of Christmas gifts. 2021 saw a 5% increase in online holiday sales year on year, and 2022 is likely to continue the trend.

Fortunately, the Christmas shopping rush and Salesforce go together like Santa and chimneys. A highly-customisable CRM platform, Salesforce makes every step of the shopping journey a breeze for both customer and retailer – including marketing and advertising.

Whether your festive strategy is mapped out or you’re still in the pre-planning stages, here are 6 tips to help you nail sales and marketing this Christmas.

1. Use customer data

Like all good campaigns, customer data is one of the cornerstones of impactful Christmas marketing. Salesforce houses your marketing, commerce and service records, allowing you to understand your customer’s preferences and make accurate predictions on what will resonate with your audience.

Campaign and channel performance overviews are great ways of identifying what drives customer engagement. roduct reviews and sales information help in determining which product ranges are likely to see uptake over the festive period.

Though it might be tempting to gloss over them, don’t ignore campaigns that underperformed. There will be a reason they didn’t, and having insight into why is only beneficial. Turn all your data into insight and use that to exceed customer expectations and stand out among your competitors.

2. Create a promotional calendar

Once you have collected your data-driven insights and brainstormed a loose strategy and creative direction, build a festive promotional calendar to share internally. Include which promotions will run on which days, and group them according to the demographic and recipients you intend to target.

Don’t ignore the last two weeks of the year. In 2021, shoppers made 23% of their holiday purchases during the final two weeks of the year, up a substantial 11% from 2020.

Salesforce enables you to share your calendar across all departments, including marketing, merchandising and fulfilment, making alignment on the Christmas campaign strategy smooth and simple.

3. Lean into collaboration

Rolling out a successful Christmas campaign requires excellent communication and teamwork. Salesforce features make this as simple as possible by connecting all relevant teams in one place.

By linking your marketing and inventory planning team, you can ensure your marketed products maintain sufficient stock levels throughout the festive period. Additionally, you can create contingency plans in the event of sales either skyrocketing or potentially underachieving. This in turn gives your supply chain the ability to ramp up or down in response to real-time changes.

With its ease of use and built-in instant messenger, Salesforce allows users to collaborate instantly and effectively.

4. Produce personalised marketing

When shoppers share their information with you, they’re putting a lot of trust in your ability to handle it correctly. But they expect you to put it to good use: by providing relevant offers and messaging based on their personal data.

By creating a personalised marketing campaign, you can cut through the Christmas clutter and stand out. Use Salesforce to segment your data based on demographic information, previous ad impressions and buying history. Use this to craft a personal message for your segments, complete with the perfect gift ideas. To really go the extra mile, be dynamic in your approach by looking for overlapping customer touchpoints.

It’s worth noting that shoppers have a preference to which channel(s) they want to be contacted on. Upwards of 40% of shoppers won’t interact with a brand if they are not using the shopper’s preferred method of communication. Gather feedback and data on your customers’ communication preference and avoid alienating your customer base.

5. Keep data organised and protected

Although data protection is nothing new, as many as 48% of people don’t understand where and how their data is being stored. The onus and vital importance of keeping customer data organised is on the business.

Not only does Salesforce protect personal information (including names, contact details, IP addresses and other user identifiers), it also ensures your teams are able to access and understand how to apply that data within your organisation – a necessity if you want to include personalisation in your Christmas campaign!

6. Test your messaging

Before you know it, next Christmas will be coming up and you’ll be running your campaign again in what feels like no time at all.

Leverage the festive season frenzy as a way to learn so you’re even more prepared in the future. Take advantage of Salesforce functionality to A/B test your offers, content and marketing tactics, as well as when, where, how you target consumers.

The results of these controlled tests will help you identify and improve the effectiveness of your marketing material. You can adjust messaging in live time if required or apply learnings for future campaigns.

A bonus tip: Conduct a Salesforce post-campaign analysis

Salesforce offers just as much insight after your campaign has concluded as it does during the Christmas rush itself. Running a post-campaign analysis gives you concrete numbers to measure against your KPIs and expected metrics. Calculate your ad spend and ROI by channel, segment or across the whole campaign.

Make Salesforce work for you

Get the most out of Salesforce for this (and every upcoming) Christmas campaign. As Salesforce consultants, Purus assists with Salesforce training, support or help customising the platform to fit your needs. Get in touch with our team of qualified Salesforce advisors today to find out more! Get in Touch. 

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