4 ways to use e-commerce data to optimize LTV pre- and post-holiday

The holiday season is when consumer brands are at their busiest. The high-energy, two-month period that starts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday can account for as much as 20% of a brand's total annual retail sales.

There is another side to the holiday season that brands must consider. When it comes to lifetime value, holiday shoppers are the worst. Many shoppers will buy from your brand and then leave. They could return next year in some cases. Sometimes they're gone for good.

How do you turn one-and-done shoppers into loyal brands? There is a treasure trove of commerce data that you collect.

You can use your commerce data to craft the right pre-holiday strategy and drive repeat business after the holiday season.

Pre-holiday: Optimize your marketing spend

Proper segmentation drives better personalization during the holiday season.

In light of growing uncertainty over the effectiveness of digital advertising, brands need to carefully monitor their marketing spend data in November to see if they are on track for success or failure over the holiday season. The closer you are to BFCM, the higher your return on investment will be. You need to adjust quickly if it is not.

You want to keep an eye on the effectiveness of each marketing channel during the holiday season. Return on ad spend is one of the most useful metrics to track because it shows how much revenue you make for every dollar spent. If you want to make changes in real time, break your ROAS down by channel.

If you want to know if your marketing efforts are driving profitability and bringing the right customers to your website, you can run a cohort analysis. You can identify the return on investment for each dollar you spend on customer acquisition by calculating this calculation.

You will need to create a time-based cohort of customers from first time of purchase and compare them over time. We recommend starting by making Black Friday day 0, then counting backwards and forwards each day after, because the exact dates of BFCM are not certain. The LTV:CAC cohort analysis for Christmas sales can be performed using this method.