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For brands in the digital age, social media has become a nearly ubiquitous tool for communicating with consumers, achieving added brand exposure and engaging with followers. In fact, more than three in four small businesses harness social media to strengthen consumer connections, and nearly 92% of U.S. businesses with 100-plus employees include social media in their marketing mix.

Brands and marketers tend to put an outsized amount of focus on acquiring new customers — and understandably so, as that’s how businesses grow. But often, the focus on attracting new audiences can overshadow another important key to long-term business success: keeping the customers you already have coming back.

For brands doing business in the outdoor space, the opportunities to excel in today’s market abound. In fact, according to the 2023 Outdoor Participation Trends Report from the Outdoor Industry Association:

For any business, the holiday season is a critical time for realizing big annual revenues. After all, the end of each calendar year, when holiday shopping is in full swing, is typically when annual profit projections are made or missed. And according to expert forecasts, the 2023 holiday season will present opportunities for growth, with holiday retail sales expected to grow by 3.5% to 4.6% over 2022’s numbers.

It’s a mantra heard far and wide (and over and over again) in professional marketing circles: Know your customer. And when you think about it, it’s a hard principle to dispute.

Cyber Monday 2022 brought a fitting end to what was a record-breaking holiday weekend, according to the Washington Post. Consumers spent $35.4 billion online over that period. As for Cyber Monday, it presents a huge opportunity for online retailers to boost fourth-quarter (and annual) revenues. In fact, since the introduction of Cyber Monday in 2005 as the online answer to the brick-and-mortar-heavy Black Friday, U.S. sales for the added “shopping holiday” have grown from roughly $484 million in its debut to a single-day online record of $11.4 billion (with a B!) in 2022.

Most brands that sell their products and/or services online invest significant amounts of time, effort and money into attracting visitors to their website. But once consumers get there, if they don’t eventually convert, the investment isn’t nearly as valuable as when they do — especially when it comes to impacting the bottom line.

Common sense tells us that selling to an existing customer (customer retention) should be both easier and less expensive than finding and converting new customers (customer acquisition) — especially if the existing customer has been well-served. After all, the logic tells us, starting from scratch to gain a new customer will require more effort, more resources and more time than simply keeping a customer you already have.

As professional marketers and business owners know all too well, a lot of time, effort and money go into catching consumers’ attention and attracting them to visit a brand’s website or brick-and-mortar store. But once they’ve arrived, the job is far from over. If the prospective customer encounters any significant hurdles to conversion along the path to purchase, all the work and spending can be for naught, at least when it comes to the business’s bottom line.

Over the past five years, U.S. holiday e-commerce sales have risen from $108.7 billion in 2016 to $239.26 billion in...

When it comes to finding e-commerce success, there are a lot of different paths you take to the top — as evidenced by the long list of modern businesses turning huge profits selling their products and services online. But no matter the type of business or what it’s selling, if it’s prospering in the online marketplace, it’s likely employing some key tactics in its online strategy. It’s also likely that some of those same powerful tactics are holding prominent positions in leading competitors’ e-comm game plans.

Working in the realm of public relations, there is no better aspect of the job than getting the opportunity to plan and implement a press trip or media event. And while we may be partial, planning one in the outdoor space may even surpass all other industries (combined).