Elizabeth Wang is the retail marketing manager for global ads at Google. Here, she spotlights the Pandora marketing leadership team and their strategy to keep customers engaged during an always-on holiday shopping season.
As the biggest jewelry brand in the world, Pandora aims to democratize jewelry, making it accessible to everyone. This is a particularly salient goal during the holiday shopping season, which constitutes a significant portion of Pandora’s business. Consequently, the brand has experienced firsthand how holiday shoppers’ behavior has become increasingly complex and unpredictable, and it understands how retailers face new challenges this year.
Specifically, Pandora knows that marketers must be constantly ready for holiday shoppers before, during, and even after big sales events, like Ramadan, Singles Day, and Black Friday. In fact, 75% of holiday shoppers across surveyed markets agree that they look for deals, discounts, and promotions throughout the holiday shopping season.1
We asked Pandora marketing leaders about their proven, always-on approach to the holiday shopping season and their advice to other marketers. Here’s what they had to say.
Test and learn to capitalize in key moments
Our key consumption period — when we do a substantial part of our revenue — is Christmas. To enable this moment, we have a testing framework in place across the entire year. We typically run tests from January to October, when we’re keen on innovating. This gives us the advantage of gathering learnings that we can apply just before our key consumption period. Then we freeze testing and focus on retail operations in October, November, and December.
We start working on the go-to-market execution of our Christmas campaign around May or June. By then, we have clarity on our investment levels. We know the campaign; we have the tool kits ready; and so on. Once we have clear evidence that something is going to improve our retail operations in November and December, we get the necessary teams in place by October to execute.
Stay agile and optimize across channels
Many companies lose sight of how important the omnichannel experience is. Their media budgets tend to go toward e-commerce, not factoring in the multitouch path to purchase. Certain shoppers like to actually feel products, others like to do a ton of research, and some just want to purchase the product online and have it sent directly to them. We’ve found it’s critical to look holistically at our business performance and the sales we drive, because no two customers are the same.
Since our initial holiday budget is set as soon as January, we can start testing early in the year to ensure that we’re going to have a strong enough presence during key consumption periods to remain agile. We then move into something called “open budgets,” where every two weeks we look at the incrementality of both e-store and brick-and-mortar sales. If we see an opportunity where we’re currently above our marginal ROAS threshold, we’re able to add in more budget so we can adapt to real-time trends and not leave money on the table. Having omnichannel bidding strategies and budget fluidity are crucial for us during moments like Christmas, because we’re constantly shifting budgets based on the overarching impact of the campaign.
When you spot incrementality, scale
As a company, we are fully aligned on a holistic measurement strategy that blends online and in-store KPIs. So when we started using store sales measurement in combination with our first-party sales data, it was a game changer. It gave us a full picture of what was happening across the business and opened up way more opportunities for incrementality. We then rolled out testing for Local Inventory Ads and Performance Max for store goals.
The results speak for themselves. In 2023, we saw a 220% increase in offline revenue year over year, contributing to a 77% growth in total Google Ads revenue. At Pandora, we make the most out of being a global company by collaborating closely with our markets. Once we see incrementality, we scale.
Be always-on, across the funnel
For the holiday, we look at everything from awareness to conversion. We concentrate on storytelling early in the campaign to build brand affinity and showcase our products to loyal customers and potential customers. And we focus on big promotional periods as well as the key gifting period.
Having a long and a short view of our marketing funnel is very important. We know that our shoppers like to browse the web and social media before they purchase, so we zero in on reach first and foremost. That drives performance in the long term. When we’re really close to the end of the promotion, the YouTube funnel can be scaled to maximize conversions by targeting lower funnel tactics like Video action campaigns.
Later in the purchase journey, there are two big variables that we have to manage due to our large retail store network: click and collect. These allow customers to see exactly what inventory we have in stock and where, along with delivery cutoffs. For these variables, we use Shopping ads to clearly communicate shipping, details, and return policies. And local inventory ads are an important solution for us to help customers easily gauge product availability and drive them in-store once the delivery window is closed.
Inspire customers to think about gifting, then make shopping easy
We know that not all customers may start their Christmas shopping super early. For those who don’t, we need to help them prepare and we need to inspire them. That’s really what we focus on when we start promoting ahead of the Christmas season.
For example, we want to help male gifters know the great options that Pandora offers for the special people in their lives. After we inspire them, we use performance marketing to continue to show them that we are the right choice for finding that perfect gift. It’s important to make it easy for them to explore our products and know where they can shop.
At Pandora, we never stop testing and learning. It’s in our DNA and is really important for us, and it helps us to prepare for the most important season of the year: the holiday season.
