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Let's be real. The holiday season can make or break your year. With this niggling fact in the back of many founders’ minds, brands have been known to dedicate up to half their total budget to making Q4 a success. That might seem like a bit much, but there’s good reason for the spend — those three months can account for upwards of 40% of a store’s total yearly earnings.
But here's the thing. While your competitors are scrambling to throw together spendy last-minute ad campaigns in November, leading brands are already laying the groundwork for holiday success. The brands that get their holiday plans rolling in August see roughly 30% more top-of-funnel traffic in Q4. Pretty good, huh?
If you want to crush it this holiday season (and not just barely survive it), there are three critical things you need to tackle right now. Trust us, your future self will thank you when you're watching those conversion rates soar instead of stress-eating leftover Halloween candy.
1. Dig Deep Into Your 2024 Holiday Data (Yes, Even the Ugly Parts)
Before you start dreaming about this year's holiday sales, you need to have an honest conversation with last year's numbers. And we mean really dig into all the numbers, not just the vanity metrics that make you feel good.
Start with the big picture stuff. What were your total sales compared with your goals? Which products flew off the digital shelves and which ones sat there like fruitcake at a party? When it comes to channels like corporate gift sales, how much did you earn? (Deeper yet, how much time did your team invest into each B2B order, and how many clients did you have to turn away because of the time crunch?)
But don't stop there. Look at your traffic patterns, conversion rates, and average order values throughout Q4 2024. And if you don’t know those numbers? Well, find out how you can gain those insights in 2025. This might mean adopting a few new tools that deliver those insights. Believe us — the investment is worth the Q4 ROI.
Here's where it gets interesting (and maybe a little painful). Analyze your worst-performing days. That one Tuesday in December when sales tanked? There's some valuable info there. Maybe your checkout process crashed under traffic, or your shipping cutoff dates confused customers, or your email campaign landed in SPAM folders or bounced entirely because you’ve punted pruning your list for the past year. These "failure points" are actually goldmines of insight and, in a weird way, bring clarity to this year’s pathway to success.
Pay special attention to mobile performance. Mobile commerce, or m-commerce, has doubled in sales since 2021. With m-commerce hitting record highs year after year, if your mobile experience wasn't on-brand and smooth as butter, you lost money. Period. Check your mobile conversion rates, page load speeds, and where people dropped off in your mobile funnel.
Don't forget about customer feedback. Scroll through those post-holiday reviews and support tickets. Yes, even the one-star reviews that make you want to hide under your desk. Customers will tell you exactly what went wrong — slow shipping, confusing product descriptions, time-consuming gifting experiences, lack of gift messages, checkout issues, and beyond. This feedback is pure gold for fixing problems before they cost you sales this year.
Whether brands are strapped by time, sheer people power, or a lack of tech to meet their needs available in the market, there are endless reasons why brands become repeat offenders of ill holiday prep.
So, remember that the goal here isn't to beat yourself up about what went wrong. The goal is to lay all your data on the table, identify patterns and opportunities, and pick a handful of areas to fix and level up your ecommerce game. Every successful brand has horror stories dotting their journey. Many (most, probably) even go on to repeat missteps season after season. But if you make a concerted effort to repair a few broken bits each season, you’ll be Grade A Perfect in no time flat.
2. Make Gift-Giving Ridiculously Easy with Zest
Most online stores are terrible at helping people buy gifts. Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes. Modern ecommerce has been optimized to the hilt in just about every way except the gifting experience.
Shoppers get overwhelmed by choices, frustrated by the clunky or nonexistent gifting CX, and often just give up and buy another impersonal gift card.
Zest was founded to fix busted online gifting. Instead of making consumers handle gifting logistics like scheduling, gift messages, and more (like trudging through the checkout once for every recipient on their gift list), Zest has tools fit for any kind of gifting your customers crave — friend-to-friend, one-to-tons, corporate, event, and anything in-between.
But zoom out and think about the typical gifting experience from a gift-giver's perspective. They want to give something thoughtful from a brand they trust and love, but they're stressed about getting it wrong. Maybe the gift won’t get there in time. Maybe they added the wrong addresses. Maybe they entered the right address but their recipient moved, and now it’s the wrong address. Maybe they're shopping for their boss, their teenage niece, or their partner's parents and the pressure is on to make this a good, authentic, and personal moment.
TL;DR: They need confidence that their gift will hit the mark, and the traditional purchase journey optimized for someone buying something for themselves just does not cut it.
Zest solves this problem beautifully. Instead of leaving customers to guess, build their own ad hoc gifting flow, or fill out a contact form and await a response at some mystery time in the future, Zest empowers every customer to buy gifts with the same access and convenience they’re used to when shopping online.
While adding Zest to your store easily solves any and all front-end woes that have plagued online gifting for literally decades, your team also needs to consider bringing gifting to the forefront across your whole funnel to 10X this channel in Q4 2025. It’s time to optimize your:
- Website nav: If the only way your shoppers can access your most giftable goods is through a link tucked away in your footer, it’s time to fix that. Make your gifts the hero of your website. Stick gifting links on product pages, add gifting CTAs in popups, have your chat bot ask shoppers about their gifting needs, slap a “gifting” section in your main menu. If you hide this channel, you don’t give it any chance to grow.
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- Product catalog: Help shoppers imagine your best products as the best gifts. Add your most giftable SKUs to your Zest corporate gifting storefront, create seasonal or limited-time bundles, and add thoughtful upsells like handwritten notes or gift wrap. Your shoppers want to buy gifts from you, so show ‘em what you got!
- Marketing emails & texts: People shopping for gifts are ready to spend a lot of money (and have been shown to spend more frequently, too). We recommend talking about gifting regularly, even outside of Q4, in your marketing emails and SMS campaigns, then driving traffic right to your gift section or corporate catalog. Odds are good you might not always hit the moment someone is seeking a gift, but creating a steady cadence of gift-specific language will sear your store in your audience’s mind when they need the perfect present.
- Influencer campaigns: Influencer marketing and user-generated content is proliferating every corner of ecommerce. These are excellent paths to building trust and awareness with existing or new audiences. Consider running a UGC campaign where your creator needs to send 10 gifts ASAP and they do so with ease right on your site (thanks to your Zest-powered gifting). Leverage this channel to educate the masses about your store’s easy gifting before the Q4 scramble.
- Discount structure: Gifting, especially corporate gifting, can mean selling heaps of products in one single transaction. And when you configure gifting-specific discounts, such as volume-based discounts, you encourage even more gifting in the moment while becoming a no-brainer for gifters in the future.
- Unboxing experience: The gifting experience is inherently special. Zest helps brands optimize this specific purchase journey on their website, but we recommend keeping the unboxing experience in mind, too. Platforms like Yuzu can help your brand create truly memorable unboxing experiences for every recipient. This tech can automate the process of top tier printed gift inserts that hold the gift message, commemorate the gifting moment, and even engage the recipient with offers to become a customer themselves.
The bottom line: When you make gift-giving easy and stress-free, people buy more gifts. Happy gifts will return to buy more gifts, and happy recipients will arrive ready to purchase for themselves or to gift it forward.
3. Start Your Holiday Marketing NOW (Seriously, Right Now)
If you're waiting until October to start your holiday marketing, you're already behind. The brands that dominate Q4 are paying attention to when their customers are starting to shop. And for the 2025 holiday season, nearly 40% of consumers plan to start holiday shopping in September or sooner. So while it might feel like overkill to shout about gifting in the blazing summertime sun of June, it’s the perfect time to start building awareness and anticipation.
Why does early holiday marketing work? Well, for one, consumer attention is finite, and it gets increasingly fragmented as the holidays approach. By November, your customers' inboxes are flooded, their social feeds are cluttered, and their decision fatigue is real. The brands that get in front of them earlier have a massive advantage.
We recommend serving up useful content that helps alleviate some of the universal stress we all feel when shopping for gifts. Things like gift guides sorted by budget or recipient, how-to content related to your fancy new gifting tools, and seasonal inspiration that naturally showcases your products as gifts can educate and inspire. A "10 Thoughtful Gifts for New Homeowners" blog post in August? That's smart positioning. It helps people while subtly introducing them to your brand before the holiday rush hits (and gives the Google SEO bots time to identify your resources as top-notch first-page stuff).
As you distribute your materials, pair them with irresistible offers like early access to holiday collections, exclusive gift guides, or special pre-holiday discounts for subscribers. These tactics can be relatively quick and easy while building your email list, and every email address you collect now is worth significantly more than one you collect in December when everyone's already overwhelmed.
Summertime is also a great time to start engaging new audiences and fostering trust and engagement. Your Q2 and Q3 social media strategy should focus on storytelling and community building. Share behind-the-scenes content about how your products are made, highlight customer stories, and create content that makes people feel connected to your brand. When holiday shopping time comes, you want to be the brand they remember and trust.
And remember to test these early campaigns to gather even a few signals that can impact your holiday marketing. Run small-scale versions of your planned holiday ads to see what resonates. Test different messaging, visuals, and audiences. A/B test your email subject lines and delivery days to crack the code of maximum impact. The data you collect now will help you optimize your budget and plan when it really, really counts.
The Bottom Line to Boosting Your Q4 Bottom Line
Holiday success doesn't happen by accident. Brands touting massive Q4s can do so as the result of smart preparation, strategic thinking, and learning from the past. By analyzing your 2024 performance, optimizing your store for online gifting with Zest, and starting the gifting hype early, you're setting yourself up for your best holiday season yet.
Remember, your competitors are probably procrastinating on all of this. While they're scrambling later, you'll be executing a well-planned strategy that turns holiday shoppers into loyal customers.
So grab that pumpkin spice latte, dive into those analytics, and start building your holiday success story. Future you is counting on it.
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