2025 Summer shopping trends: Reach vacation-ready shoppers using Experian’s Audience solutions

Summer may be vacation season for consumers, but it’s go time for marketers. Between holiday weekends, travel season, and changing shopping habits, the pressure is on to deliver campaigns that land and convert.

If you’re feeling behind, you’re not alone. Many marketers face the same challenge every year: How do you actually use the customer data you have to fuel high-impact, seasonal marketing? And how do you ensure your brand shows up in front of the right people in the right place before the competition beats you to it?

That’s where Experian comes in. With Experian’s advanced Audience solutions, you can get ahead of the trends, connect with vacation-ready shoppers, and optimize performance across digital, TV, and retail media using customer data for seasonal marketing.

Capitalize on vacation excitement to drive sales and growth

Summer travel often triggers a surge in pre-trip spending. Surveys show that 82% of consumers plan to travel this summer, and according to Fortune, today’s travelers spend thousands of dollars on things like luggage, apparel, and recreation gear before they even leave their homes!

But while consumer demand is heating up, so are the challenges. Marketers are navigating a turbulent economic environment shaped by shifting demand curves, tighter budgets, the rising cost of goods, and supply chain disruptions caused by newly imposed tariffs. These pressures are forcing teams to rethink everything from product positioning to pricing strategies.

In this climate, it’s more important than ever to maximize performance, reduce waste, and stay laser-focused on reaching high-intent audiences likely to convert. Using customer data for seasonal marketing helps brands predict and capture demand with precise, relevant targeting. Whether your customers are planning a trip to the beach or hiking the Rockies, timely messaging and audience alignment can drive engagement and conversion.

Experian Audiences power effective audience strategies

But even the most compelling campaigns can fall flat if you’re working with incomplete data, outdated segments, or generic targeting. Consumer data providers like Experian can help you fix that.

Our Audience solutions help you go beyond assumptions and truly understand who your shoppers are, what they’re planning, and how they behave, so you’re ready to get in front of their summer plans.

Six steps to creating a successful seasonal marketing campaign

When you’re ready to turn summer intent into strategy, Experian Audience solutions help you translate vacation-driven behaviors into high-performing campaigns. Each product in the Experian Audience suite supports a specific stage in seasonal marketing planning and execution.

1. Define your goals

Before diving into channels and creatives, get clear on your customer database marketing goals. Are you trying to increase online purchases? Drive in-store traffic? Expand brand awareness?

Use Syndicated Audiences to set fast, focused goals. If you’re short on time, Experian’s 2,400+ Syndicated Audiences give you a head start. These pre-built, behavior-based segments — from luxury travelers to seasonal sports enthusiasts — help you quickly identify who to target, where they spend time, and how to message to them.

With segments ready to plug into 30+ activation platforms, you can ensure quick, confident activation.

2. Decide what data you need and which audiences to target

Using customer data for seasonal marketing means mapping behavior to intent. This core tactic in customer database marketing can help you drive deeper engagement. Our data solutions simplify the process, whether you’re starting with limited data or already know your best customers.

• If you’re starting with a list, Enrichment can append lifestyle, income, and travel preference data to help you understand what motivates your existing customers.
• If you don’t have a list, Marketing Attributes gives you full control when building new audiences or lookalikes based on relevant seasonal traits like beach vacationers or frequent CTV watchers.

3. Identify key holidays and events

Summer is full of shopping triggers: Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and countless local and regional events. However, not every customer behaves the same way.

Use Enrichment to understand when your customers are most likely to act. By comparing your first-party data to broader market segments, you can time promotions more strategically. For instance, enrichment might reveal that outdoor gear buyers convert in early June, while luxury travelers plan closer to July.

4. Activate across digital, TV, and retail media

Summer shoppers don’t stick to one screen. They’re streaming TV, reading travel blogs, browsing retail apps, and catching up on email — often from a beach chair or airplane seat. That’s why omnichannel delivery is a must, and it’s where consumer data vendors like Experian can help you reach your audience across channels with targeted messaging for key holidays and events:

• Syndicated Audiences simplifies omnichannel activation with built-in integrations to 30+ leading activation platforms. These pre-mapped segments let you deliver consistent messaging across the places where your audience is most engaged.
• Looking for privacy-forward reach? Contextually-Indexed Audiences are segments built by linking real-world behavioral data to the types of content those audiences typically consume online, allowing you to activate based on content instead of identity while offering a more contextually relevant experience. Using customer data for seasonal marketing, Experian maps real audience segments across web and app environments — like national park guides and travel blogs — for ID-free precision targeting in a cookieless environment.

5. Track and evaluate performance

Don’t wait until the end of the campaign to make changes. Experian’s measurement tools help you track performance in real time, so you can optimize early and often.

Measure how well specific audiences — enriched, syndicated, or contextual — are performing across platforms and use those insights to shift spend toward top performers.

6. Optimize and refine your strategy

After the season ends, it’s time to take what you’ve learned and build smarter for the next push.

Use Outcomes to analyze:

• Who converted
• Which segments underperformed
• How your customer base compares to the broader market
• How your audience evolved
• Which campaigns drove meaningful adoption

These insights can then inform your next round of audience building, so whether it’s back-to-school or a holiday, you’re already ahead.

Example 1: The beach vacation shopper

To illustrate Experian’s Audience solutions at work, let’s say a high-end swimsuit brand wants to reach women over 30 planning beach vacations to Florida, Hawaii, or Mexico. However, their CRM only includes basic transaction and purchase details and offers little insight into who their customers are.

Audience solution: Enrichment

Using Experian’s Enrichment solution, the brand could layer on lifestyle, income, and travel preference data to turn shallow profiles into rich audience segments.

With a deeper understanding of their shoppers, the brand could develop a targeted messaging strategy by destination, build high-performing lookalike audiences, and confidently activate across channels.

Example 2: The European traveler

As another example, suppose a footwear brand wants to reach millennial travelers heading to Europe between May and August. They specialize in stylish, comfortable walking shoes that are ideal for travel but lack the technical in-house resources to build custom segments.

Audience solution: Syndicated Audiences

Using our Syndicated Audiences, the brand could easily tap into pre-built segments tied to leisure travelers, international shoppers, and comfort-focused footwear buyers. With plug-and-play access to over 2,400 verified audience segments, the brand could quickly layer this targeting into their programmatic and paid social campaigns without requiring custom development.

And with fast speed-to-market and improved message relevance, the brand could launch cross-channel campaigns just in time for peak summer travel planning.

Example 3: The outdoorsman

Consider a camping tent company that wants to reach families planning summer trips to national parks, campgrounds, or RV resorts. They don’t have much first-party data to work with, but they know their audience is online, researching their next adventure.

Audience solution: Contextually-Indexed Audiences

With Experian’s Contextually-Indexed Audiences, the brand could target people actively reading content about outdoor travel (like hiking tips, campground reviews, or road trip itineraries) without relying on cookies or IDs. They’d be able to activate contextually relevant audiences mapped to sites that outdoor enthusiasts frequent and drive site traffic with strong click-through rates.

Example 4: Big-box retailer launching summer gear

Imagine a national retailer preparing to promote summer essentials like patio furniture, grills, fitness gear, and travel accessories. Their goal is to build predictive models for their summer product demand and reach new customers most likely to buy before they even search.

Audience solution: Marketing Attributes

With Experian’s Marketing Attributes, the retailer could license over 5,000 lifestyle, demographic, and behavioral variables to enrich internal models and uncover high-indexing consumer groups, such as outdoor entertainers or health-conscious families.

This data-powered insight would help them predict demand and identify audience segments worth testing across media channels. The team could find new, qualified segments ideal for email and CTV activation and get a head start on the season, eventually increasing ROI on their summer campaign spend.

Talk to Experian about your summer campaigns today

Using customer data for marketing doesn’t have to be overwhelming, especially when you have access to a trusted consumer data provider and plug-and-play audience tools for every stage of the funnel.

Whether you’re working with a robust CRM or starting fresh, consumer data vendors like Experian can help you reach the right audiences with speed, accuracy, and confidence. Our advanced tools are designed for both advanced marketers and teams just beginning to explore consumer database marketing. No matter your goals, Experian is here to help you build an audience strategy that performs.