Peak sales season

E-com customers are ready to purchase your products, or a specific subset of them: Christmas, Mother’s/Father’s Day, seasonal travel or sports, or some other widely-shared season that boosts your sales is approaching. The closer peak-sales season gets the more customer behavior will prioritize bottom-funnel activity:

• Clicking on ads that emphasize price, availability or speedy shipping
• Responding to action-oriented messaging over brand or even feature-focused messages
• Making more branded and brand + specific product searches overall
• Subscribing to newsletters IF they offer coupons
• Converting faster, with fewer average page views and fewer visits to different competing websites

Marketing & merchandising have to anticipate the shift by:

• Increasing performance-ad budgets: on Google/Meta/Amzn platforms increase target-spend parameters like ROAS & CPC too. Don’t count on the algorithms to anticipate, or catch up to, increased customer interest.
• Shifting messaging toward specific high-interest products: if winter is approaching highlight your best-selling skis on the homepage, shift your social imagery from lifestyle to more product-focused shots, highlight special prices & “Buy Now” style copy in ads & newsletters.
• Moving influencer & PR messages from “I love this brand” to “I love this specific product from the brand”
• Leveraging deadlines: plan messaging around “last day to ship” or any other event you can count down towards.

The creative & messaging shifts take planning and development well in advance of the event, and need to align with all the upper-funnel messaging that’s been prioritized in the run up to the sales season.

Off Peak-Sales Season

Customers slow down: fewer are ready to buy or are in a purchasing mindset. Some may need use & care info for their recent purchases, more will want inspiring imagery that shows them how your brand embodies their imagined best life.

Media prices and market noise drop: now’s the time to reprioritize the upper funnel with:

• Shift ad budget from performance to brand: return performance budgeting parameters to a level that ensures target ROAS in a less conversion-oriented market, and increase brand-building spend. It’ll go further in the less competitive media market.
• Increase brand story & lifestyle messaging: let lifestyle take the place of some product-centric imagery and copy on your ads, site & social
• Push PR & longer-lead influencer activations

GROW THE FUNNEL Overall

Don’t overshoot your seasonal marketing shift: just meet the market as it goes through its seasonal cycles and you’ll grow sales more efficiently. Ultimately you’ll grow your marketing funnel faster overall.

Last modified: June 9, 2025