By Jaki Kackert
Creative Marketing Consultant
It's never too early to look ahead to the opportunities for the new year. Even though January is right around the corner, merchants are challenged right now with balancing the day-to-day operations during the holidays and planning for year-end reconciliation; the last thing they're focused on is next year.
But as the busy season begins to wind down, it'll be reassuring to know that your organization has the marketing strategies and tools in place to help merchants turn the calendar to a successful 2025.
Helping your merchants prepare for the new year with effective marketing strategies involves proactive planning, clear communication and strategic guidance. Here are some approaches to ensure they start the new year strong.
To move forward in 2025, your merchants need to understand what worked well in 2024. Ensuring that you offer robust CRM and real-time inventory solutions can guarantee that your merchants have the right information at their fingertips to analyze sales trends, customer behavior and marketing campaign effectiveness.
Having historical information can help them set realistic and strategic sales and marketing goals for the new year. With the right data, merchants can better build their marketing calendar to take advantage of specific trends, events, seasons, promotions and sales that resonated best with customers.
Help your merchants audit their websites for speed, mobile responsiveness and ease of navigation. Ensure that merchants' websites and marketing strategies are optimized for mobile, as mobile commerce continues to grow.
More and more consumers, especially Gen Zers and zillennials (the micro-generation that overlaps late millennials and early Gen Zers) are shopping via mobile apps and social media platforms—and they're utilizing BNPL functionality online more than ever before, 40 percent per month to be exact.
Merchants who offer multiple purchasing channels help provide a smooth, user-friendly shopping experience for their customers. As a reseller, you'll need to ensure that you provide multiple payment solutions like recurring, mobile and contactless options to help them keep up with consumer demand.
And let's not forget the impact social media channels have on potential sales. According to recent data, approximately 18.5 percent of total online sales are currently generated through social media platforms like Meta, Pinterest and TikTok, with this number expected to continue to rise in coming years. Helping your merchants understand the importance of creating a sales and marketing plan for social media will be key for future success—for both you and them.
Assist merchants in content planning, developing a content calendar for blogs, social media posts and videos that align with their brand and marketing objectives. Work with merchants to plan marketing efforts around key times of the year such as seasons, holidays or product launches to take advantage of the 5 billion social media users online.
Encourage merchants to use video content, such as product demonstrations, live Q&A sessions, or tutorials to create engaging customer experiences. Merchants can showcase user-generated content in their marketing efforts to build trust and authenticity with their audience. Running a contest where users post photos or videos featuring the merchant's products can boost brand visibility and engagement and build trust and authenticity with their audience.
Multi-channel marketing is important for one reason: be everywhere that your customers are. Leveraging multiple channels—email, video, the aforementioned social media, direct mail, print, etc.—allows merchants to interact with their customers across multiple touchpoints for a more comprehensive campaign.
According to studies, over 70 percent of consumers indicated they prefer to connect with merchants over multiple channels, and the lifetime value of the customer increases by 30 percent if multi-channel marketing is used. Merchants are competing on more than quality and price: customers expect service that's tailored to their needs and of consistently excellent quality.
By analyzing data from various channels through an integrated CRM solution that you provide, merchants can gain valuable insights into customer behavior, demographics, preferences, purchase history and trends to help them measure and optimize campaigns for higher effectiveness.
The next topic, customer lifetime value (CLV), is a metric that estimates the total revenue a merchant can expect from a customer over the course of their relationship. It's a forward-looking metric that helps merchants understand the long-term value of retaining customers.
CLV helps merchants make decisions about customer acquisition, retention and relationship management, increasing profitability and fostering long-term loyalty. For merchants that have integrated recurring payment solutions, it's especially helpful when analyzing the churn rate of subscriptions and memberships.
By providing comprehensive guidance and practical marketing strategies, as well as implementing integrated payment and customer-centric solutions to collect the data, resellers and ISOs can help merchants better understand their customer potential and capitalize on opportunities in the new year for continued success. 
As a seasoned marketing professional, Jaki Kackert has contributed to the success of organizations within the payments space and financial services sector and has helped brands, both big and small, create awareness and drive results through effective marketing strategies. Contact her at jbkackert@gmail.com.
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