The holiday season is almost here. It’s time to offer your customers some eye-catching deals. But it’s also time to run some special campaigns to promote your holiday deals. For that, you need to have your best holiday marketing strategy ready.
Due to the pandemic, eCommerce sales this holiday season will rise, unlike any other year. Online promotion will also have a bigger impact than any other time. So it is quite an unusual time for marketers to plan and implement the holiday marketing strategy.
But worry no more; we have come up with some of the best holiday marketing strategies for you to implement this year.
Why holiday marketing strategy needs special attention
The holiday season is the season of giving, caring, and sharing. This is also the reason that this season brings in more sales than any other season. According to NRF, the 2019 holiday season alone accounted for a sales figure of $730.2 billion, which is 4.1% more than the last year. The eCommerce business also grew a lot, accounting for $137.6 billion.
These statistics show why the holiday season is termed the most prolific season for business owners. So, as you can guess, the holiday season is the most competitive time for promoting your product, as you will face stiff competition from all around. This is why this season will require you to follow a different marketing strategy to succeed.
However, if you can follow the right strategies, the holiday season is the best time to achieve the most sales.
Holiday marketing strategies to follow
You already know the importance of a special strategy for the holiday season. So here you go: the best holiday marketing strategy that you should follow this year.
Start early—like really early!
The perfect time to start holiday marketing is to start early. Start building suspense more than a month prior to the holiday season. You can also create a standalone landing page and acquire emails for sending out emails with all your offers for specific holidays.
Starting early marketing for the holiday season will help build hype and will give you more exposure than offering a last-minute deal.
You will also get more time to partner with other businesses for the upcoming holiday season and offer your customers some better deals.
Set a timeline
Set an exact timeline for when your holiday specials deals will be available. Make sure to show a countdown on your website to let people know when exactly you’ll start the offers.
This will create a sense of excitement for the customers, and those who are wanting to buy from you will surely check out the deals once you offer them during the holidays.
Start it up with email marketing
Do you know that email is still the best way to make your voice heard? Well, the statistics say that it is.
According to Mailchimp, the average opening rate of email is 21.33% for all industries.
Which is way more exposure than any other medium of promotion.
It’s ideal to email the existing subscribers a while before the special offers start and then again while the sale is live. You can also send another one to let your subscribers know that the time is running out to avail of the offers. This way, you can boost your sales for the holiday season with ease.
Take your time to create dazzling campaign visuals
Campaign visuals matter. People remember 10% of what they read but 65% of what they see. So you can guess how much impact it can have on your sales. The quality of the image has a huge impact on your overall conversion from the campaign.
That’s why it’s important that you take your time creating some eye-catching visuals for your holiday campaign. Data-driven marketing, along with some dazzling visuals, can make this holiday the best one for your business.
Nothing can beat a video for engagement
Videos are the best media for engagement. Don’t believe us? Then see the stats for yourself. Statistics say that 54% of consumers want to see more video content from a brand or business they support.
So as you can understand that, you can increase your engagement by many folds, if you can create some attractive videos. And we all know that more engagements mean more sales.
Here is an example of video promotion for holiday marketing.
If you don’t have an in-house digital media creation team, you can check the freelance marketplace like Upwork, or Fiverr to get your videos done. They will charge you $5 or more, depending on the complexity of the video.
Offer customers an omnichannel shopping experience
Imagine someone saw your ad while on desktop, but still couldn’t decide on buying from you. When on the subway, he browsed through your products again, but this time from the app, but couldn’t find the product while thinking of buying it. Sounds like a disastrous scenario?
An omnichannel experience offers a seamless shopping experience across devices so that customers can enjoy a smooth purchasing decision and buy from wherever they want. Creating an omnichannel shopping experience for your customers can both help increase your sales and retain customers.
You have to keep in mind that in today’s world, there are choices all around. So unless you can offer the customers an omnichannel shopping experience, you’ll most likely lose many customers. So we suggest you run campaigns on various platforms and be present wherever your prospective customer visits.
Make good use of good old PPC ads
PPC Ad is the oldest way of promoting a product online. Yet it is still here and well. According to Unbounce, PPC visitors are 50% more likely to purchase something than organic visitors. That is because if a visitor visits your website by clicking the PPC Ad, they already have a good first impression about you. And if you can truly grab the attention of a visitor, getting more sales is not really that hard.
By utilizing PPC ads you can really boost the holiday sales by many folds. As PPC Ads can be shown to people based on their interest, you’ll surely get a good conversion, especially during this holiday period.
Run a viral campaign for social media
Viral marketing is a type of promotion that is engaging enough to spread through word of mouth. There are various examples of viral marketing and some of them can be perfect for holiday marketing.
Interactive puzzles, quizzes, contests, and even something like a hashtag campaign can yield some great results and help you achieve your holiday sales goal.
The great thing about viral marketing campaign is that they cost little to no money yet offers great engagements. So using them on your holiday marketing strategy might be a good plan, what do you say?
Don’t forget social media ads
Social Media is the new king of the internet. Around 2 billion people use Facebook every day, so whoever your target customer is, there’s a good chance they are using Facebook or any other social media.
That is why social media ads have become one of the integral parts of marketing campaigns. In 2019, marketers worldwide spent more than $89 billion on social media ads. Sounds huge, right?
So unless you want to miss out on a huge chunk of customers, social media should be a big part of your holiday marketing strategy.
Show off last year’s offers and sales
People like to see something done by others before they decide to do that by themselves. Offering the best deal of the town is essential, but showing them how much you sold last year is a mind game that pays off more.
Let people know how many sales you amassed last year and offer them an even bigger deal (at least on paper!).
These types of promotions urge buyers to get the deal more than the regular ones. After all, selling is about playing a mind game, right?
Final words
The holiday is the most important time of the year for customers and sellers alike. While sellers give staggering discounts, that becomes possible because people tend to buy more during this season. But unless you have a solid strategy to promote the exciting deals you are offering to the customers, your discounts will remain unnoticed.
Following the holiday marketing strategy we have mentioned here, you can surely pull off a great holiday season in terms of sales.
Let us know if you have any preferred strategy for holiday deals promotion. We will be glad to hear about your experience.
A Strategic Marketing Plan is a document that outlines an organization’s marketing goals and objectives for a specific period of time and how they will be achieved. It also includes an analysis of the organization’s current marketing situation, including its strengths and weaknesses.