How brands are turning to unified marketing to stay ahead this holiday

Finding customers isn’t easy. It keeps getting more complex, and the landscape keeps getting more crowded. How can brands cut through the noise with their budgets intact? This is one of the biggest questions facing independent brands today. It’s no more pronounced than it is during Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM), when brands compete for the eyes of more than 200 million shoppers. 

“Marketing can get unpredictable and costly for brands. During the holidays, that volatility is even more present. It’s a difficult job for our merchants, and it’s difficult for experienced marketers across the industry, too,” says Andrius Baranauskas, product director at Shopify.

“It almost seems like an impossible journey. But we knew our merchants could grow much faster if this complexity went away.”

Enter unified marketing. Ahead of Black Friday Cyber Monday, brands are looking to unified tools like Shop Campaigns, Shopify Audiences, Shopify Collabs and other automations to keep pace in a fiercely competitive market and keep front-of-mind for customers. When all the pieces of a business converge and work together, running a business not only gets easier but can be more profitable. Here’s how brands are staying ahead.

1. Keep control of costs and optimize your budget 

Unless a brand has an army of marketers at their disposal, they’re trying to squeeze the most out of each marketing dollar. As the holidays get closer, the ability to manage and optimize marketing spend becomes paramount. Doing this means maximized revenue and less budget being eaten up by operating expenses.

Shop Campaigns is designed to help merchants do just that. Brands can grow sustainably by setting their own customer acquisition cost and target return on ad spend. Merchants are only charged when a customer converts, making it a risk-free investment. In addition, Campaigns can now retarget lapsed customers with exclusive offers to build loyalty. This model is especially crucial during BFCM when ad costs can skyrocket. 

Baranauskas explains, "Shop Campaigns is customer acquisition on autopilot. Merchants set their budget, and Shopify does the rest, ensuring that campaigns are cost-effective and meet the financial constraints of our merchants.

Caraway, a leading cookware brand, earned $1 million in revenue from Shop Campaigns in 2023. The brand wanted to widen its customer acquisition efforts and combat rising marketing costs. For Caraway and many brands, it isn’t just about managing costs but about driving substantial revenue growth.

“We do see continued pressures and costs elevating in the customer acquisition space. It's what 50% of my team is focused on 100% of the time, so it's obviously a huge, huge area of priority for us,” says Connor Dault, vice-president of growth and digital product at Caraway.

“We were looking for efficient customer acquisition, and we found it.”

In 2023, Shop Campaigns helped merchants acquire more than 1 million new customers, and the fastest-growing brands on Shop Campaigns attribute up to 24% of their new customer growth to the program.

2. Target the right people at the right time

The 'spray and pray' method of marketing won’t cut it anymore. Merchants have to get their ads in front of the most interested buyers. Shopify Audiences changes how merchants can reach potential customers by using commerce insights exclusive to Shopify and boosting ad performance across Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Criteo. Shopify Audiences allows for the creation of custom audience lists, which can drive up to 2x more retargeting conversions for every retargeting dollar spent and reduce customer acquisition costs by up to 50%.

"The holiday period, and especially the week between Christmas and New Year's, presents an incredible opportunity for brands to reach customers that are in-market for new products. But this period is highly competitive, and brands should be systematic about how they approach their campaigns,” says Eric Seufert, owner ofMobile Dev Memo.

"Tools like Shopify Audiences are helpful for reaching relevant customers across the media mix, but understanding the right pricing model for various customer segments is as critical as reaching them. Brands should develop the valuation tools needed to understand customer lifetime value by segment so that they price the holiday opportunity appropriately."

Bath and beauty brand Happy Hippo leveraged the insights offered by Shopify Audiences to scale reach through Meta, and the results were a 4.7x return on ad spend, 72% lower customer acquisition costs, and 200% increase in conversion rate. 

“Shopify Audiences is a huge benefit for Shopify merchants. It has helped lower customer acquisition costs so our investments can stretch much further with Facebook ads,” says CEO of Happy Hippo, Adam Biel. 

And this fall, just in time for BFCM, Shopify introduced a new feature within Audiences that enables merchants to exclude their existing customers from ad sets. This ensures that advertising dollars are spent on acquiring new shoppers rather than preaching to the converted, enhancing return on ad spend. Merchants using this have been able to exclude on average 40% more customers compared to their standard ad lists.

3. Spread the word through the best partners

In modern marketing, social media creators dominate. Finding and managing the right voices to amplify your brand is crucial. Especially for mission-centered brands, it’s important to partner with creators that embrace their values—and have audiences to match. And 41% of U.S. merchants shared that influencer/ creator marketing was going to be the most impactful strategy as they prepped for holidays.* 

Shopify Collabs connects merchants with creators across platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, who can authentically promote products to their followers. For the brand Solgaard, it completely changed their approach to influencer marketing.

Solgaard is a sustainable travel gear brand that believes in using commerce as a force for good. To push this mission forward, Solgaard needed a stronger marketing presence on social media. But they didn’t just want to hire influencers, they wanted to build a community around their products. Solgaard used Shopify Collabs to discover new ambassadors across different social platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

“Our team is constantly seeking new ways to advance our mission of preventing as much ocean plastic as possible,” says Adrian Solgaard, CEO. “Fostering a community of remarkable individuals on the Shopify Collabs app has made our efforts easier and more effective.”

Through working with Collabs, they identified nearly 400 brand ambassadors, generated more than $364k in affiliate sales, and saw a 28% year-over-year increase in revenue generated by creators.

More brands and more creators are turning to tools like Shopify Collabs. The amount of creators that have signed up to use Collabs has increased by over 50% in the past year alone. 

4. Automate to innovate 

Beyond targeted campaigns and collaborations, merchants are using marketing automations that help engage customers at every step of the journey. With Shopify Flow, merchants set up custom workflows to avoid repetitive work around tasks like inventory management, loyalty programs, and discounts. 

And with marketing segmentation, merchants can automatically kick off marketing emails in Shopify Flow. So, the moment a customer's actions match up with a segment you've set up—whether it’s a customer who purchased once or one who restocks often—they’re sent an email. This kind of automation means you're always chatting with your customers in a timely and relevant way, boosting both their loyalty and your chances of keeping them around.

Things work better when they work together

As BFCM nears, the stakes are high, and the competition is fierce. It isn’t enough to lean on siloed software, brands need the interconnection of a single platform. Unified marketing tools from Shopify offer independent brands a fighting chance to maximize their reach without overwhelming their budgets, or their teams. 

By consolidating everything one needs into one place, a brand’s marketing becomes all the more powerful. Ultimately, this means a stronger bottom line–during the time of year it matters the most.

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*Survey among 13,337 standard merchants from the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, conducted between May 29th and June 12th, 2024 by Shopify. 2,529 U.S. respondents participated.