As we head off into the festive season with key celebrations just around the corner, it’s also the time for brands to embark into gifting/shopping moments with consumers online. 

To help you prepare for these key moments, we have developed a simple 4 step framework to get your planning started now.

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1. Objective Setting

Purchase decisions today are more emotional than rational due to the variety of choices we are presented with each season. It’s important to set the Pre-launch & Launch objectives to ensure that we develop our Key messaging properly.

Pre-Launch Objectives -  the need to capture them can start weeks before the festive moment, the campaigning to set your intentions is important as they may not purchase right away.
Launch Objectives - the key desired action you aim to achieve when you sales start, besides from just maximizing your sales, consider what are the check out habits you want to achieve too.

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2. Key Messaging

There is no one size fits all messaging as all brands deal with multiple segments of audience, that said we can simplify this by just determining the primary & secondary audience messaging as this will usually cover the majority of your consumers.

When setting the key messaging, consider on:

1. Desired actions - what do you want them to do after receiving your message
2. Audience segment - who are they and how do they align to your brand
3. Message - what is the message you want them to see, think and do

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3. Framework

This is the key planning where you plot down the mechanics on how each phase of your festive sales moment is going to reach out to the audience. This serves as a map and timeline on how you will activate each phase of your festive moment helping you to decide on what assets needs to be created to successfully roll out each phase:

Phases - Can be generally broken down into three - Introduce / Amplify / Launch
Channels - All your sales channels which can be website, e-commerce platforms, app or social commerce
Mechanics - Be as detailed and succinct as possible to map down each phases sales mechanics

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4. Campaign Map

Finally now that you know your objectives, messaging and framework, it’s time to map and simulate the campaign journey. This helps to put into perspective the flow of actions desired by the brand and the consumers to take to reach a successful sale. 

In the map, it needs to list down:

1. Primary Journey - the main path customers should take to successfully checkout
2. Secondary Journey - a reminder path to steer the customers back towards your sales 
3. Brand actions - actions the brand needs to take during each stage of the map to activate their sales mechanics
4. Customer actions - the desired effect each step in the map we want the consumers to take which normally includes:
   - Attract - What we want them to see to stroke their interest
   - Engage - What we want them to think about for the sale
   - Convert - What we want them to do to check out
   - Cultivate - How the brand will continue to engage with them post sales