The year-end peak retail season presents opportunities for brands to grow their business. And marketers who are no strangers to using AI will be tapping it to win sales.
But to really level up one’s marketing strategy, harnessing the full potential of AI solutions is critical. It’s why businesses that are more mature in adopting AI enjoy a 59% boost in revenue.1
So here are three ways you can maximise sales opportunities this shopping season by using AI to: win new customers, engage consumers across touchpoints, and help shoppers confidently choose your brand.
Already, brands like Gossby, Pandora, and Tira Beauty have used the following AI-powered marketing strategies to drive growth, and so can you.
1. Use AI-powered campaigns to win new, valuable customers
Acquiring new customers is an obvious way to grow one’s business but it comes at a cost. Research shows it’s more expensive to gain a new customer than to retain an existing one.
But it might require less to attract new customers during APAC’s peak retail season, given that 90% of them purchased from brands they had never bought from before, during key retail moments.2
With APAC shoppers open to trying new brands in this period, you can convert these potential new customers in a cost-effective way with AI-powered campaigns.
Performance Max, for instance, lets you efficiently reach new audiences who are ready to convert across all of Google’s channels like Search, YouTube, and Maps with a single campaign.
In addition, you can steer the campaign to gain new customers with the new customer acquisition (NCA) goal. You can also acquire customers with high predicted lifetime values using the campaign’s New Customer High Value Optimisation feature.
Those Performance Max capabilities were what helped Gossby, a print-on-demand export retailer in Vietnam, gain new customers during the peak retail season, maximise the average order value, and increase overall profit margins.
By using Performance Max with a NCA goal and high-value optimisation, Gossby saw:
In fact, 62% of Gossby’s conversions came from new customers. And of them, 30% were valuable customers who spent 43% more per transaction than existing customers.
2. Tap AI ads solutions to engage customers across touchpoints
Another way businesses can level up their marketing strategies is to use AI ads solutions to connect with APAC’s deliberate shoppers wherever they are researching their purchases — online or offline.
Indeed, 60% of shoppers take six or more actions to research a purchase online, on apps, or in stores before deciding to buy a brand or product that’s new to them.3
And during the peak season, they can become even more active across touchpoints. For example, Australia’s Christmas shoppers made more store visits, online map searches, and search engine queries than at other times.4
To seamlessly engage customers across online and offline touchpoints, you can use AI-powered solutions like Shopping ads and Performance Max for store goals.
Shopping ads let you reach shoppers online with important information like shipping and return policies. And Performance Max for store goals lets you deliver, for example, digital shopping coupons and store location information to shoppers across all of Google’s channels.
Those were the AI-powered ads solutions that jewellery brand Pandora used in Australia to help holiday shoppers make purchase decisions easily, whether online or offline.
Besides running Shopping ads, Pandora used Performance Max for store goals to encourage shoppers online to check out promotions in stores. It further optimised its campaigns with local inventory ads to feature products available at nearby outlets, and gave customers the option to click-and-collect.
That omnichannel strategy contributed not only to the success of Pandora's holiday marketing campaign but also to a 21% year-over-year uplift in the 2023 total return on ad spend (ROAS) for Australia.
3. Draw on generative AI to grow confident purchases
You can also grow sales and win loyal customers during the peak shopping season by helping them make confident purchase decisions. Afterall, highly confident consumers are 6X more likely to say they would “definitely buy again.”5
One way APAC shoppers feel sure about their buying decisions is by finding highly relevant information — it makes them 1.4X more likely to feel confident in their purchase than those who did extensive or quite a lot of research.6
To meet the customer need for highly relevant information, particularly during the peak retail season when information about various deals abound, marketers can draw on generative AI.
By using generative AI image tools in Google Ads or multimodal chatbots like Gemini, you can easily create a wide variety of creative assets and descriptions for product listings, and provide highly relevant information that helps customers make confident purchase decisions.
India’s beauty retailer Tira Beauty, for example, used Gemini to provide shoppers with enhanced information about its face wash products, so they can make confident purchases.
Tira Beauty was keen to adopt Gemini for marketing because it has thousands of product listings on Google Merchant Center, and manually improving the information would have been inefficient.
It used Gemini to swiftly analyse product images, descriptions, and URLs, and extract relevant keywords and attributes to create product listings that better match what shoppers were looking for.
As a result, its face wash products enjoyed a 50% uplift in organic clicks. Its AI-optimised product listings also supercharged its Performance Max campaign, raising online sales by 31% and improving ROAS by 47%.
Given its success in using Gemini for marketing its face wash products, Tira Beauty plans to extend its use of generative AI to marketing other product categories.
Indeed, by unlocking the full potential of AI in marketing, you’ll be well-placed this peak shopping season to win new and valuable customers, helping them choose your brand with confidence, whether online or in stores.
Find more ways you can tap Google AI to optimise for the holiday season – and beyond – with our top tips.
