What a Shortened Holiday Season Means for Your Omnichannel Strategies

With only 27 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, brands and marketers need to be more strategic than ever this holiday season, as there’s less time to capitalize on one of the year’s most important revenue opportunities.

Despite the shortened timeline, holiday sales are still expected to grow. Deloitte projects an increase of 2.3 percent to 3.3 percent, pushing total sales past $1.58 trillion. To maximize revenue, brands need to start their campaigns earlier, extend them later, and make every day count.

How exactly? By delivering a seamless customer experience, amplifying promotional efforts, and personalizing communications, brands can make the most of this critical shopping season. Let’s take a closer look.

Using Product Data to Provide a Seamless Omnichannel Customer Experience

There are a number of factors out of the control of brands and retailers during peak shopping seasons — e.g., what competitors are offering, economic conditions, supply chain interruptions, just to name a few. However, one thing retailers can control is providing consistent, detailed product information across every channel a consumer may interact with.

A consistent and seamless customer experience across all shopping touchpoints — whether on a brand’s e-commerce site, third-party marketplaces, social platforms or in-store kiosks — relies on having a single source of accurate product information. Essential details like product titles, descriptions, specifications, images, pricing, inventory levels and shipping options must be identical across channels to avoid confusion and build customer trust. Inconsistencies, such as mismatched product descriptions or conflicting pricing, can lead to consumer frustration and abandoned purchases.

A product information management (PIM) system helps brands maintain this consistency by centralizing product data and ensuring it’s uniformly distributed to all platforms. With a PIM, brands can easily manage large volumes of product information, reduce discrepancies, and deliver a seamless experience that meets customer expectations, ultimately protecting sales and brand reputation.

This consistent experience also helps retailers encourage a diverse array of shopping modalities. Customers looking to shop in-store, online or a combination of the two will be given the same experience, unified by a single source of product information.

Maximizing Promotions to Maintain Momentum Throughout the Season

With a shorter season, retailers can’t be tethered to the traditional model of capitalizing on the cornerstone shopping holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday and using those sales to subsidize a more inconsistent rest of the season.

Retailers should look to extend the promotional season to maintain momentum, starting before Black Friday and continuing through January. Some strategies can include offering exclusive early promotions access to loyal customers, keeping customers engaged with time-limited flash sales, creating unique and personalized bundle offers, and providing incentives like free shipping offers across all channels. Keeping in consistent communication with customers through social media and email can not only help keep momentum up, but can also provide a platform to deliver personalized offers.

Key Steps Brands Should Be Taking to Optimize the Sales Process

This is a universal maxim, but it becomes increasingly important during a condensed holiday season: The goal of retailers needs to be to reduce friction and encourage any type of shopping experience a customer could ask for. In the last four years, customers have increased expectations for what a business should offer. Brands need to be responsive to that.

Customers expect real-time inventory visibility to easily locate products online and in-store; in fact, 60 percent of holiday shoppers claim they have utilized buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), and 93 percent said they will shop both in-person and online this holiday season. Therefore, retailers should offer flexible fulfillment options like BOPIS, same-day delivery or ship-from-store, and stock visibility for both online and brick-and-mortar operations to accommodate all shoppers.

Making the Most of a Shortened Season

The 2024 holiday season presents both challenges and opportunities for brands looking to maximize their omnichannel strategies. To stay competitive and meet heightened customer expectations, brands need to start early, extend their promotional efforts, and maintain momentum throughout the season. However, the most important element is establishing consistency across all channels. By embracing these strategies, brands can position themselves to capture revenue during this condensed, but crucial, shopping period.

Kristin Naragon is the chief strategy officer at Akeneo, an intuitive platform that simplifies product information management.