It’s crucial to keep a pulse on your cross-channel marketing program KPIs and campaign results throughout the year, but reviewing your holiday successes and optimization opportunities in REAL-TIME is especially important. Since the holiday season presents many opportunities to reach year-end goals and milestones, your cross-channel email and SMS campaigns should be in tip-top shape. So, as the preparation you completed prior comes to fruition, let’s unpack what you should keep track of between now and year’s end.

Baseline KPIs Still Matter Most!

Some additional metrics come to the forefront in Q4 that are important to monitor, but your baseline send, engagement, and purchase KPIs still matter and hold a lot of weight. Routinely review your email open rate to ensure your subject lines are standing out in your contacts’ extremely cluttered inboxes. Additionally review both email and SMS click-through rates to guarantee you’re driving enough qualified traffic back to your website. And finally, check on your email and SMS conversion rates – Is that traffic generating purchases?

Beyond your campaign metrics, you should also pay close attention to your acquisition results and trends. Your email and SMS list growth should be consistent with contacts steadily joining over time. Your popup acquisition rate(s) should be stable, if not higher than at other times of the year, while you promote your best incentives. Your email opt-out rate might increase when you send more, but you never want to dip into a negative list delta.

When it comes to your automated campaigns, the volume should reflect your onsite traffic – As more customers browse, abandon, or purchase on peak shopping days, the respective campaigns should trigger accordingly. So, throughout the holiday season, keep an eye on your email and SMS automated campaign volumes to ensure everything is firing correctly.

Let Holiday Results Support 2024 Planning

Aggregate all your observations and reports from the holiday season to influence and support your plans for 2024. Consider what resonated most with your contacts regarding message themes and top-performing triggers. Look for your best-performing audiences that earn the highest click-through and conversion rates and how your purchase-based segments have grown. Review your customer journey for gaps in touchpoints – where else can you position email and SMS opt-in? What other messages can be triggered?

Collecting as much data as possible from your Q4 campaigns is also helpful for creating your benchmarks and goals for the following year. With so many changes to how consumers shop and connect with their favorite brands, it’s essential to follow the emerging trends within your programs first to define your strategies. Pay particular attention to revenue share from email and SMS, engagement differences, and customer lifetime value, among others.

Prioritize Wrapping Up Tests

If you leveraged A/B split testing during the year, over the holidays, or otherwise, wrap them up and consolidate your results for review. This includes tests on acquisition incentive and positioning, automated campaign timing and cadence, MMS creative, or email send details like From Name. Determine what strategies worked best for your contacts or where there wasn’t enough statistical significance to choose a winner and add them to your toolkit for 2024. Plan to cement the tactics that repeatedly won and test the others over again.

Keep Holiday Momentum Going!

Your holiday message volume might peak between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but do NOT stop sending email and SMS campaigns through the end of the year – Take advantage of other key shopping days like Super Saturday, Giving Tuesday, and Green Monday, and promote your holiday shipping deadlines to your last-minute shoppers and gifters. Have various ‘Oops’ messaging at the ready for all your major promotions and sales in the event of technical difficulties or customer service issues. And, most importantly, be nimble and ready to pivot if needed: Since you’ll be keeping a close eye on program KPIs and campaign results, you’ll be able to isolate opportunities for improvement and additional touchpoints. You got this!

Be Mindful of GA4 Reporting Changes

If you use Google Analytics to review your email and SMS campaign performance alongside your other digital channels, remember recent attribution changes will make it hard to compare results year over year. With the move from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, Sessions are defined differently, and revenue is attributed differently. We recommend using reporting within Listrak for an apples-to-apples view of your channel performance year over year, as this will provide you with data from the same models.

Get Started

If you are a Listrak client, your Account Manager can further help you review your holiday results and performance. Not yet on the Listrak platform? Learn more about our integrated platform here.