Your Sectors Plan Differently. Your Emails Should Too.

Search data shows Garden Centres plan Christmas in August and gift shops wait until September; so why would you email them both about Christmas in August?

Most businesses send the same seasonal email to everyone at once. Christmas campaign goes out in October. Easter campaign goes out in February. Everyone gets the same message on the same day.

It's simple. It's also leaving money on the table.

We've been tracking search behaviour for Joe Davies across 11,000+ retail accounts for over a decade. The patterns are remarkably consistent, year after year. Different sectors don't just search for different products. They search at completely different times.

Card shops start planning Christmas in January. Garden centres begin in late February and peak in mid-October. Gift shops start around the same time but peak four weeks later, in mid-November.

Same wholesaler. Same products. Completely different planning cycles.

Once we understood this, we stopped sending one Christmas campaign and started sending four, each timed to when that sector actually plans their buying. The results? Email open rates improved 23%. Conversion rates improved 31%. Average order value increased 18%.

The only change was timing.

Why One Campaign Doesn't Fit All

The timing differences reveal deeper business realities.

Garden centres are destination locations. They drive Christmas traffic from late October onwards, so they need stock in place weeks earlier than high street shops. When we email them in August about Christmas stock, we're catching them exactly when they're planning. Email them in October and we've missed the window.

Gift shops on high streets see demand build later. Their customers are doing last-minute shopping in November and December. These retailers plan four to six weeks ahead, not four months. An August Christmas email feels irrelevant. A September email lands perfectly.

Card shops are different again. They need extensive ranges (hundreds of card designs) and cannot afford stockouts during peak season. They're planning ten to eleven months ahead. By the time most wholesalers start their Christmas push, card shops have already placed their orders elsewhere.

Online retailers follow a similar pattern to gift shops but with lighter stock holding and faster replenishment cycles. They want to know what's selling well before they commit, so "proven bestsellers" messaging works better than "plan ahead" messaging.

Understanding these differences means you stop treating your customer base as one homogeneous group. You start aligning your marketing calendar with when each sector actually makes decisions.

Segmentation Doesn't Have to Be Complicated

When people hear "segmentation" they often think of complex personalisation engines and individual customer profiles. That's one approach. But sector-level timing is simpler and, in our experience, delivers outsized returns for the effort involved.

For Joe Davies, we segment into four broad groups: garden centres, gift shops, card shops, and online retailers. Each gets a different campaign calendar.

Garden centres and card shops get Christmas campaigns starting in August. The emphasis is on stocking early for October traffic, with messaging around stockout risk.

Gift shops get Christmas campaigns starting in September. The emphasis shifts to new arrivals and trending products, with gift sets featured more prominently.

Online retailers also start in September but the messaging emphasises proven bestsellers and fast replenishment.

Four variations. Not hundreds. The complexity is manageable, but the improvement in relevance is significant.

The Same Principle Applies Beyond Christmas

Search data reveals similar patterns for other occasions. Teacher gift searches (mugs, photo frames, "thank you" gifts) peak in late June, but retailers start searching in March when they plan summer term inventory.

Mother's Day, Father's Day, Easter - in each case, different sectors start planning at different times. The retailers who plan furthest ahead tend to be the ones with the most space and the least tolerance for stockouts. The ones who plan later are often managing tighter margins and smaller orders.

Once you see these patterns, you can't unsee them. And once you align your campaigns to them, generic blast-to-everyone emails start to feel wasteful.

Your Sophisticated Buyers Reveal Themselves

There's a useful side effect of thinking this way. When you start tracking search timing by sector, you also spot your most strategic customers.

Some accounts show sophisticated multi-occasion planning. In January they're searching Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. In March it's Easter and teacher gifts. In May, Father's Day and summer. In August, back-to-school and Halloween. In September, Christmas begins.

These aren't reactive buyers. They're planning their entire year, locking in stock before competitors do.

When we identify these planners, they get different treatment: early access to seasonal ranges, volume discount incentives, quarterly planning calls. They're planning strategically, so we respond strategically.

Sector-level segmentation revealed them. We'd never have spotted the pattern sending the same email to everyone.

Building Your Own Timing Calendar

You don't need ten years of data to start. Six months of search logs will reveal your key patterns.

Export your historical search data and associate each search with an account type or sector. Tag seasonal terms. Then chart when each sector starts searching and when they peak.

Compare this to your current campaign calendar. When do you send seasonal campaigns now? How does that compare to when your sectors actually search? Where are the gaps?

From there, build sector-specific calendars. You don't need dozens of variations. Start with two or three segments based on planning behaviour. Test the timing. Measure the results.

The data is already there. You're already logging searches. You probably already categorise customers by type. Connect those pieces and your seasonal campaigns become predictive rather than reactive.

What's Next

We've looked at how search timing reveals when to market. Next, we'll explore how zero-result searches reveal what to market.

Every search returning zero results is a customer telling you about a product gap. For Joe Davies, zero-result analysis created entirely new categories now generating significant seasonal revenue.

Halloween is one example. Retailers were searching for Halloween products when no Halloween category existed. We created the category, emailed everyone who'd searched, and built it into the seasonal calendar. It's now a meaningful revenue stream, and it exists because search data revealed a gap we'd have otherwise missed.