Memorial Day Trends

Memorial Day is fast approaching, starting shortly after the Mother's Day boost that largely streches across women's apparel, beauty, homecare / home goods, and gift-forward advertisers. Mother's Day promos are expected to wrap ~May 11th with straggling potentially bleeding through that week to shore up any belated gifters by May 15th.

The majority of Memorial Day sales will run through the 4-day weekend, with early-birds starting the previous week around 5/18. Based on data across our portfolio of brands, we typically see the long weekend around the holiday perform the best with peaks on Friday and Monday. Verticals such as swimwear, apparel, outdoor goods and accessories, and beauty tend to yield especially strong results with offers ranging from GWP's to % off to new collection launches.

If your brand is not running a sale, we recommend still considering scaling up through the long weekend and starting your ramp a few days prior to capture increased customer demand and to combat anticipated high traffic costs across platforms. Especially in the US, consumers are highly trained to consider MDW a shopping weekend, so we tend to see strong sales stretching from Friday-Monday as people enjoy their weekend plans and Monday off.

In your preparation - don't be afraid to slightly increase your AWN and Prospecting efforts to capture the anticipated higher MDW demand, where you can reallocate budget slightly downward to RTG to yield the benefit of your PR efforts ahead of time. We don't recommend over-indexing or moving a significant amount of budget to Retention campaigns on Paid as those customers are likely to convert via organic or email/sms efforts regardless and Paid will over-attribute their contribution.

Start your upper funnel prep work early - first or second week of May to close sales effectively during MDW, and ensure you are leveraging diverse creative types including video, static, partnership ads, and the all-important catalog ads.