The holiday shopping season is coming: How are growth marketers preparing?

Because we’re just 22 days from the official start of the holiday shopping season, we reached out to several growth marketers we’ve gotten to know through our TechCrunch Experts project to find out how this year’s supply chain issues are effecting their planned campaigns.

We spoke with:

The global supply chain disruptions we’ve seen so far this year will take time to repair. Even as vaccinated employees get back to work, a kaleidoscope of bottlenecks remain: truck driver shortages, congestion at shipping ports and the scarcity of empty shipping containers and the vessels that can carry them.

In quarterly earnings calls, “there were adjustments made to projections based on the fact that there’s no telling what challenges we might face going into Q4, as far as supply chain,” said Lopez. To maximize order flow and meet customer expectations, Dick said her company moved up its campaign start dates by 2-3 weeks and plans to lean more heavily on SMS and email campaigns than in the past.

“As I look at what’s happening with these companies from a marketing perspective it’s all good, solid fundamentals,” Toy advised. “A lot of this frankly is what you should be doing year-round.” Considering the marketing basics, and learning how to pivot at a moment’s notice, these marketers are ready for the holiday shopping season. Are you?

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Julio Lopez, director of client strategy, retail practice lead, Movable Ink

Not only is the pandemic a big consideration and supply chain challenge, but we’re also faced with some natural disasters. There’s been flooding; there’s been fires. There are many things that are impacting retailers’ ability to control their supply chain. We’re hearing everything from products not being manufactured to things being stuck at ports of entry, because there isn’t enough staff, or there aren’t enough shipping containers to get things over here from China.

This is something that is very much top of mind for a lot of retailers and listening to some earning calls in the last quarter, there were adjustments made to projections based on the fact that there’s no telling what challenges we might face going into Q4, as far as supply chain.

I think it’s very important for retailers to be aware that their marketing plans and the SKUs or lines that they were looking to feature at a particular point in time in Q4, may or may not be available. They’re going to have to be ready to pivot their marketing calendars to account for inventory that may or may not be in stock. So that’s another place where data and the value of data become even more important.