The challenge: If you’re a marketer in retail, it’s crunch time. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner, and consumers are already shopping for their holiday gifts. You’ve probably been planning your campaign strategy for this season all year, and now it’s time to execute.
But there’s one problem: without self-serve data access, you’re going to get bottlenecked waiting on data teams to build audiences, analyze results, and create new campaigns across email and advertising tools.
Can your team move fast enough to take advantage of the biggest sales season of the year?
The solution: Marketers use Hightouch to self-serve data access year round, and avoid bottlenecks during the critical holiday season. Marketers can create audiences, analyze trends, and execute campaigns without a single ticket to the data team. Self-serve data access isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about autonomy, giving you the speed and control you need to maximize your impact when it counts the most.
Our own data shows the power of self-serve access. Last year, marketers using Hightouch created 40% more audiences in November than in the months before and after. Their secret? Immediate access to the data they need, which allowed them to build and execute personalized, timely campaigns without missing a beat.
Don’t take our word for it, though! Let's take a look at some of this season's most innovative campaigns.
Holiday campaigns powered by self-serve data
The best holiday campaigns are data driven. Here are a few examples of Hightouch marketers who are making the most of their holiday sales season.
Rituals built a cross-channel journey for its popular Advent calendar
Rituals is a global luxury brand with more than 1,000 stores that is especially well known for its Advent calendars. In the past, Rituals’ marketers struggled with data access. They had to ask data teams for customer lists for paid media and email, and were working in silos for campaigns within each of their channel tools.
This year, though, Rituals implemented Hightouch’s Composable CDP on Google BigQuery. The data analytics team did foundational work to make sure marketers can access all of their data in BigQuery via Hightouch, and now, marketers can self-serve audience and journey building.
For the first time, Rituals’ marketing team ran their entire Advent campaign without manual requests to the data team. Marketers are using journeys to organize and execute engagement across channels rather than reaching customers with disjointed messages in each channel.
Rituals customizes journeys across channels, and takes different actions based on customer engagement with the Advent calendar campaign.
Results:
- The time it takes to create audiences decreased from 2 weeks to just hours
- Marketers can build their own audiences and journeys
- Data engineers and analysts have reclaimed 30% of their time every month, to focus on more strategic long-term projects
DTC retailer improved match rates to add $183k in incremental holiday sales
An major direct-to-consumer retailer spends a significant amount of their advertising budget during the holiday season to maximize sales– so efficiency during this period is more important than ever. A key strategy is differentiating paid campaigns for net-new customers, who typically can be acquired at a 7:1 ROAS ratio, vs. repeat customers, who can be driven to make purchases at a 20:1 ROAS ratio.
Marketers were having a lot of trouble actually acting on this strategy, however. When they manually uploaded customer lists to Google Ads, only 38% of their customers were actually getting matched– meaning that the rest of their customers couldn’t be retargetted in the more efficient personalized campaign.
This year, marketers have found a better way. They’ve done away with manual processes, and are using Hightouch to automatically update Google Ads and their other tools with customer lists. And by using Match Booster, which enriches data with third-party identifiers, they’ve increased match rates on Google–which means that they can reach more of their existing customers the right way.
This DTC retailer automatically syncs customer lists to Google Ads, and increases match rates with Match Booster.
Results:
- Increased match rates on Google Ads for existing customers from 38% to 75%
- Forcasted holiday campaign incremental revenue from this improvement: $183k
E-commerce marketplace boosted conversions 22% by replacing segmented campaigns with AI Decisioning
Retailers often have a wealth of both creative assets and different products to promote. Manually building campaigns and journeys for all of them can be overwhelming. One e-commerce marketplace wanted to move beyond creating a handful of campaigns and instead use AI to personalize journeys at scale.
By implementing Hightouch’s AI Decisioning, this brand transformed its approach, scaling from 10 segmented campaigns to truly individual journeys for each user—without manually creating any campaigns. Marketers set up campaign goals and content variants, and AI continuously learns and optimizes experiences to each customer based on their preferences, behaviors, and engagement history.
With Hightouch’s AI-driven capabilities, this brand has scaled personalization efforts exponentially, driving better results and empowering their team to focus on high-impact creative strategies. This is the future of self-serve marketing: setting up campaigns that automatically personalize and optimize for success.
This e-commerce marketplace personalizes campaigns for every single customer by using AI Decisioning.
Results:
- AI-powered journeys outperformed manually built campaigns, increasing conversions by 22%.
- More strategic focus: marketers now spend their time on creative strategy and testing new ideas, instead of manually building and maintaining campaigns
Make the most of your next holiday season
If you’re feeling the pain of siloed data that bottlenecks marketing this year, know that it doesn’t have to be that way. Hightouch uses your existing data, so it’s fast and easy to set up, even for the most complex enterprises. To learn more, grab some time with our solutions engineers today.
