As the owner of a purpose-driven e-commerce store, you’re likely aware that you can generate the most sales with effective holiday season marketing. Not only can the gift-giving Christmas craze boost sales, but it can also build brand awareness by attracting and retaining new customers to your store.
To ensure your business grows throughout the end of the year, you should use some tried and tested holiday season marketing strategies. Here’s how.
Holiday Season Marketing Best Practices
1. Start Advertising Early
One of the most crucial steps to hooking holiday shoppers is to advertise as early as September. This gives you ample time to grab your customers’ attention and extend attractive discounts that can boost your sales.
Two great methods to advertise early involve early access to loyal customers and website optimization.
Offer Subscribers and Loyal Customers Early Access
Use the holiday season to make your subscribers feel special by offering them early access to holiday discounts or exclusive deals and offers only available to them.
By incentivizing customers to share their reviews, photos, and stories on social media, you can create a buzz before the start of the holiday rush. Not only will this simple social media marketing strategy allow you to attract more customers and boost sales, but it can also build brand loyalty.
Website Optimization
Priming your website for the season by prominently displaying your holiday marketing campaigns has been shown to boost user engagement and enhance the user experience. A few simple tweaks you can use to revamp your website include:
Using holiday-inspired CTAs – Spread the Christmas spirit and encourage your customers to shop by optimizing your CTAs. Make them enticing and descriptive, i.e. ‘Shop Stocking Fillers’, and include target keywords when possible. Don’t just change the wording but also the color and layout to align with the season.
Adding personalized holiday greetings – Customers value personalized messages. A pop-up on your live chat widget can grab a site visitor’s attention to make them check out your holiday deals.
Implementing banners or pop-ups – Sales and discounts increase the likelihood that a site visitor becomes a paying customer. Use banners and pop-ups to highlight your site-wide or product-specific holiday sales.
2. Build Momentum
Once you’ve created an initial buzz, it’s time to build momentum through the power of social media and influencers to enhance your e-commerce success.
Boost Engagement With Giveaways
Everyone loves free stuff. That’s why giveaways are so effective. They provide an inexpensive method to generate email leads, boost engagement among your followers, attract new followers, build brand awareness and create a buzz.
To get the most out of your giveaways, ask followers to like, comment, share a post, or tag their friends. This will not only generate interest in your giveaway and products but also in your brand as a whole.
Partner With Influencers
Many brands see the value of partnering with influencers to increase their exposure. You don’t necessarily have to pay them for direct promotions or sponsorships, but can instead ask them to use your products in their holiday-themed social content.
Followers will be inspired to check out your shop and brand and try out your products, increasing your website traffic and boosting your sales. At a minimum, you will reach new audiences and gain followers who are also prospective buyers.
Offer a Bonus
Upselling is a great way to encourage customers to shop. Essentially, you add free gifts to any purchase as a bonus. Make sure to highlight that these bonus products are part of a limited-edition series and are only available at this time and as long as “supplies last.”
Make your offer enticing and think about what your ideal customers really want and need.. People expect BIG discounts, especially during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Other ways to offer a bonus could involve:
Free shipping – If you don’t always offer free shipping, then now’s the time to do it. Either provide free shipping on all purchases or once a customer spends a certain amount in your shop.
Include mystery gifts – A free mystery gift included in each purchase adds intrigue. Free random gifts to your customers increase customer retention and an opportunity to provide value.
Promote similar products – Throughout the shopping journey, suggest similar products to encourage your customers to spend more.
If you need help thinking of juicy deals, here are some ideas to think about:
- Buy More Save More (Tiered discount based on how much is spent)
- % Discount on Select Products or Collections
- % Discount Site-Wide (with discount automatically applied or add a unique code for sale.)
- $X off if you spend $X amount
- BOGO: Buy One Get One Free. Offering a free product for every purchase works well because of the FREE aspect. Everyone loves a great deal!
- End of Season Discount (It’s an excellent way to clear seasonable overstock or items you want to move from inventory).
- Daily Discounts you offer customers each day with a different item every day. Keep customers coming back to see what’s on sale by running special 24-hour sales.
Give Back to the community. Donating something to the community for every purchase made on your website. This humanizes your brand and if you are supporting a cause that resonates with your target audience and brand.
3. Convert
With all your marketing strategies in place, you’ll see better conversions and be well on your way to becoming a successful e-commerce business. But if you want to know how to boost e-commerce sales before the holiday season is over, you need to pay attention to last-minute shoppers.
Capture Last-Minute Shoppers
Many people are too busy with work, their personal or their home lives to buy Christmas gifts and end up scrambling to shop last-minute. You can capture these shoppers by extending your holiday marketing campaigns, i.e., your special discounts or bonus products.
One thing to keep in mind is that last-minute shoppers are usually concerned about whether their gifts will arrive on time. Offer them expedited shipping to guarantee on-time delivery. Simply send out an email to your subscribers and appeal to last-minute shoppers with comforting words, noting that it’s not too late to get meaningful gifts for their loved ones.
By extending your holiday offers and deals, you specifically target late shoppers, which gives you an opportunity to build deeper relationships with them. Aside from helping you acquire new customers, this can also increase trust, and build brand loyalty.
Holiday Marketing Strategies – Key Takeaways
If you want to know how to sell more products online during the holiday season, you need to employ successful holiday marketing campaigns. Through the power of social media, influencers, website optimization, giveaways, and special discounts or exclusive offers, you can encourage customers to buy their gifts in your e-commerce shop, build sales and end the year with significant business growth.