How To Leverage January’s Low CPMs

Hey 👋

Happy New Years To All Merchants! 🥳

We hope your holiday season went well, but now it’s January..

And every big brand burnt through their ad budget on BFCM & Christmas — that means CPM is at an all-time low 👀

That means you get to experiment with different marketing channels, as well as cost-efficient ways to get eyes on your brand — and that’s exactly what this week’s post is all about 🔥

Let’s not waste any time and get right into it!

1. Why Is January The Best Time To Test? 🤔 

Before we get to the experiments — let’s get one thing straight:

Q4 is the both the most expensive but most profitable time to run ads, but you can only spend so much before you have to tone it down.

Here’s a cool visual from Confect, showing the dips in CPM:

The cool thing is, even though customers shop a lot during the holiday season, performance in January doesn’t drop — mostly because of leftover stock.

During January, there’s less competition, ads are much cheaper to run, and shoppers have the same desire to buy from you, while they still have that “Christmas Spirit”!

But past 3rd of January, normal ads start to take over in performance compared to holiday-themed ads, as you can see from the dip in the 2nd half of the visual.

And while CPMs are low, it’s the best time ever to experiment with your approach — let’s finally dive into a few ways you can run ads efficiently this month 😄 

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2. New Tactics Going Into 2025 🌟 

These strategies are very worth playing around with (especially since big brands will use them soon enough):

1️⃣ Giveaways — a great way to generate organic impressions for your brand, look at Ridge, for example. Last year they gave away 2 trucks, and one winner chose $100K over the truck. Sweepstakes, even if done yearly, can attract lots of people to your brand

2️⃣ Video DPAs — dynamic product ads display products to users based on their abandoned cart, browsing history and previous interactions. One service that does this well is Marpipe, and, the cool thing is, the better you are at designing them or using video, the more rewarded you are with the performance

3️⃣ Incrementality Testing — measure advertising impact across channels (like Meta, Google, TV, podcasts), and sales platforms (DTC Sites, Walmart, Amazon, Target).

Define your top KPIs to test, and then a control group (the segment of your audience that isn’t exposed to the marketing campaign), and the test group (which is exposed).

Then you can measure the lift and see whether that campaign was a success or not, an example visual from Matomo:

Other than these, there are still more high-engagement strategies & even more channels through which you can market your brand 👀 

P.S. — In case you missed it, we posted a 2024 eCom Wrap-Up, covering all the biggest events that happened last year 🔥

3. High-Engagement Content Strategies 💬 

These in particular can be goldmines for your brand (if you aren’t already doing them):

1️⃣ Live Shopping (on TikTok) — Canvas Beauty Brand made $2M in sales during a single live event on Black Friday, and Nicki Minaj’s live shopping event got over 172M views and 115M likes. Live shopping is something you may regret not jumping in on sooner

2️⃣ Collaborations & Drops — just partnering with a brand that has similar values & products with yours can merge audiences & adds a huge layer of trust to both sides. If you know such a brand (even if they are smaller!), don’t be afraid to reach out.

A cool (but very silly 😂) example of a collab is Liquid Death x e.l.f. Cosmetics — their partnership completely blew up back in March:

3️⃣ High-Volume Social Content — again, TikTok is a goldmine for brands that post hundreds of creator videos a day. It’s the only platform that has it’s own Shop, a Live Shopping feature, and an algorithm thanks to which you can blow up off 1 great video

If you want to learn how to collaborate with creators & make sales from TikTok, check out our full eCom TikTok Shop Guide 🔥

4. View-Through Channels Are Worth It? 👀 

Aside from the hype around TikTok & social media marketing, there are still tried-and-true marketing channels that are worth playing around with, especially now in January:

1️⃣ TV — you can use existing assets to create an awesome TV commercial, and the cool part is, if you find a winning creative, you can run it for weeks or even months.

A great example is Jack Black’s Amazon TV ad that ran during Thursday Night Football:

2️⃣ Advertorials — another great way to drive awareness to your brand. Running them with publishers can be overpriced, so looking into agencies like Character & Silver can be worthwhile. On Meta, sponsored editorial content is accounting for 22% of ad spend now

3️⃣ Mobile Ad Networks — a ton of brands are using AppLovin, and if you’re a brand with a decent scale on Meta, it actually is worth testing. This just means your brand & products may appear as in-app ads, which you’ve seen on random mobile games and apps (AppLovin owns 350+ apps that you can advertise through)

5. Now’s Time To Take AI Seriously 🤖 

It’s worth looking into where you can leverage AI more, especially now that you have a month or so to test without breaking the bank.

Here’s what you should look to test AI with:

1️⃣ Pop-Ups — tools like Black Crow and Alia work well together, cause Black Crow uses AI to understand when it’s the best time to show the user a pop-up on your site, and Alia creates highly converting pop-ups that don’t scare the visitor away.

2️⃣ AI in Email & SMS — services like Warmer can write personalized emails in seconds based on customer data, and Exposebox does the same but with SMS, too. It’s worth doing your own research to find tools that actually match your needs 1:1, however.

3️⃣ Within Site Optimization — look for tools that can be trained on your site, and tell you exactly what to update to increase CR% based on conversion data and traffic, we’ve found Alli and Pathmonk, they may be worth checking out.

Also, Perplexity AI recently broke into the eCom bubble with a shopping tool, check out our post on The AI Search Era & how to prep your brand for it 😉 

That’s that! With January being the most efficient month to test new marketing strategies, we’ve listed as many as we could 🔥

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Daniil from ECORN