Holiday Marketing Ideas For Web Store Owners

Published on 30 August, 2022 | 425 views | 7 minutes read

Recent customer behaviors displayed that people do not hesitate from buying products online even for special occasions such as Christmas, Easter, other Festivities and so on. Governments also promoted self reliance with their borders closed. This led to the dependence of global players on local vendors.

From the seller’s and marketer’s perspective, the desire to stand out from the crowd is very crucial. Therefore in this write-up, we are going to share some of the holiday marketing ideas that will help your business to boost sales during the holiday shopping season. 

The following tips should help you make better decisions: 

1. Analyze Your Performance 

It’s fine if your last year’s sales number is not that great. It is normal. Every business faces ups and downs. But it’s important to learn from the past and to start making new plans. Measure the sales and revenues your company dreamed of and what percentage came to reality. I am sure you will find the stuff on which you need to focus this holiday season. Well, once you are done with analysis and reporting, you need to jot down the points that concern your employee first. Your employees directly connect your brand with your customers. Figure out what skills and training are required to optimize the efficiency of your employees.

Make sure your staff knows how to deal with customers on different platforms such as support chats, social media, or while on calls. If you engage yourself in employee training, you will be able to entice more and more customers to your store.

2. Understand Your Traffic 

The only real way to measure your campaign’s effectiveness is to know where your visitors come from and what they do once they arrive at your store. Sounds obvious, right? Well, the amount of times this step is overlooked when it comes to creating that killer holiday campaign is unbelievable. Before you draw up that meticulously planned events calendar, you should spend some time on Google Analytics, getting to grips with your visitors’ wants and needs. This will help you deal with all those intimidating terms like segmentation, personalization, and retargeting.

3. Start Early 

This isn’t just sound advice for your holiday email marketing campaign, but for all of your holiday marketing ideas: the earlier you start, the better. If you want to target the Black Friday period, it would be advisable for you to have all your ducks in a row by the middle of August. This means that you will have built your email subscription list, identified your customer profiles, and looked into their wants and needs for the upcoming buying period. If you are unsure about how to go about setting up an effective email list and strategy, check out this great guide from Mailchimp. Once you’re confident that you’ve acquired a decent and well-maintained subscriber list, you can move on to the next steps. 

4. Personalize Your Website 

This holiday season, create eye-catching and soothing landing pages. The landing pages are the first thing that can easily entice new or existing customers to your website. Design holiday-themed landing pages for each festive day whether it’s Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, or Cyber Monday just like the given example. Once done with designing, focus on your content too. The more personalized content the better the chances of organic conversions.

If you want more traffic on your site, start writing content before 45 days of holiday seasonal sales. It will help you to get 50% engagement from search engine traffic. Generate personalized content, i.e., users should feel that your content is just for them and no one else.

5. Buy Traffic As Early As Possible 

This tip is a balancing act between spending money early, with little return on ad spend, and making the most of all the interest you’ve fostered when the holiday season comes. Try running engagement ads during the weeks leading up to the holiday to help create a customer base that is aware of your brand and products. Then, as the crunch time of the holiday approaches you can use retargeting ads to remind those prospective buyers of your great brand and products.

Finally, to help make up for all the time and money that went into those early engagement ads, you should look to increase your average order value (AOV). 

6. Build Customer Loyalty With Personalised Giftings 

Gifting and rewarding customers for being regular to your store motivate them to stay connected with you. Customer loyalty is the most crucial process for any business that wishes to engage and interact with its customers on a more personal level – making them feel that they are important to you. Rewarding customers with points, additional discounts, gift cards, and coupons also make them re-visit and shop again from your store. Hence, improving your customer’s retention rate.  Top brands from various industries have incorporated loyalty systems in their regular marketing campaigns and have witnessed an empowering growth in their results.

7. Segment your Audience 

Segmentation is when you divide your email into different categories so that you can address different audiences in different ways. This is the best way to ensure that your email doesn’t come across as just another bland electronic flyer that the consumer disregards without a second thought.  To successfully achieve this, we recommend you draw up a couple of categories, informed by your foray into Google Analytics. These categories will depend on your brand and product, but if you are unsure, it’s a good idea to start with the following:

* Loyalty: How loyal or active are these customers? Have they visited the website and made a purchase, or do they generally browse and bounce? Do they visit your store all year round, or only during the holidays? Knowing this will help you craft your email specifically towards those shoppers, while also avoiding targeting shoppers to buy something they’ve already bought.

* Interests: You should be able to identify the customer’s interest from what they looked at and purchased on your site. This knowledge will allow you to separate your shoppers according to these categories and aim the most appropriate of your holiday marketing ideas in their direction.

* Bargain Hunters: If you have visitors who only convert when there’s a sale, discount, or coupon on offer, you will be able to engage them with price and time-sensitive deals. 

Naturally, it’s entirely up to you to decide how to divide and categorize your customers to maximize your email campaign’s effectiveness. And when it comes to effectiveness there’s one strategy in which a well-worded email is without comparison, that of retargeting and converting those annoying abandoned carts. 

8. Adapt to the Market Trends Quickly 

Almost every business comes across a change in trends, now it could either be in the products they’re selling or the marketing methodologies they’ve adopted. While running a holiday marketing campaign or preparing marketing ideas for this festive season, be sure to analyze the prevailing trends in the market. For example, QueensGreenCanopy took the initiative to gift trees on behalf of those who’re unable to plant one even though they wish to do so.

9. Team Up With Local Vendors And Retailers 

The market is changing, and so is the way that industry works. Creating fusions and innovating something different attracts more eyes than regular and traditional practices of serving customers. Therefore, teaming up with local vendors and/or collaborating with other companies under cross-industry partnerships allows you to expand your reach and serve your customers better.

It, therefore, creates an ecosystem of innovative experiences, customer insights, and the whole digital platform including marketing tools and social handles. Moreover, this ecosystem holistically serves your customer’s needs. In fact, in the fastest-growing economies in the world, it is inevitable that you need to team up with local vendors to thrive in the market. 

10. Know Your Platform 

If you’ve done your buyer persona research, you’ll have a good idea of where your audience hangs out most online. Not only does this help you reach them, but it also helps you form the right holiday marketing idea and create the right kind of content for the platform they use. Check out the different social platforms and know what you should be doing on each one. These various handles are all simple pieces of content that you could easily use in fashioning ideas for the holidays. 

* Facebook

* YouTube

* TikTok

* Instagram 

* Twitter  

Bonus Tip 

Use Your Social Media Presence To Gather Insights 

In the months leading up to the holiday shopping season, you can use your store’s social media account to connect with your already established customers. You can learn a lot about their habits through your social channels. Running a Twitter poll to identify what shoppers hate and love during these periods has proven a great holiday marketing idea for companies in the past, as well as creating live Facebook events to engage with customers on a personal level. 

You could also use social listening - which is a hugely fruitful method that monitors how your business and its products are being discussed online. Through direct customer comments, mentions, user-generated content (UGC), and discussions surrounding your targeted keywords, social listening can gather some gold dust insights and help turn them into actionable goals. 

In Conclusion 

There are no golden holiday marketing ideas that are going to shoot your store from potential obscurity to worldwide recognition over the course of one holiday season. So try different approaches and do what works for you and your business.