What do Spotify Wrapped and your holiday marketing performance review have in common? Both use data to tell a compelling and highly personal story. What’s more, the data in each can reveal insights you never would have expected.
If you use Spotify, you know that your Wrapped doesn’t simply list how many minutes you tuned in or all of the artists, songs, and podcasts you sampled. Instead, it mixes your data with insights it pulls from across and beyond its platform to paint your digital portrait. It even predicts your age based on your listening habits. Now that’s digital data wizardry!
Similarly, your holiday marketing performance review uses your data to reveal how close you came to meeting or exceeding your goals, what worked and what didn’t, and what you could retain or change for 2026.
You might have a sense of how your season was going while you were in the thick of it. This focused review gives you the complete picture with trends and details you might have missed while you were occupied with the day-to-day plan.
This marketing data analysis should be standard operating procedure for any retail or ecommerce operation that relies on the holiday quarter for a substantial portion of its revenue. But any organization that develops a special marketing plan for this time of year can benefit from this focused review.
In this post, I’ll focus mainly on reviewing your holiday email marketing program. But I’ll also pull in other channels and data sources because email succeeds when it’s a key feature of an orchestrated cross-channel approach.
Why you need a holiday ecommerce performance review
This performance review won’t replace your annual email marketing performance review across all four business quarters. But anyone who has ever worked in retail or ecommerce knows that the holiday quarter is a different beast. That’s why you develop a specific holiday email marketing plan, which then can benefit from a focused review.
As with any performance review, running the numbers will uncover key points like these:
- Total revenue and day-by-day trends
- Alignment with your holiday email marketing plan and goals
- Campaign performance trends
- Audience engagement trends
- Comparison with 2024 results
What you learn will help you and your team retool for the coming year and even shed some light on the differences between the holiday season and the rest of the year. But it serves a wider purpose:
- It highlights contributions to company goals, which you can share with your executive team
- Pulls key numbers into a single report or spreadsheet that you should know by heart in case you are asked for them unexpectedly
- Points out big wins that you can celebrate and build on
- Reveals unseen problems and gives you a starting point to correct them.
Yes, it’s one more task to complete before you can close the books on 2025. But it can make 2026 even more productive.
How to analyze holiday campaign performance
Your first step should be to build your performance review into the workflow of your holiday email campaign plan. That way, you can assign numbers to each team member ahead of time and then work together to compile the review. It’s more of a challenge if you’re a team of one, but you should be able to access the data you need quickly after the holiday dust settles.
In the meantime, this checklist gives you the key areas to track and the numbers and insights you’ll need for each. You will also include qualitative insights that you gained from your marketing data analysis.
Your 10-point holiday marketing performance review checklist
1. KPI scorecard
- Website traffic focusing on days and hours bracketing your email campaigns
- Conversion rate per campaign and total conversion rate for the marketing period
- Basket value comparison
- Campaign-level revenue. Compare automated and broadcast promotional campaigns and behavior-triggered emails.
- Channel performance comparison (email, social, web, SMS)
- Total revenue
2. Data, audience, and segmentation insights
- Segmentation planning and changes (with revenue or engagement performance if possible)
- Amount of data you can access in your ESP or CRM versus data you must request from a data team
- What you learned about your customers in this period
- Acquisition sources: Comparisons between first- and third-party sources
3. Messaging and creative analysis
- Campaign themes that customers or subscribers responded to or ignored (urgency, emotional, informational, etc.)
- Subject line performance and comparison with campaign results. Compare AI-generated and organic subject lines for performance and creativity.
- Creative content associated with high or low-performing campaigns
- Last-minute creative changes and circumstances requiring them
4. Offer and promotions review
- Rank offers and promotions by KPIs. Compare across revenue, engagement, conversion, basket value, and promotion type (percentage discounts, money off, BOGO, etc.) Determine how much discounts ate into the profit margin.
- Automated versus broadcast campaigns. Measure to assess personalization impact on clicks, conversions, and revenue
5. Operations and tech performance
- Website load times and downtimes
- Checkout process and friction
- Order fulfillment
- Email platform performance/downtime issues
- Email workflow and stoppage points
6. Acquisition checkup
- Source review to uncover first- and third-party performance and issues like customer value, engagement, high unsubscribe rate, or spam complaints
7. Customer feedback insights
- Review email comments/complaints
- Talk with customer support/service team to identify issues
8. Budget and ROI assessment
- Areas over-spent or under-spent, and reasons why
- Insights into impact on 2026 annual/holiday budget planning
- Compare campaigns, channels, acquisition sources, and message types to evaluate ROI and note which were higher/lower than expectations
9. Testing and experiments
- List tests, methodologies, and results
- Suggest changes for 2026 holiday or annual email strategic planning or campaigns
10. Strategic planning
- Assess areas where you stayed with your original plan and where/why you had to change gears
- Review performance on new tactics. Pull in data from the KPI scorecard.
Wrapping up: Write it down, share it around
Your holiday marketing performance review is like a good workout. You’ll exercise all your marketing analytical powers pulling the data together, but you’ll feel great when it’s over. Plus, you’ll have a report that lays out exactly where your holiday program succeeded and where it fell short.
But that’s not where this story ends. The value isn’t just in the report. It’s what you do with it.
First, write everything down. Focus on everything your holiday email program did to boost the bottom line and contribute to company goals.
Next, make it special. Design it like a presentation so it’s attractive and easy to read, and the highlights stand out. Flex the creativity you have left and present the numbers and insights as a narrative that conveys the impact of your holiday email marketing program.
After that, market the report to your marketing team members beyond the email group and to your executives. Don’t just email it as an attachment. Print it out and clip a note to the cover that teases the contents. Hand-deliver it if you can.
These extra steps can make your report more appealing than the usual spreadsheet with comments. That effort also could move your email program from the sidelines to the center of attention.
Finally, use it to plan for 2026. Sure, you had to do some planning before you turned in your 2026 budget request. But this report can lay the groundwork for strategic and tactical changes later in the year.
What new program could you request budget money for? What new metric would you want to try to measure? You won’t have to page back through spreadsheets to find the numbers you need.
Your Q4 self will thank you!
One last thought
Even if you have a full team to work with, pulling these numbers and insights together into an attractive and easy-to-read report can be a challenge. We’re always available with advice, guidance, and extra hands to pitch in.
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