Your ecommerce calendar just got a year-round makeover

You don’t have to wait for Black Friday and the holiday season for online retail and ecommerce success. Ecommerce calendars have expanded significantly thanks to numerous holidays and cultural events.

The result is a year-round selection of purchasing opportunities, all vying for customers’ attention. Yet, despite the opportunities to save money, shoppers are signaling fatigue. Up to 39% of global consumers say the volume and frequency of deals overwhelm them, and one in four sidesteps big-ticket sales entirely, according to recent research from Intuit Mailchimp.

For brands, the message is clear. Success means being strategic and intentional about when to appear, not simply shouting louder whenever something happens.

From peak-season spikes to a perpetual pulse

Despite the attention that seasonal peaks still receive, according to the research, holiday shopping season moments now represent just 10% of annual shopping opportunities.

Campaign planning must shift from a single high point of the holiday shopping season to a more continuous rhythm throughout the year. More traditional quarterly cycles of launching, pausing and reviewing are outdated when your audience is quickly pivoting between different occasions, whether it is a holiday, an industry-invented occurrence like Prime Day or Small Business Saturday, a major sports event like March Madness or a personal life moment.

Transitioning from more monolithic holiday campaigns to modular, moment-based sprints lets you stay top-of-mind without burning out budgets or customers. Your strategies and plans must adapt to seasonal shifts. These investments will align with evolving consumer behavior, which is moving beyond a few key purchase dates to numerous moments throughout the year.

Dig deeper: Half of ecommerce brands lack the support to scale personalization effectively

Mission-led mindsets replace the all-powerful discount

Just like the old norms of the holiday shopping season are evolving, tried-and-true discounts are no longer the default when driving customer behavior. About 78% of online shopping moments are not led by price promotions, which provides brands with an opportunity for richer storytelling and value-led engagement.

The research looks at the moments or missions that drive consumer behavior rather than the dates they are associated with, which include:

• Advocacy (25%).
• Sales or discounts (23%).
• Celebrations (20%).
• Gathering together (17%).
• Entertainment (5%). 
• Holidays, which have traditionally driven much of the marketing campaign activity by brands and their customers, show these at 10%.

Each mission has its own motivations and emotional triggers. 

• Fear of missing out drives behavior around sales or discounts.
• The giving glow of supporting a cause drives advocacy, and nostalgia drives holiday purchases.

Thus, a Valentine’s discount code speaks to very different motives than an International Women’s Day activation. Messaging, creative and offers must map to the mission (i.e., joy, pride, thrift, community) rather than the calendar label.

Segmenting by mission allows you to balance the head and heart by pairing pragmatic bundles for back-to-school parents with surprise-and-delight tactics for Met Gala enthusiasts. This diversity in approaches, motivations, audiences and moments gives you more opportunities to connect authentically with customers on a mission.

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Relevance beats presence

While deals are abundant, 40% of shoppers aged 18-34 feel overwhelmed, and 25% of all shoppers avoid major sales events, suggesting that even saving money can become excessive. Targeting audiences broadly risks eroding, rather than earning, consumers’ trust. 

Consider the following:

• As an example of relevance by life stage, Father’s Day spending is 50% more likely by parents than non-parents and 44% more likely around summer break. 
• There is also a wide variance in age-related behaviors, such as shopping on Valentine’s Day, which is nearly double for younger shoppers (ages 18-34), and these shoppers’ tendency to buy more around major entertainment events.
• Locale is another factor that can have varying participation based on the moment and event. For instance, urban consumers buy in advocacy-related moments and events at nearly two times the rural rate (39% versus 20%), while rural shoppers lean into Easter and Thanksgiving.

Gone are the days of assuming your audiences follow the same calendar. Instead, the shopping calendar fragments once you filter by who and where. Ignoring this risk means missing out on opportunities that more savvy retailers capitalize on to engage customers in new and more meaningful ways. 

How to adapt to the year-round calendar

The old calendar was dependable and made things more streamlined. Yet, for years, we’ve been witnessing the extension of the holiday season before and after the traditional peak. 

Successful brands will pivot (if they haven’t already) to capitalize on consumers’ new seasonality. Here are things you can do to stay one step ahead. 

Audit and select with intent

Create your directory of moments with a short list of those that match your brand values and your customers’ priorities and missions.

Map data to opportunity for engagement

Use behavioral data to decide whether an event or life moment calls for:

• Price (e.g., back-to-school).
• Exclusivity (e.g., Prime Day VIP drop).
• Inspiration (e.g., Pride content spotlight)

Replace monolithic holiday events with year-round micro-campaigns

Take the thinking from a before, during and after holiday campaign and scale it down accordingly, but keep the same momentum going. Shoppers respond well to pre-event nudges, with a quarter even buying during the warm-up window to these campaigns—pair anticipation emails with real-time engagement and post-event replenishment journeys.

Automate for scale and personalize for relevance

Use mission, demographic and engagement signals to trigger tailored content. Automation makes mass customization feasible without draining teams’ focus and efforts.

Mission-led marketing outperforms pure discount strategies

Despite retail changes and new opportunities, seasonality remains relevant in ecommerce. However, it has splintered into dozens of micro-moments that offer brands savvy enough to know their customers and how to personalize offers to the right audience at the right time and opportunity. 

Brands that curate their year-round calendar with events and opportunities that feel authentic to their customers and their products and services will win in this new seasonality. 

Dig deeper: How to use micro-moments to capture customer intent in real-time