Articles 
Top 23 Holiday Campaign Marketing Tips for Your Online Store
- Syed Muneeb Ul Hasan
- October 29, 2018
With the holiday season about to begin, It is essential that store owners should get ready for the surge in traffic and sales. What actually troubles many store owners is the fact that not every ecommerce marketing tip out there actually work!
Today we will discuss 23 of the best holiday marketing tips from the pros out there to help you score big this holiday season. The idea is to offer you tips that come with actionable implementation ideas. Let’s go.
Marketing Tip 1- Plan Early
Holiday marketing starts in October and the events then go on till the end of the year. However, if you do not start planning as early as Q3 (July-August_September), it is already too late.
See: Is Your Ecommerce Store Prepared for the Holiday Season?
The campaign planning takes a time that you simply cannot afford to lose in the final quarter of the year. This is why experts suggest that your planning should be done by the third quarter so that you can dedicate time in Q4 to the execution of the plan. This strategy ensures that you have enough time to adjust and align the holiday sales strategy.
Marketing Tip 2 – Offer Exclusive Deals
Customers feel privileged when they are offered deals that are not available to everyone. These exclusive deals should be designed in such a manner that customers perceive the value of the deal as higher than what they would pay. If pulled correctly, this tactic has the potential for increasing the store’s sale exponentially. Remember to feature these deals prominently so that they receive maximum eyeball time.
Marketing Tip 3 – Sell the Brand
During the holiday season, customers are exposed to a number of brands that all compete for the customers’ attention. This is why if you have a strong brand, you should capitalize on this strength for holiday marketing. Customers like to flaunt their purchases from popular brands and social media is a great platform for bringing in brand-focused sales.
Marketing Tip 4 – Theme It
Holiday marketing should have its own festive theme and color scheme. The tradition of decorating stores has carried over to the online commerce industry with great success. While it is a no-brainer, but many store owners opt for standard holiday theme that has become common across the industry.
To distinguish your store. Opt for a custom design that sets you apart and makes your store memorable for the casual visitors and social media users for holiday marketing.
Marketing Tip 5 – Personalize
Personalization has become fairly common these days with stores offering personalized inventory options and marketing material to individual customers. However, in the rush of the holiday season, it is easy to forget this simple yet very effective holiday campaign marketing prerequisite. This is where your investment in ecommerce marketing automation tools will pay huge dividends.
Marketing Tip 6 – Launch It
DO NOT wait for the last moment to launch your holiday campaign. Holiday marketing should begin early to bring your store to the attention of the early shoppers who are looking for bargains at the end of Q3 so as to avoid the holiday season shopping stampedes.
Marketing Tip 7 – Stand Out
Online stores pop up in Q4 with so worrying frequency that shoppers often confuse one store with another. In many cases, this simple confusion leads to a loss in sales. Make sure that your holiday marketing scheme entails that your store stands out because of attractive design, unique offers and engagement generators ( quizzes, mini-games or social media campaigns designed to bring in and retain user curiosity).
Marketing Tip 8 – Highlight Your Specials
If you have a unique product line or bundles, Giving them premium storefront real estate is a simple yet highly effective holiday season marketing tip. In fact, for holiday marketing, you should spend a good portion of your budget (and time) to bring these specials to the limelight.
Marketing Tip 9 – Focus on Relationships
The holiday season is a great opportunity for building relationships. Remember that the visitors that come to your store are looking for a reliable vendor who could fulfill their requirements. By offering personalized and timely services, you could leverage the loyalty of these customers long after the holiday season is over.
Marketing Tip 10 – Use Email Marketing
Email marketing is an underestimated holiday season marketing tip that has the potential for adding great value to your store’s revenues. Q2 is time to plan and execute the design and structure of emails. Once you are done, Q3 is the time for executing the email marketing ideas so that by the time the holiday season starts, you could start reaping the fruits of your labor.
Marketing Tip 11 – Know the Calendar
Holiday Season is actually a collection of events that are observed either locally or internationally. This means that you should plan ahead and pick the holidays that you wish to target. Next plan your pre-marketing and post-event follow through so that your overall marketing flows effortlessly from one event to another.
Marketing Tip 12 – Gift Guides
As a holiday marketing tip, sending gift guides to your customers through email and social media advertising is a great way of making quick sales. These guides allow the customers to see how the products available at your store could be used for making the holiday season great.
Marketing Tip 13 – Be Prepared to Give Additional Discounts
In many cases, almost every store offers discounts to get more sales. However, customers always wish for special treatment. If you have an ecommerce store, you should always be ready to offer additional discounts to capture those customers that could move away to the competition.
Marketing Tip 14 – Try Partnerships
Partnerships are a powerful way of increasing brand reach and revenues. By partnering with relevant brands and vendors, you could get great deals for your customers. However, remember that you have to offer a similar advantage to the audience of your partner.
Marketing Tip 15 – Gift Cards
Gift cards are a time-tested holiday campaign marketing idea that increases store sales. Since you could offer gift cards as rewards for store loyalty or prizes for contests, you should consider using campaign-specific digital gift cards this holiday season.
Marketing Tip 16 – Creative Social Media Campaigns
Coming up with creative social media campaigns is tough. However, the competition has become so severe that social media campaigns should be at the top of your holiday season marketing tips. It takes a lot of thinking to beat out the competition on social media platforms. Ideally, you should do all the thinking in Q2, and then execute these ideas in Q3 and Q4.
Marketing Tip 17 – Hold Contests
Contests that offer real gifts are an important holiday campaign marketing tip. People always enjoy contests because of the chance of winning prizes. Small contests offering small gifts help bring more engagement and help with more conversions.
Marketing Tip 18 – Inject Creativity
This is not only true for a holiday campaign but overall you should be more innovative and creative in your social media and marketing campaigns. Creative ideas have always been at the core of the success of ecommerce stores.
Marketing Tip 19 – Donate
Getting your customers to donate to the less fortunate is something your customers will love you for. Everyone wants to be happy and you can use this theme as a way of getting your customers to contribute to a noble cause. This will help skyrocket your reputation in the industry.
Marketing Tip 20 – Consistency
Consistency in planning and execution is the key to the success of the holiday campaigns. In many cases, marketers try to make last minute changes to tweak the campaign for optimum results. However, they overlook the fact that frequent changes actually damage your ideas and delay the execution of the ideas.
Marketing Tip 21 – Get Ready to Invest More
Remember that however carefully you plan your budget, in holiday season campaigns you will experience overruns. This is where a number of ecommerce stores fail to produce results. With rigid budgets, you often miss the opportunities that arise in real time.
Marketing Tip 22 – Outstanding Customer Services
Customer services are the point of failure for a number of stores. Thus, any list of holiday campaign marketing tips always includes a reference to customer service. Always plan on increasing the number of people dedicated to customer-facing processes. This means hiring more people to deal with the holiday season customer service requirements.
Marketing Tip 23 – Keep Things Fresh
Marketing campaigns could quickly get stale and customers often fall victim to marketing monotony. For store owners, this means that your marketing collateral should be planned for at least double the span of the holiday season. This will ensure that you have fresh marketing ideas to continue attracting customers that are bored with the been-there-done-that ideas of the competition.
Finally
As far holiday marketing and ecommerce marketing tips are concerned, the year 2018 is set to be a big year for the evolution of the commerce landscape which will come alive through the holiday season. The best practice is to follow the ecommerce marketing tips we have mentioned systematically and make sure you are providing the experience your customers are waiting for. If you have anything else that we might have missed, please comment down below, we would love to know your opinion.
