The holiday season is here and everyone is excited to celebrate it with many preparations. Everyone waits eagerly for this time of the year – both consumers and businesses. Consumers rush to online and offline stores to purchase goods for themselves and their loved ones throughout the holiday season. So it’s a great opportunity for businesses to boost sales.
It’s also a time of enormous competition among businesses. To stand out in this fierce competition you need to apply various marketing strategies and ideas in your business.
That’s why you need to prepare a well-designed holiday marketing strategy that can help you significantly in increasing sales.
In this blog post, you will get to know about top marketing ideas for a successful holiday marketing campaign. Let’s dive in!
Top ideas for holiday season marketing campaign
1. Plan in advance and start Early
Plan your holiday campaign at least a month before to make the most out of the holiday season. Most business owners and marketers start planning just before the start of the holiday season and lose a lot of traction. The sooner you start planning your marketing actions, the better. Planning ahead and starting early can help you reach more people.
You will get a lot of time to create high-quality marketing campaigns. You can start by running holiday email campaigns. But first, you need to know your audience well and take your time to create appealing offers that they are looking for. This can boost highly boost your conversions and sales.
Notify your subscribers early about the upcoming deals so they don’t miss out on your holiday season offers. One great strategy is to send emails with countdowns. Also, you can create early bird specials to grab the attention of your audience.
2. Offer holiday giveaway
Make the holiday season memorable for your audiences by arranging giveaways. This will make your subscribers feel special and help create a sense of love towards the community. Create a gift guide on how they can get the perfect gift.
You can use dynamic content to create digital gift guides that show relevant products to specific audiences. This will help you to cross-sell and upsell based on a user’s interest. Offer a free product, buy one get one free offer, free service, or flash sales.
3. Run referral programs
Word of mouth is one of the best forms to reach a large target audience. Send emails to customers who have already purchased something from you and let them know that they can get exclusive discounts or earn some money by referring a friend. This will eventually make your sales grow,
There are countless opportunities by building a referral system. If you have quality service and products then you’ll discover that many people will be interested to refer a friend. They will spread the word because they believe in your brand.
If you are running a WordPress website then you can do it easily with a complete affiliate solution – WC Affiliate. You can use this tool to an onboard unlimited number of affiliates and also create multi-level affiliate programs. WC Affiliate also has an automatic payout system so you won’t need to worry about paying your affiliate manually during the busy time of the holiday season.
4. Collaborate with influencers
Collaborate with influencers to amplify your holiday season marketing efforts. Influencer marketing, also known as branded content or working with creators, is a great way to expand the reach of your brand. Approaching the right influencer that fits your business industry can be very beneficial for your business.
In today’s world, content creators with niche audiences can often offer more value to your brands than other types of marketing strategies. An influencer is someone who can influence others to buy your service or products through their content. You can pay that person to promote your product or service to their followers during the holiday season.
5. Use urgency as a marketing strategy
You can apply urgency in your email copies, website content, header banner, and pricing pages to make the shoppers grab your holiday season deal fast. Use phrases like ‘last chance’, ‘only a few left’, ‘limited stocks’, “act today”, “limited time offer”, “this week only”, or even use a countdown timer to give the shoppers a feeling of urgency to buy your service or product. These types of words usually create FOMO (fear of missing out) among online shoppers. Thus, it can drive a good number of conversions and sales during the holiday season.
6. Run automated holiday email campaigns
Running email automation is an effective marketing strategy for all types of marketing campaigns including the holiday season. You can easily reach the right people, with the right message, at the right time via email automation. This can significantly decrease the load of work during the busy holiday season.
Fluent CRM is a masterpiece for setting up email automations on WordPress. You can set up email automation for each of your products on separate days or occasions. Set up abandoned cart automation secure sales during the holidays. Target new leads with email sequences. Send marketing and deal emails to leads who are likely to buy. Target subscribers and notify them about your holiday season deals. Send a welcome email with a special discount or coupon and much more to boost your sales.
7. Drive traffic through social media
Social media plays a significant role in reaching a broader audience. People usually engage and search on multiple platforms for good deals during the holiday season. That’s why you should showcase your holiday season deals on social media platforms during the holiday season. Also, you can interlink them to drive traffic from one social media platform to another. This way, customers will get to know more about your brand.
You won’t get much engagement if you post content at a time when no one engages. Analyze your customer behavior and when they are most active during the day. Publishing content at that time of the day is the most effective way to get optimal views.
Another way to attract users and get more traffic is to be responsive over your social media accounts. You should reply to every comment made on your posts. This creates a feeling of being valued among your audiences. Your brand will stand out in the crowd if you can be responsive, engaging, and build relationships with your audiences.
8. Write catchy subject lines
Subject lines are the first thing everyone notices before opening an email. the barrier to email effectiveness. To get a better open rate and sales you should optimize your subject lines. Start using words that can create value and mention things people are thinking about this time of year.
Email open rates can also be optimized by personalizing the subject lines. Because personalized subject lines such as including the recipient’s name can easily get the attention of your audiences. You can also use emojis based on the type of your subject line. For holiday season emails you can use emojis like sparkle, gift box, snowman, Santa, etc.
9. Free shipping
Free shipping is a valuable marketing strategy to win back customers. If you have an online store that charges for product shipping then this technique is just for you. You will be able to make your customer happier when they get to save money on shipping costs.
Offer free shipping for customers purchasing in bulk or for a certain threshold.
When the customer reaches a specific price point, you can display a notice of free shipping by spending a little more. This will encourage them to spend a little more just to meet the free shipping threshold. You can also try this for new customers and this can reduce the cart abandonment rate efficiently.
10. Last-minute deals
Last-minute deals can help you during the crucial holiday season. It can also create FOMO (fear of missing out) and drive them to take the most important decision to complete orders.
You should promote your products with the biggest discount during the last days of the holiday season. last-minute shoppers to make their final purchase. You can also craft hourly special discounts on the last days of your holiday season marketing campaign.
Final words
Following the marketing tips mentioned above can drastically change the result of the marketing campaigns during the holiday season. These high-converting techniques just need a little time and effort to work. Plan and strategize for the holiday season by following the tips we discussed in this blog post. Repeat the steps that work magically on your business in every marketing campaign with the right marketing tools. It’s time to start working on optimizing your marketing strategies and help your business spread holiday vibe to your customers.
