Most brands heading into the holiday season are working from something — historical data, a rough promotional calendar, a tested offer strategy, or at least a strong understanding of what tends to move product. Our new client, a direct-to-consumer youth baseball glove manufacturer, didn’t have any of that. What they did have was great product/market fit and high quality products.
That is to say, we didn’t have much to build from when we approached the holiday season, where sales depend on coordinated campaigns because competition for consumer attention is at its peak. And like most small businesses, there wasn’t an unlimited budget to invest in ads or creative just to see what sticks. So our goal was straightforward: Drive as much revenue as possible during the holiday season with a limited budget.
Creating a holiday playbook from scratch
Before getting into tactics, we spent time understanding what was already working and what limitations would shape the campaign. To start with, Meta was clearly the strongest paid channel, consistently driving more efficient conversions than anything else, and we were nowhere near saturating the audience. With a limited budget, splitting our efforts across multiple platforms during the most expensive time of the year was not an option, so we decided to lean into our strengths for this campaign, to learn as much as possible while generating the best return on ad spend.
Tip: Diversification is important over the long term, but limited time or unproven campaigns with small budgets should double down on what is already working first. Then, invest that additional revenue into diversifying over time
Operational realities were just as important. Shipping deadlines, production timelines, and the basic expectation that a holiday purchase arrives on time all needed to be factored into how and when we communicated offers. These are the kinds of details that often get overlooked in campaign planning, but they directly affect performance — especially around Christmas.
The product mix also played a significant role in shaping the strategy. The core glove line represents the brand and needs to be protected from heavy discounts. Custom gloves have long lead times, which makes them more sensitive to timing, and messaging needs to be very clear. Clearance products, made up of old inventory that the company wanted to move, gave us more flexibility to be aggressive with discounts. This ultimately helped create a stronger perception of value without impacting the brand’s reputation.
Tip: Not every product should play the same role in a promotion. Use clearance inventory to drive perceived value, while protecting flagship products.
Planning a full-season revenue driver
Once we’d thought through those details, and the limitations of pricing and timing, the campaign structure became clear. We built a promotional calendar that ran from early November through the final viable shipping window before Christmas. The calendar was mapped directly to product timelines, inventory flexibility, and how customers behave during the holiday season (the last factor was based on our team’s e-commerce expertise, as obviously we didn’t have previous holiday data from this company).
Every phase of the calendar had a purpose:
- Early promotions introduced urgency without being overly aggressive and helped capture customers who wanted custom gloves or who did their shopping early
- Mid-season deals built on that momentum and kept the brand in front of customers as they moved closer to making a decision
- Black Friday and Cyber Monday acted as peak conversion periods
- Last-chance offers leaned heavily on timing, especially around shipping deadlines, to capture last-minute demand
Tip: Your promo calendar should be built around fulfillment realities. Shipping cutoffs and production timelines create natural urgency that drives revenue.
This approach allowed the campaign to build over time instead of relying on one or two days to carry the entire period. It also helped avoid a common issue where customers delay purchases because they expect a better deal to come later. When each promotion is clearly defined and stands on its own, there’s less incentive to wait.
Structuring offers to increase order value
With the promotional calendar in place, the next layer was how to design the offers themselves. Our end goal was to increase the value of each transaction, compared to the norm. That meant building offers that encouraged customers to spend more when they decided to purchase, rather than just making it easier to buy a single item.
We leaned into a mix of incentives that supported that behavior. Spend thresholds (spend $X to save $Y) created a clear reason to add more to the cart. Free shipping cutoffs reinforced that behavior while also removing a common friction point (people hate paying for shipping!). Clearance products played an important role in anchoring the perceived value of the overall offer, allowing us to be aggressive with discounts without impacting the core product line.
The core product line was a sensitive spot, for our client and for us. For our client it’s understandable, as the entire value of the company is based on the perceived value of the gloves. For us, keeping them largely untouched meant they could help us achieve our goal of keeping transaction value high, rather than just selling more items at any cost. Outside of a limited window around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we avoided heavy discounting on those products. As mentioned earlier, we instead used heavy discounts on clearance items to create a higher perceived value. Custom gloves, as the most expensive product line, were anchored at a higher tier, so the core product line, the stock gloves, fell in that Goldilocks sweet spot.
Tip: Design offers to increase cart size, not just conversion rate. A higher average order value often outperforms marginal gains in conversion.
Simplifying and scaling to maximize success
On the digital advertising side, the approach was intentionally simple. Since we’d identified Meta as our strongest platform by far, we leaned into it, moving our entire ad budget into Meta for the season. On Meta, ad campaigns learn on their own based on user behavior, and it’s important to leverage this compounding effectiveness. So we set up two separate campaigns: one for the holiday season, and one for that very unique and important weekend from Black Friday to Cyber Monday.
Over the course of the season, most ads were slotted into the existing holiday campaign, which was constantly improving. This ensured all new ads launched with a headstart, allowing our campaign to compound on its own learnings and become more efficient over time.
The behavior over Thanksgiving weekend is obviously distinct, so that weekend got its own campaign. With only 4 days to drive as high of a return on ad spend (ROAS) as possible, we couldn’t wait for the campaign to self-optimize. Instead we needed the ads themselves — the offers and the creative — to push decisive user behavior. We used our best discounts this weekend, combined with language that conveyed urgency, to encourage quick purchases. Next year, with a proven strategy, we will likely lean into this even more.
Using email to capture demand more efficiently
Email also played a key supporting role in our campaigns. In addition to using retargeted ads to re-engage past customers, we used email to stay in front of past customers throughout the holiday season and encourage repeat purchases. The result was increased efficiency in our efforts to maintain and capture repeat business without pulling budget away from new customer acquisition.
Doing more with less on the creative side
Creative followed the same philosophy as the rest of the campaign — simple is best. We didn’t want to invest a lot of money in creative we weren’t sure we would work. We needed good quality creative to properly test our strategy, but it wasn’t necessary to dump a ton of our client’s money into a big shoot. So we ran a small, low-budget photoshoot, just to get what we needed to test and learn.
The messaging was straightforward, focused on communicating promotion and timing information. We didn’t want the ads to feel slick or overproduced, as that doesn’t align with the brand’s personality. We wanted them to feel genuine, while communicating clearly and giving our audience a reason to act on the offers.
Tip: Don’t overinvest in creative before validating the offer and messaging. Creative should support a proven strategy, not compensate for a weak one.
The results: unprecedented success
The holiday season was a blowout for the company, returning to pandemic-era highs that had seemed unachievable for the business in the following years. The cost per acquisition was cut in half, meaning every dollar spent on marketing and advertising (which includes our fees) was twice as effective. Black Friday nearly doubled the previous single-day sales record, and Cyber Monday became the third highest sales day of all time.
Thanksgiving weekend produced record-breaking return on ad spend — more than twenty times the investment — and the campaign held strong with double-digit returns through the rest of the season.
Takeaways
If you’re planning your own holiday marketing campaign, strategy and structure is far more important than any specific detail or piece of creative. Most campaigns don’t fall short because of execution, they fall short because the strategy isn’t there, or doesn’t work, or doesn’t align with the audience.
Another thing: This campaign established a baseline where none existed before. When starting from scratch, it’s important not to over-invest. While it can be tricky to find the line, it’s important to balance cost and quality, to be able to get the data and feedback you need with the minimum investment possible. Then, use that data to fuel next year’s campaign performance. It starts from a system that’s already been proven, allowing for better decisions, better testing, and more confident investment.