What Does Winning Look Like for Marketers in 2025?

For retail marketers, the transition from the holiday season to the new year presents opportunities and challenges. While many businesses see the holiday period as their finish line, forward-thinking marketers understand that the real victory lies in converting seasonal momentum into year-round success. The first quarter typically sets the tone for the entire year’s performance.

The retail industry is set for steady growth in 2025, with global volumes expanding by 2.2 percent, marking the fastest growth rate since 2021. Major economic regions are showing robust momentum, with European and U.S. markets expected to accelerate their growth to around 5 percent.

With consumer behaviors continuing to evolve, success in the new year will ultimately be defined not just by sales figures but by how effectively brands can build and maintain meaningful customer relationships throughout the year.

Make Shopping Fun and Hassle-Free

Many surveys have found that one negative experience is enough to make shoppers abandon a brand. During holiday sales, a bad experience almost seems inevitable with all the product promotions and countdown notices that can easily overwhelm customers.

While businesses may want to do everything they can to maximize cart value and purchases, they may risk bombarding their customers with too much information or overstimulation. To strike a balance, they should focus on making the experience engaging and rewarding, where shoppers leave the store feeling they got a good deal on great quality items.

At physical stores, businesses can set up the space to optimize browsing and the checkout experience, positioning store clerks strategically to offer customer service when needed. Stores that are more technologically integrated can use QR codes, tablets, and even smart TVs so customers can better help themselves.

On e-commerce platforms, businesses can optimize their UI/UX design for purchase activity. This could mean creating a special page for all items on sale, leveraging a recommendation section for easier and more tailored browsing, and deploying a chatbot to answer any questions that shoppers might have.

In short, it’s important to personalize as much as you can. Instead of bombarding your shoppers with information and product recommendations, adopt a personalized approach that allows you to present what each browser will appreciate. Natural language processing, image recognition, and other deep learning technologies can generate the most personalized and effective content recommendations in real time.

The Buying Incentive: Give Them Something to Look Forward to

There are already many discounts and promotions available during new year sales. So, if a shopper is still hesitating in the face of these deals, is there anything that can change their mind? The answer, as one might expect, is that it depends.

Whether or not we can convert a shopper depends on two things: whether they're hesitating (as opposed to window shopping) and the incentive offered. Technology has made it easier to identify hesitant shoppers. In fact, artificial intelligence-powered tools can now analyze over 400 digital body language attributes, such as cursor movements and page scrolling, to give each browser a hesitancy score.

If the score hits a predetermined threshold, the software labels them as hesitant and triggers a pop-up with an incentive to complete their purchase. Dynamic coupons make this even more effective by offering various incentives, like discounts, free samples or small gifts. The system then automatically analyzes and segments shoppers to determine the best incentive for each one.

A big sale brings out all types of shoppers. Some only care about getting a price discount, while others want a gift with their purchase. An AI-powered conversion optimization tool can identify which shopper responds best to an incentive, allowing businesses to offer what will best encourage any shopper to convert.

These incentives are especially useful in 2025 as rising inflation means consumers are likely to spend less. The right incentive can make shoppers feel they’re getting more value for their money as well as encourage repeat business.

Global cosmetics brands, including Clarins, use free samples instead of discounts as shopping incentives. This strategy allows these brands to dole out gifts and get their customers to try new products, all while maintaining the prestige and luxury of the brand.

The Engagement After: Continue to Connect Outside the Store

Brands looking to enjoy a profitable and sustainable future are already thinking about what to do next. This process should start with looking at the people who newly subscribed to their mailing lists, followed the brand’s social media accounts, or have left an opening for a future connection. From there, marketers can get their creative juices flowing and think about how to engage the community of existing and potential customers interested in your business.

With social media, engagement has become instant but also increasingly difficult to manage. Instead of worrying about how to reach their audience, businesses now stress about how to keep them engaged and not annoy them in the nonstop world of social media. Our advice: create opportunities for interaction and offer value through education.

Some consumers prefer playing a game with the brand online or getting a behind-the-scenes look at how a product is made. Conversational marketing tools have made online engagement easier, making quality interactions the standard customers now expect.

If you're feeling overwhelmed, don’t worry. Conversational marketing tools are there to relieve you of pressure, not add to it. Conversational marketing platforms now have a wide range of pre-built interactive kits that marketers can customize to fit their needs without any coding. Want to create a digital roulette wheel your followers can play with? Or perhaps you want to set up a fun personality test for your subscribers to take? Conversational marketing tools have you covered.

With global retail volumes expanding and major markets showing steady growth trajectories, retailers must focus on balancing technological innovation with authentic human connections in 2025. By implementing these practical actions driven by data, marketers will best position brands to thrive in a competitive retail market. The key to winning isn't just about maintaining holiday momentum — it's about extending that growth sustainably into 2025, far beyond seasonal rushes.

Hong-Chia How is the former vice president of enterprise sales, Asia Pacific, at Appier, a SaaS company that uses AI to power business decision-making.