Ready for the holiday season? Holidays are right around the corner and people are planning for shopping and holidays. Is it your business’s very first-holiday hustle? You might be already thinking about some ideas about the seasonal promotion of your business.
May it be your first or 100th-holiday promotion; it is always been hard to come up with some new ideas for the holiday marketing of your business. Many entrepreneurs even have a mindset that holiday marketing is just for big businesses. But that’s not the case at all.
In fact, this is a great time to tie your customers into a seasonal promotion, isn’t it? Treat your audience with great deals and create relevant and lucrative campaigns to set up your business for success in the upcoming year.
Thinking that ‘holiday marketing’ is only done during Christmas? Nah! It’s done during all the festivals, and businesses that have run the campaigns during these festive seasons have earned fruitful benefits.
Now it’s time for Christmas and you shouldn’t miss a chance of seasonal promotion of your business. So, you have landed at the right place as we are going to discuss here the best holiday marketing ideas.
Let’s get started!
1. Determine your holiday marketing budget
You might already have kept your regular budget aside for online marketing. If you haven’t, now is the time to think about a budget that you will require for small marketing. This is in particular to some social media channels that require at least a small amount to run the campaign. If you are going for Facebook, of course, that is free, but the Facebook algorithm gives more preference to sponsored posts and ads. Therefore, your campaign might get lost in the busy news feed.
But in case you aren’t interested in investing in a Facebook campaign, you will need to publish your posts multiple times or offer discounts if your fans share your posts. One of the quickest solutions would be to buy small ads or promotional posts in order to ensure that fans see your posts.
Apart from this, if you are ready to spend, it’s great! Decide the amount of money that you can contribute to your marketing budget during the holiday season and start working.
2. Work on Website Optimization
Whatever be your business niche, it is important to provide a fast and flawless web experience.
Time is the most important thing in online business that is preferred during the holiday season. If your website isn’t easy to navigate or it simply takes a long time to load, it is for sure that customers will leave your website.
Can your small business afford to lose traffic during the busy season? Not at all. Therefore, you should address any lags or missing information on your website.
You might be wondering:
How to make my customers happy?
Just take a few steps to optimize your website in order to attract and retain traffic via conversion. With this, your website will become easy to navigate, making your customers happier than ever before.
Is your website mobile optimized?
That’s an important point to be noted. Do you know that maximum people shop via mobile? Check the below facts:
• 84% of smartphone shoppers use their phones while in a physical store as per Google.
• 61% of people have a better opinion of brands when they offer a good mobile experience as per HubSpot.
So, what do you think about making your website mobile optimized?
3. Update your products to showcase your sale
Don’t miss to apply a sale or discount to your products so that the visitors can identify the price differences. No doubt your products will be seen as usual on your website. But for the holiday push, they too deserve getting dressed up. Also, list the discounted products under the special heading such as “Holiday Specials” or “Special Deals” and add this collection on your homepage to get noticed quickly.
On these days, you can’t neatly wrap all the presents in a box. There are businesses that donate to a charitable organization or sponsor a company-wide day of service. Or you can arrange awards for the best web designers or best website themes. With this, visitors will feel like they’ve come across the best deal around, plus since you have aligned your promotion, you will gain customer appreciation as well as sales.
4. Host a gift giveaway on social media
Want to ignite your social media holiday season campaign? Treat your visitors with giveaways and contests that can help in boosting the activity during the rush to get the perfect gift. You can launch giveaway content and also, invite people to get involved. But prior to making your campaign live, don’t miss to check the parameters and requirements of the contest for legal purposes.
You can even offer coupons to your visitors. As per the 2016’s survey by CouponBox, coupons can grow the revenue for retailers up to 40 percent. Prior to deciding on the coupon, first, determine your profit margin and then create a coupon that will help you earn without affecting your profit margin. Create fascinating coupons for your customers and share them as and when required on your social media or via email newsletters.
Make sure each coupon you offer has a unique coupon code so that you can track which coupons are most used. For instance, create a coupon code such as “EMAIL” for email offers and a different code for social media such as “SHAREME,” to detect coupons found through social media. When the holiday season ends, count the coupon codes to know which coupons proved to be highly profitable for your business. This will help you to plan the coupons for the next year.
5. Dress Your Website up for the Holidays
No doubt your customers like the regular appearance of your website. But during holidays even they expect something new. So, it is important that you dress your website with some extra sparkle.
Take the example of the coffee king “Starbucks”.
All have seen the company’s white-and-green siren, but since November 1st 2018, Starbucks’ cups have got a little more festive.
When the visitors visit their website, they are welcome with twinkling snowflakes and a giant, festive banner image. Also, their promotion code is amazing: SNOWFALL.
Wait don’t get too excited!
Don’t miss to note one thing. The good, as well as old-fashioned marketing advice, is that know your audience.
Whenever you are planning to design your brand as per the holiday-themed, keep track of how your customers receive it. In case, you don’t have an idea about it, you can run A/B tests, ask for customer feedback, or hold a focus group.
6. Use Your Email Marketing List
You can get easily caught up in making sure if your website is perfect for the festive season or not. But, you should remember that many customers won’t see it until you help them notice it to them in some form. For example, you can send an email that contains your website link and a perfect reason to visit your homepage.
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing tactics to create awareness, acquire, convert, and retain. Therefore, it is highly used during the holiday season.
Just don’t forget that your subscribers have subscribed for a reason: they want to hear from you! So, wish them for this holiday season and share your good news.
7. Create Interest
All have been eagerly waiting for the holidays. But since you are a website owner, you can use all the expectations to create hype for your business.
For example, the biggest fashion brand, H&M created a short trailer to drive its 2017 holiday partnership with Nicki Minaj. This campaign proved to be highly successful as their followers increased by 31%, they earned a media value of about $98,252,000, and their mentions in 2017 were about 245,630.
Got your eyes rolled back!
Now a question might have struck your mind that what if my budget is low? No problem at all! Though you can’t hire a mega-watt celebrity for boosting your holiday, you can always create anticipation, the old-fashioned way: with a countdown!
You can make some days special by offering giveaways on those days. For this, you can do the promotions, offer deals or post blog content – anything that will encourage your customers.
8. Promote Your Expertise
After dieting for months, the holiday season is the time for gaining weight. This also brings a motivation to lose weight at the start of the New Year.
Jokes apart! The point here is that if your brand holds a special expertise on a holiday-related topic, then it’s time to jump in and start sharing.
For example, if you are running a web hosting company, then focus your content on how web hosting can help people to start their own blog during the holidays.
This will motivate the individuals of different niches to start their own blogs such as food blog, health blog, travel blog, etc.
9. Add a re-targeting pixel on your site
What if a visitor comes to your site and leaves without taking any action? You won’t know that if he will come back to you or switch to another site. Therefore, you should add a re-targeting pixel on your site. With re-targeting you can follow the users around the web and send them targeted messages that will convince them to go back to your website. You just need to add a small and inconspicuous piece of code to your site that tracks the user on Facebook or Google and displays advertisements that keep him aware of your brand.
Re-targeting certainly works as you already know that the user is interested in your business and so, it is possible that they might get tempted by your offers. With this form of online advertising, you can keep your brand in front of visitors during this busy season and covert the bounced traffic.
10. Improve your site speed
It’s time for shopping and your website is therefore going to be jammed with traffic. A point to note is that there will be high traffic coming from mobile devices. This is because people are in hurry and so will prefer using their smart devices.
Visitors already have many plans during the holidays and hence, they grab their products from the online store that is quick in terms of speed. Imagine your website takes a long time to load, the visitors will surely move on to your competitor’s website. It’s a fact that if there is a second delay, you lose the conversion by 7%. If you don’t want this to happen with your business, make sure that your website gets loaded speedily.
Don’t miss to check your website speed score via various tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights. You will be able to find the site load speed as well as tips to improve your load time. You should also optimize your images prior to uploading them to your website. This helps in improving your page load time.
11. Build trust among your visitors
After Google’s update about marking the sites without SSL as “Not Secure”, many websites have seen switching to HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). Apart from this reason, SEO ranking and a secure environment are also the two factors that businesses are thinking upon and so opting for SSL installation.
Prior to visiting a website, visitors are making sure that the website is safe to trust by checking for HTTPS, or “the green bar”. So, make sure that your website is SSL certified.
12. Ensure your visitors can easily contact you
Visitors come to your site with an intention to buy during the holidays. They select the easiest and effortless option to reach you. Better check for your contacting options and make sure those are working well.
Also, ensure that your contact menu is easy to find and contains your phone number, your email as well as physical store address. Live-chat is also the most used option, as many people don’t like to contact via phone. This option helps your visitors to get answers to questions, staying on your website. This ultimately leads to more conversions and revenue.
13. Christmas Offers Landing Page
If you are offering some special discounts on products, ensure that you make the giving easy.
The festive season starts during November – December and that the time when your online store gains traffic.
From these visitors, a small group would be of shoppers finding gifts. If you create a page that specifically caters to their needs, you will increase your conversion rates and make your new customers happy.
The landing page with specific gift ideas is the only thing needed for making it easy for the buyer to shop. So, you will need to invest less and take a small amount of effort for achieving great returns.
Create different pages for curated products categorized under specific gift-recipient types. You can find what that particular customer type is looking for, from the historical purchase data. If you own an online store for women, it would be easy to do. Categorize your gift idea section into “Clothing”, “Cosmetics”, “Footwear”, Jewelry, etc.
Wait, you haven’t completed your gift shop yet. Setup a Christmas Surprise landing page weekly or daily. Offer a new 1 week or 1-hour flash sale every day the whole Christmas. Don’t offer all the products each day. Display one or two and see what happens.
Ensure to promote this landing page via your social media platforms and email subscription list. This will help the audience to return to your site each day. Due to the flash sale, a sense of urgency is created and the visitors instantly browse your website.
14. Give Holiday Look to Your Logo
Every reputable online brand does this. Take the example of Google. The company keeps its logo updated to celebrate even the smallest events such as on birthday of significant people.
You too can do something similar. Of course, there is no need to exactly copy Google or some of the big brands (in fact don’t copy anyone). However, you can easily hire a freelance logo designer for creating something new for your brand.
Ensure that you use the holiday symbols such as a Christmas tree, wreath, snowman, presents, and several lights.
15. Offer Free Shipping
Several online stores offer free shipping, so, you too can.
For being in the game, you have to offer some free rewards and so, free shipping is the best option. If big stores such as Amazon or Flipkart can do it, your clients will stop exiting as they did before seeing the shipping fees at checkout.
Though you will lose some money, you will gain new customers. You can even include the shipping cost into some other product prices.
Remember if discounted prices can attract Christmas shoppers, free shipping can encourage them to buy and that’s what you want.
16. Use the Countdown Timer
You can use the countdown timer in emails as well as on the homepage, popups, product page, alert bars, cart page, checkout page, etc.
- A storewide sale means the time when you offer discounts on the products in your store. Simply speaking, shoppers will get a certain percentage off when they purchase anything from you. You can do that by displaying a countdown timer on the homepage.
- Creating a sticky alert bar to your page and adding a countdown timer below. Visitors will always see the bar even when they keep scrolling to the bottom of your site.
- Continue showing a countdown timer on the product page for allowing shoppers to know that time is coming to an end. This might force them to purchase the product.
Is your website ready for the holidays? Don’t miss working on the above tips to promote your website during the holiday season.
If you have any other tips, you can share them in the comments section below.
