We’ve come to know “the holiday season” as the big celebrations that take place at the end of each year. But from President’s Day to Halloween, it seems the excitement never stops.

That’s why retailers must remain on their toes year-round.

The surge in end-of-year shopping certainly warrants additional planning. But you can incorporate new techniques and processes into smaller holidays or international celebrations throughout the year to improve your campaigns and ultimately boost revenue.

Today, effective holiday planning is characterized by four key themes:

1. Personalized omnichannel experiences
2. Data-powered customer journeys
3. Reliability, consistency, and uptime
4. AI-forward experiences

B2C companies like Whirlpool, CHRIST Juweliere, DOUGLAS, Arezzo, and the San Jose Sharks are experts at keeping consumers engaged with these best practices in mind, especially during peak seasons. Here’s how you can increase your holiday readiness, whether for Cyber Week, Memorial Day, or even World Chocolate Day.

Personalize experiences across channels

What sets your holiday campaign apart from your competitors? Personalization boosts every stage of the lifecycle, whether you’re sending existing customers on omnichannel journeys or adjusting featured products based on new customers’ browsing behavior.

Visualize and optimize every step in the purchasing journey, specifically on peak volume days to see exactly what your customers see. This may include aligning sub-brands under one cohesive strategy, assessing your cart abandonment remarketing, or incorporating new feeds of similar products at check out.

Arezzo, Latin America’s largest women’s footwear brand, did all this and more to prepare for Black Friday 2024. In just over a month, Arezzo worked with SAP Emarsys to implement its initial holiday engagement strategy across three brands. Using out-of-the-box tactics such as Fast Abandoned Cart, Top Category Cross-Sell, and Convert Hot Leads, Arezzo greatly increased customer engagement by creating highly personalized communications according to the lifecycle stage. The company also used customers’ contact data, browsing behavior, and purchase patterns to hyper-personalize email, SMS, and web messages with relevant messaging no matter their channel.

As a result, Arezzo increased its Black Friday order volume by 44% and overall revenue by 28% YOY.

Use real-time data to power customer journeys

Personalization doesn’t happen without data. Yet, for many companies, data lives in different places, wasting time accessing it and manually feeding it into campaigns. A customer data platform (CDP) brings all these sources together in one place to surface insights across the data in real time. In high-pressure scenarios like peak holidays, this can make or break your campaigns.

For the San Jose Sharks, data lives in multiple places depending on what facet of their business it’s for like ticketing, parking, food, or e-commerce. SAP Datasphere integrates and correlates this data, allowing SAP CDP to provide the Sharks with a 360-degree view of each customer. This makes a big difference during the winter holidays, which is also hockey season.

Between games and entertainment events, there are sometimes more than 100 different holiday offers going on at once.

With SAP Emarsys, the Sharks now use the busy season as an opportunity to overlap offerings and cross-sell while managing a high level of communications.

As a result, holiday campaigns drove 30% more revenue in one year.

Retailers have a unique charge to make commerce processes smoother with data. For companies like Whirlpool, that data is housed in an ERP and integrated with its commerce platform to ensure the most up-to-date product catalog. The commerce platform acts as the foundation to oversee all digital operations, from managing complex catalogs to handling high site traffic volume and ensuring all product information and content is consistent across owned and partner sites. After all, what good is a beautiful e-commerce site if customers are met with out-of-stock messages and irrelevant emails?

Ensure uptime during peak seasons

The fanciest, most engaging campaigns are worthless if your site is down or customer service is jammed due to high traffic.

Prior to any holiday you want to prioritize, work with your technology stakeholders and partners like SAP to ensure peak performance. Forecast your projected traffic, conduct stress tests, plan for staffing resources, and practice drills so you’re not scrambling during the big day(s), resulting in disgruntled customers who may abandon their carts.

Take it from CHRIST Juweliere, Germany’s leading jeweler, who maintained 99.9% availability even with a 150% increase in traffic. In addition to designing personalized, targeted campaigns for Cyber Week, CHRIST ensured 100% reliability for its sites and content feeds so customers received a smooth order and fulfillment process and had support when they needed it.

Look for ways to increase engagement with AI

AI might seem like something to leave for off-peak times. But it can make or break the effectiveness of your campaigns by automating much of your team’s work and setting you apart from competitors. With the right AI tools alongside your data and omnichannel marketing platform, you can easily analyze information like revenue streams or customer engagement to identify patterns and curate experiences even further.

DOUGLAS Group, Europe’s number one omnichannel destination for premium beauty, uses AI to bridge the gap between physical and online shopping—a notoriously difficult feat for companies with products that require try-ons. DOUGLAS’ work began well before the holiday season, leaning into AI-driven customer engagement to provide value-add experiences and services.

Start now on your holiday readiness

November and December holidays are still eight or nine months away. But strategy takes time and practice. What upcoming holiday could you test out a new idea on? If summer is a peak selling time for your company, have you ensured reliability, consistency, and uptime before the season starts?

SAP CX powers the most dynamic, data-driven, omnichannel holiday campaigns for the world’s top retailers. Now it’s your turn to elevate your campaigns with customer data, AI, and personalized marketing experiences your customers won’t forget.

Dig into retailers' holiday success stories