Does your business have a holiday marketing plan? The holiday season is a great opportunity to gain more customers and generate higher revenue with irresistible deals. Consider developing a marketing plan and putting your ideas into action soon. Here are six helpful holiday marketing tips to drive sales and revenue this season.
1. Bring it Back to Basics
The holidays aren’t an ideal time to experiment with a new marketing approach. If you’ve done thorough testing throughout the year, you probably know the type of content your customers engage with most. If you’re determined to try something new, A/B test your content to see what works best.
You can also use your customer data from previous holiday marketing campaigns to see if your base has changed. Check their demographics and what they value. Understanding your customers will help you craft and refine your holiday messaging.
You’ve probably built a reputation with your customers throughout the year. Your reputation will be one of the deciding factors when they are ready to shop. Make sure you give them the same customer experience that they’ve had with past purchases.
Use relevant holiday hashtags in your social media marketing, so your content is seen when it trends.
2. React and Adapt Quickly
Regardless of your business or website size, you’ll need to have a fast-acting team available or on standby to remedy any issues that may affect your site or ads during the holidays.
Being ready to adapt goes beyond digital and content measures. Consider changes to your customer service, shipping, fulfilment, and operations teams too, so they can handle the extra visitors and orders. Your business’s ability to react and adapt swiftly may impress your customers and drive more sales.
3. Share More Marketing Content
Content marketing offers a personalised shopping experience. Create content like blog posts, videos, email newsletters, and ads that emphasise and evoke the holiday spirit.
Consider doing this before the holidays and schedule them ahead of time. This will give you more time to enjoy the holidays yourself and your customers may be more inclined to read during this period too.
Additionally, keep search engine optimisation (SEO) top of mind when planning holiday content. Optimised content helps drive organic traffic to your website or landing pages via search engines like Google — even if they’ve never shopped with you before.
4. Prepare for New Competition
With so many businesses taking advantage of the holiday shopping season, you need to ramp up your marketing to draw more customers to your store. You can do this by ensuring that your email campaigns stand out and communicate the benefits of shopping with you and not your competitors.
But getting your customers to open your emails isn’t the only challenge. Increased competition can result in abandoned carts too. With as much as 81% of sales being lost to cart abandonment during regular shopping times, this is concerning. Automated abandoned-cart emails can help you reduce these numbers tremendously.
5. Consider an Influencer Strategy
How effective an influencer strategy can be differs from industry to industry. Influencers don’t only bring trust and social proof to the table. The right influencer for your industry may also connect you with your target audience through sharing your content. This may increase your brand awareness and sales during the holidays.
Working with influencers requires you to have customer support processes in place to deal with enquiries from new or existing customers. So ensure you have a team with the right tools to respond.
6. Don’t Share / Send Too Frequently
It’s tempting to send out a lot of holiday promos, but it’s the emails that are sent at the right time that add value and capture subscribers’ attention — not necessarily the ones that are sent all the time. Sending your audience emails at the right frequency will be more effective and will improve overall customer satisfaction.
Ready to Share the Holiday Spirit?
The holiday season can make or break your revenue goals. Use these six tips to drive sales during this period.
A version of this article originally appeared on the Everlytic blog.
