Retail has struggled for most of 2024, but fear not: the holiday season is about to fly in (perhaps from the North Pole) to put us all in the black! Well, if your brand leverages one of your best weapons: personalization via first-party data.

We know by now that retailers who can get personalization right can lift revenues by 15% and even increase the ROI of their marketing spend by 30%, according to McKinsey. We’d go even further than that and say that in today’s retail environment, personalization is nearly mandatory. The brands that consistently win, especially during the holiday shopping season, are the ones who can offer top-tier personalized experiences for their shoppers.

The best part? Achieving great personalization doesn’t have to cost your business much at all, which is great news for retail brands with smaller marketing budgets that make it hard to compete during the busy holiday season. Because that’s when so many businesses throw money at social network advertising, CPMs can increase 40% just in December alone!

Instead, by leveraging personalized marketing and promotions to your existing customers, your brand can see a much better bang for your buck.

Generally, first-party data is the information on customers that you collect directly. Be it from web activity on your own website (or ecommerce store), purchase history, emails & texts, and in-store interactions; first-party data is the holy grail of customer behavior analytics.

While Google has (perhaps wisely) backed off their vow to get rid of tracking cookies, Apple has actually done so, meaning first-party data is crucial since a large segment of third-party data overall is now much less reliable (and thus, much less desirable). That’s why Facebook ads are less targeted now, and why data from social networks such as Instagram don’t convey a true profile of any one shopper anymore.

Today, more and more retail brands are relying on their own first-party data to make up for this gap. And while it is absolutely a more active data-gathering process compared to the relatively passive nature of third-party data, first-party data is also absolutely more actionable and reliable.

A robust retail clienteling CRM solution can make collecting first-party data simple. They can accommodate omnichannel retail teams, enabling both the in-store reps and online marketers to collect data such as order history and purchase behavior and sync them together in the CRM. That way, the customer data is already actionable right from the CRM that sends marketing promotions through email or SMS, as well as being a quick resource for sales associates when assisting customers in retail locations.

Let’s dive into three ways that your brand can leverage first-party data during the holidays.

One of the best ways to increase sales is to inform your customers of products they are already ready to buy. It’s a matter of knowing exactly what they want, and timing your messaging to when they want it. If you’ve collected customer data into your CRM throughout the year, and the lifetime of their relationship with your brand, your team can leverage hyper-personalized messages that can increase both the open rate and conversion rate of your email or SMS messages.

For example, Jenette Bras maintains such a great relationship with their customers that they know their size, preferred color, and preferred style. Because of this, when a new shipment or product comes into the store, their CRM lets their team know exactly the customers that have been waiting for the new products, and they can notify them via SMS that day. This type of personalized notifications drove 36% more transactions for their brand.

For the holidays, send targeted promotions of products that are specific to each customer (your CRM can help automate this process, of course):

Hi Emily,

While you’re shopping for your loved ones this holiday season, you deserve your own treat! We’ve curated a few new arrivals that go perfectly with the winter coat you purchased last year, and we have them in stock right now. Oh, and here’s a 15% discount for this whole bundle as our holiday gift to you.

Fostering an in-person community is a powerful way to drive loyalty as well as more sales, especially during the holiday season as people are looking for more things to do while having shopping in mind. By leveraging your first-party data, your CRM can show you the customers with addresses near your store locations.

Your team can then use automated campaigns to segment your base into those who live within a few mile radius of a store to promote in-person events such as 2-for-1 sales, bring-a-friend sales, and of course your holiday sale extravaganza.

By targeting only the people in close proximity, your team can reduce marketing spend and effort. This is a great example of how personalization increases the efficiency of your marketing spend during the winter season. Just imagine running a special campaign to the locals around each of your locations without dropping thousands of dollars on ads.

Perhaps the most effective way to leverage first-party customer data is to send customers the products that are right for them. After all, Amazon has made multiple fortunes by creating a recommendation algorithm that is designed for just that purpose.

Your brand can do this (albeit on a smaller scale than Amazon’s) by tapping into your CRM and creating curated recommendations specific to individual customers, or a highly segmented group. One way is to send a text or email with a Shoppable Story, Endear’s supercharged version of the lookbook, included:

Created and sent right from Endear’s CRM interface, a Shoppable Story isn’t just a visual way to recommend targeted products. It’s also a transaction-enabled channel that can take a customer from browsing to checkout directly from a text or email. It’s a powerful way to drive more sales by showing products not just as static images, but as a “story” or collection; how they can be part of an ensemble or how they can match one’s color scheme. All this carefully selected through the first-party data collected in your CRM.

Think you can’t provide that white-glove clienteling experience to your online shoppers that you could for your in-store patrons? Think again. With the latest retail tech coupled to your CRM, your sales associates can provide real-time shopping assistance to anyone who is currently on your site.

Using a real-time chat like Endear’s SalesChat, reps can answer product questions, provide styling tips, suggest alternate items, and of course upsell customers at checkout.

Keep in mind, this isn’t just flipping on your AI chatbot. While that can help a conversation get started, there’s no replacing a human sales associate for actual personalized service. And since your rep has access to the customer’s shopping history, location, and even special dates (birthdays, anniversaries, etc), the level of clienteling you can provide to close that deal is extremely high – which is the perfect recipe for converting more virtual window shoppers into happy customers.

Marketing to your existing base will always give you the best ROI for your retail brand, but that doesn’t mean customer acquisition isn’t also worth some of your marketing efforts. The holiday season is a great time to onboard new shoppers who are sure to become loyalists after their first experience. Luckily, first-party data can also help your team here.

We already mentioned bring-a-friend events, but because the holidays are all about shopping for someone else (ie. gifts!), understanding what your current customers purchase can give you insight into their friends and family who you can market to next.

With each purchase, your brand should always include a holiday promotion redeemable when the gift recipient signs up with an email or phone number. That way, you already have first-party data on the gift they received as soon as they come into your CRM. And since your CRM has captured that immediate data, you can already start recommending other holiday items to your new customer-by-gift-proxy that you think they might enjoy. This is a great way to turn a gift recipient into a loyal customer.

The holidays are just around the corner. Get your data right and start clienteling your way into the black!