Digital marketing should always be revitalized ahead of a period when engagement and sales are expected to increase. For countless retailers, both online and off, the Christmas shopping season is the prime example of such a period. Forward-thinking companies designed a holiday-specific digital marketing strategy weeks if not months in advance, but whether or not your company fell into that category this year, there are still significant opportunities for you to bolster your digital marketing for the final days of gift shopping.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that a late strategy will provide strong short-term returns, though it might. What is more important is that it takes advantage of the uniquely active situation to increase engagement and test out different digital marketing tactics. If you’re very lucky, some of them will pay off right way. But as long as you aren’t terribly unlucky (or you don’t have the right professional assistance), you should find that any holiday-oriented digital marketing strategy puts you in a better position to tackle that topic after the New Year.

There are multiple advantages to increased ecommerce activity during the holiday season, and those advantages are likely magnified this year as the volume of that activity is bolstered both by preexisting trends and by lingering concerns over the pandemic. Research indicates that about two-thirds of holiday shoppers prefer to make purchases online this year. And it bears mentioning that even among those who don’t, it’s highly likely that some of them will still fall back on ecommerce when it’s especially convenient, or at least browse online before buying in store.

Retailers and their digital marketing partners should understand that such online browsing is often nearly as valuable as the purchases that ideally result from it. Whether or not it leads to conversion, ever expression of interest in a product or service is a data point that digital marketing teams can analyze and apply to the ongoing refinement of their client’s strategy. The holiday shopping season often provides those clients with unique opportunities to push certain products via social media and other platforms, if only to gauge the public’s response.

These opportunities are facilitated by the fact that the holiday season – in this year more than any other – features situations of high demand, speedy turnover, impulsive consumer behavior, and erratic supply trends. With the global supply chain still being strongly affected by pandemic effects, shoppers this year will surely be open to compromise regarding their intended gift purchases. This means they’ll be more attuned to short-term messaging about products that are similar to what they were already interested in.

Digital marketing companies can certainly exploit that openness, and even though only a small portion of engagements are likely to result in conversions, the retailer can reasonably claim victory every time it captures a new set of eyeballs and bolsters traffic to the company website, or engagement with its social media accounts. Then, when the holiday shopping season winds down, the company’s digital marketing team can start making meaningful assessments of which short-term strategies are worth revisiting in the weeks and months to come.