Jingle bells, jingle bells...yes! Christmas and the holiday season is coming! For business owners like you, it’s a tremendous opportunity to skyrocket your sales and earn more money. In this article, we will show you the 8 best holiday marketing strategies to get your online store ready for this holiday shopping season. Let’s get started!
Check out the Retail Calendar 2023.
Table of Contents
- What Is Holiday Marketing?
- Why Do You Need To Set Up Holiday Marketing Strategies?
- When Should You Start Marketing For A Holiday?
- What Are The Best Holiday Marketing Strategies?
I. What Is Holiday Marketing?
Holiday marketing is a process of conducting intensified efforts via a variety of marketing channels to increase consumer attention, with the intention of providing them with other valuable offers and boosting revenue during the holidays.
II. Why Do You Need To Set Up Holiday Marketing Strategies?
When the holidays draw near, notice the happiness and excitement of the people around you. Holidays are the perfect time for you to connect with your prospects and celebrate feelings of companionships and gratitude.
At this time, you can build trust and credibility by turning these feelings into deeper connections with your customers on an emotional level. It’s the best way for your business to make a good impression with your customers and stand out from the crowd.
As humans, naturally, we love holidays, festivals, and any and all celebrations. It’s the time people get festive, spend time with their beloved ones, and of course, spend a copious amount of money.
According to NRF, here are the critical holiday statistics from the previous holiday season 2021:
- The growth rate of total retail sales is 14.1% from November to December
- The growth rate of e-commerce sales is 11.3% in the same period
Let’s see some outstanding 2022 holiday spending predictions:
- E-commerce holiday sales might reach between $260 billion and $264 billion this season.
Hence, if you don’t have effective holiday marketing campaigns, you are likely to lose vast opportunities to boost your sales and make more profit.
Check out the latest Holiday Markeing Ideas:
- Easter Marketing Ideas
- Valentine's Day Marketing Ideas
- Mobile Marketing For Valentine’s Day
- Super Bowl Marketing: 7 Tactics
III. When Should You Start Marketing For A Holiday?
Deciding when to begin holiday marketing campaigns might be a tricky decision for many business owners. Starting too early could make shoppers annoyed, but if you start too late, you can lose your customers to your competitors. In reality, choosing the proper time to begin your holiday marketing campaigns entirely depends on your business, your consumers, and your products.
Here are some suggestions for a marketing holiday calendar:
- June and July: The summer is the perfect time to start planning products and themes for your marketing holiday campaign.
- August to October: It is a great time to start producing holiday assets such as video, images, and other digital assets.
- November and December: It is time to kick off. Christmas marketing will be starting in November. If everything has been prepared and delivered effectively, it is usually the time to sit back and track the success of your campaign.
- January: That’s it. It is time to take a breath, reflect on the campaign to thoroughly prepare for the next year.
IV. What Are The Best Holiday Marketing Strategies?
4.1. Leveraging Historical Data
When thinking about the best holiday marketing strategy, it is vital to review your historical data. There are no two same companies, so instead of relying on a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy, you should use your data to create and leverage your marketing holiday strategy.
By using Google Analytics, you can understand your website traffic, figure out your audience demographics, measure the conversion rate, and get other significant benefits.
The first type of data you should review is your holiday sale numbers. Here are some questions to answer based on these historical data:
- Which holidays are most lucrative for your business?
- Which campaigns brought you success?
- Which channels bring your online store high traffic?
Dig into the previous holiday data to find which is bang for your buck and what fell flat. And remember, because something fell flat does not mean that it is not worth trying again. However, it is essential to review what happened and why it is not sufficient. After analyzing your holiday marketing statistics, you can easily set benchmarks for your business and identify areas for improvement.
4.2. Enhance Customer Experience
Optimize your site for mobile
50% of holiday shoppers use mobile smartphones or tablets. Make sure that the site visitors can easily browse your products and make their purchases on phones and tablets. Slow page loading is a major issue that customers often complain about. In reality, a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load might lead about 40% of online users to your competitors' sites. Mobile site optimization is your key to rocket your e-commerce sales during the holiday shopping season.
One of the proper ways to improve customer experience is using sticky CTA buttons. Once your customer is ready to buy your products on mobile, you want to get them there as soon as possible. CTA buttons allows you to create floating buttons like Phone, Chat, SMS, Whatsapp, Cart, make customize easy and uncomplicated. No matter how the site visitors navigate and scroll, the CTA buttons remain visible, ready to take them to make purchases.
Integrate live chat
During the Holiday season, visitors will reach you much more often. They might want to know more about your products, check if the product will be delivered on time, and want to get an even quicker response to their questions. You can lose sales if a potential customer can not get answers quickly enough. It is the reason why you should integrate live chat on your website. Here are some of these best live chat software for your e-commerce site:
- Live chat: A 360 - degree customer services platform that automates your work, and turns your website visitors into your customers. Livechat software is exceptionally suitable for e-commerce.
- Tidio chat: A freemium live chat software with great WIX/Weebly integrations and native Shopify chatbox solution.
- LivePerson: A most popular live chat solution for Fortune 500 enterprises. This software focuses on providing more advanced functionalities for more demanding customers.
Highlight clear and fair return policies
When people are purchasing gifts for others, it can often happen that the recipient gets the wrong size or does not like the product color, so they need to return it. Hence, you should show your return conditions clearly, fairly, and well-communicated on your website. In this way, you can build the trust of your visitors, show confidence in your products, and remove potential risk.
4.3. Give Your Website A Holiday Look
An easy and effective holiday marketing idea is making your website festive. I am not suggesting you redesign your entire website. Instead, you can tailor your store for the Holiday season with just a few festive additions and marketing efforts. For example, you can create banners and heroes images to promote your Black Friday or Christmas sales.
If you aren’t a designer, don’t worry! With Burst, you can find beautiful free stock images created with the demands of store owners in mind. Interestingly, Burst integrates with your Shopify store, so you can quickly choose holiday-themed photos to decorate your store for the holiday season.
You can also use templates to create your graphics and promote your holiday sale. Updating some elements on your online store to show that “it is the Holidays!” can boost the willingness of your site visitors to keep shopping and stay in the Holiday spirit.
Here is an outstanding website holiday look. Check out Sephora with their beautiful holiday-related banner image below!
In case you don’t have enough time to design custom holiday assets, here are several Shopify apps to make the process easier:
- White Christmas: Bring Christmas holidays to your online store with snow and music.
- Festive Holiday Decorations: Decorate your online store ith festive animations for every occasion to put your customers in the mood for shopping!
- Shopify Collabs: A new platform that allows you to partner with other creators in your niche.
4.4. Holiday Your Products And Collections
No matter what your product is, you can still add a holiday flavor to your products and collections. Here’s how:
- “Gift-ify” your existing products by bundling them into gift packs, decorating packing with festive add-ons like ribbons or tags.
- Offer digital gift cards and update the design to make them have holiday flavor.
Notably, creating highly sales-boosting holiday landing pages for promotions and sales can be extremely effective at improving your conversion rate this holiday season. Here are some holiday-focused category pages you can add:
- Black Friday Landing Page
- Christmas Offer
- Gifts for men (or women)
- Gifts for dad (or mom)
- And so on.
4.5. Embrace Email Marketing Campaigns For Holidays
Email marketing comes to must-have holiday marketing ideas. Every business should have a few marketing campaigns to drive customers back to your online store so they can act on your holiday sales.
Here are some email marketing ideas to inspire your holiday email marketing:
- Announcing holiday sale: You can send announcement emails ahead of time to existing subscribers to inform them about holiday sales details, and reminder emails when the sale officially begins.
- Exclude sale offers: One way to capture the attention in a crowded inbox is to send a hot deal that is only available for email subscribers. Sending conditional discounts can be one of the great Christmas marketing ideas. For example, if your customers spent a certain amount of money through this year, then they will have an extra discount on all your products in the next year.
- Greeting customers on holiday event: For example, congratulation emails on Christmas or New Year even will make subscribers feel special. Interestingly, these emails also let subscribers know you reach out to them not only to sell but also to care.
- Last reminder before the deals expire: Some days before the holiday sale ends, you can send reminder emails with countdown timers to let urge customers shop quickly.
During the holiday time, your customers will be wading through a flood of promotion emails from all their favorite brands. Hence, making your emails stand out is vital to attracting customers. Supercharged Store Emails by Spently was made to do that.
Spently comes with a variety of customizable email templates for creating beautiful, unique, and professional emails. It quickly and seamlessly integrates with your Shopify store. Spently will turn your store emails into marketing opportunities and drive holiday sales.
4.6. Treat Customers With Awesome Holiday Promotions
One of the appealing things about holiday shopping is promising deals you don’t get any other time of year.
Of course, offering holiday promotions and discounts is a great way to attract customers and grow the holiday sale. If you plan to put a lot of discounts on your products, you may need an app for managing these discounts. With Bold Discounts, you can create and schedule sales without creating code. It also allows putting all, some collections, or specific products on sale with a click.
4.7. Offer Gift-wrapping Services and Gift Card
Photo by Nicole De Khors from Burst
The holiday season gives you a lot of opportunities for upselling. Visitors are more open to add-on services, especially if it grows the overall value of the purchases or saves them time.
Gift Wrap Plus app is a complete solution for Gift Wraps on the Shopify store. With this app, customers can select from different options and add a gift message before adding to their cart.
Besides the gift wrapping service, you can also offer personalized gift cards and gift announcements to encourage people to purchase more. Rise Gift Card Loyalty Program is created to help you do that.
4.8. Stay Active on Social Media
Don’t forget your social media! Holiday seasons are a good time to make greater use of your social media to increase connection with your followers. Make sure you have an effective social media strategy and plan suitable content for each channel.
Some eye-catching photos about Christmas, New Year, exciting videos, and gifts will be helpful. You can also leave your online store link on these posts so that customers can click and buy their favorite products. Running a contest on Facebook or Instagram and attracting many participants will increase more traffic to your site, which can potentially rocket sales during the holiday season.
Related article: Double Your Shopify Store Sales This Black Friday With These 8 Increadible Tips
Final Words
Are you ready to maximize your online store success this holiday season? We hope that the 8 best holiday marketing strategies we have compiled together will help you satisfy customers, increase traffic, and skyrocket your revenue! Stay motivated, set realistic expectations, and remember to always put your customers first!
What are your holiday marketing ideas? Let us know in the comment section below! We would love to hear any opinions from you!
