Every year, businesses brace for the same predictable pattern: a massive revenue spike between Black Friday and the New Year, followed by a precipitous drop in January. This “holiday hangover” is often accepted as the cost of doing business. But what if you could not only amplify that holiday peak but also significantly cushion the post-holiday fall?
A sophisticated, data-driven approach to CRM mailing can transform this cycle. By looking at a successful campaign from last year, we can uncover a powerful strategy for Holiday 2025 that delivers more revenue during the peak season and, crucially, extends that momentum long after the decorations come down.
A Tale of Two Strategies: Running Your CRM in Parallel
To truly unlock the potential of your customer list, you can’t rely on a single, one-size-fits-all approach. The most effective CRM programs run two distinct mailing strategies in parallel, each serving a unique purpose.
The first strategy includes your foundational, business-driven campaigns. These are the mailings you’re likely already doing:
- New Product Launches: Announcing your latest and greatest offerings
- Cross-selling Opportunities: Suggesting complementary products to recent buyers
- Follow-up Mailings: Re-engaging customers after a purchase or interaction
These campaigns are essential, often driven by your team’s domain expertise and business goals. However, they don’t always capture the full potential revenue sitting in your CRM.
The second, and more powerful, strategy is Postie’s CRM Optimization. This approach is built on a single, uncompromising goal: incrementality. The aim is to identify and mail only the customers who will generate the most additional revenue—sales you would not have captured otherwise. This is achieved using sophisticated reinforcement learning algorithms that analyze purchase cadences and advertising responsiveness to pinpoint the most promising segments of your audience at any given moment.
By running these two strategies side by side, you balance your expert-driven campaigns with a purely data-driven engine designed for maximum financial uplift.
The Secret to True Measurement: The Baseline Group
How do you know if your sophisticated strategies are actually working? The answer lies in establishing a scientific control: a baseline group.
A baseline group is a randomly selected sample of your CRM that consistently receives mail according to a standard, unchanging cadence. By tracking this group’s performance over time, you create a stable benchmark against which to measure the true impact of your advanced tactics, such as CRM Optimization. Without a baseline, you’re flying blind, unable to distinguish between a general market lift (like the holiday rush) and the specific, incremental value your strategy is creating.
Deconstructing a Winning Holiday Campaign
To see this dual-strategy approach in action, let’s analyze a real campaign’s performance trajectory, comparing a CRM Optimization group against a baseline group.
The Setup: Pre-Holiday Performance
In the summer and fall leading up to the holiday season, the stage was set. The baseline group was performing steadily, while the CRM Optimization strategy was already delivering a 6x higher conversion rate. This established a strong pre-holiday advantage.
The Holiday Surge: A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats (Unevenly)
On November 12, the primary holiday mailer hit homes, and as expected, performance surged. The baseline group saw its conversion rate double (a 2x lift)—a solid result reflecting the heightened shopping intent of the season.
However, the CRM Optimization group experienced a massive 3x lift in its performance. Because its surge was significantly larger than the baseline’s, its relative advantage grew. It was now outperforming the baseline by 8x. This demonstrates that while the holidays boost everyone, an optimized strategy capitalizes on the season’s potential far more effectively.
The Post-Holiday Hangover: Where the Real Advantage Emerges
On January 11, the holiday magic faded. The baseline group’s performance plummeted, retaining only 28% of its holiday peak. Even more telling, its performance level dropped below where it had been in the summer, suffering a classic post-holiday dip.
The CRM Optimization group was not immune to the seasonal slowdown; its performance also dipped. But the critical difference was in the details. It retained 48% of its holiday performance—a much stronger showing. This meant its new performance floor was now higher than its pre-holiday starting point.
This is the most fascinating insight: the relative advantage of CRM Optimization was at its absolute largest in the post-holiday period. While the baseline group was struggling, the optimized group had successfully mitigated the decay, effectively extending the holiday sales window further into January. It didn’t just create a higher peak; it built a higher, more resilient foundation for the new year.
Your Actionable Playbook for Holiday 2025
This analysis provides more than just interesting data; it offers a clear, actionable roadmap for the upcoming holiday season.
- Aggressively Increase Your Mailing Reach: The data proves there is significant untapped potential in your CRM list during the entire holiday window. While a typical recommendation might be to mail 10-20% of your list in any 45-day period, the proven success of CRM Optimization calls for a much bolder approach. For the core holiday season (think October through February), you should aim to mail over 50% of your entire CRM list within every 30- to 45-day window.
- Lean into the Post-Holiday Opportunity: Don’t view January and February as a recovery period. View it as the time when your strategic advantage is greatest. The analysis showed that the incremental gains from optimization are most pronounced when overall consumer spending dips. By continuing your high-reach mailing strategy past the holidays, you capture valuable revenue while competitors are pulling back.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What do I need to get started with CRM Optimization? Ideally, 2-4 years of both transaction and mailing history provides the richest data for the models. However, you can get started with a minimum of 1-2 years of transaction data. If you have no prior mailing history, a foundational model trained on years of industry data can be used to kickstart the process.
- Can I run this alongside my other planned holiday campaigns? Absolutely! In fact, it’s encouraged. CRM Optimization is designed to run in parallel with your domain-specific campaigns for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other key dates. It adds a layer of pure incremental lift on top of your existing strategy.
- How long does it take to see these kinds of results? The impressive results detailed in this case study were achieved during the very first season the strategy was implemented. This isn’t a long-term project that takes years to pay off; you can expect to see a significant impact in your first holiday season.
By adopting a data-driven, dual-track CRM strategy, you can move beyond the boom-and-bust cycle of holiday retail and build a more profitable, resilient, and sustained growth engine for the year ahead.
There’s still time to get BFCM campaigns underway. Reach out to Postie today!
