Your marketing strategy for the holidays shouldn't be a mystery. 2022 is the best year yet for growing business to start testing their best holiday campaigns. Why? This year has been booming with more mobile integrations for apps that get you conversions through email, SMS, landing page building, chatbots, and more.
Let's go over the basics of what to consider for digital holiday marketing before we get into the nitty gritty of holiday sales ideas, examples of successful emails and social posts, and landing page content. This guide will act as a blueprint for all businesses, growing and large, to start with what marketing material they'll need for 2022. Want to get started right away? Click below to build and send campaigns free this season.
Table of Contents
- Successful Holiday Marketing for Businesses
- What Should a Holiday Marketing Campaign Do for Your Audience?
- What to Expect for Holidays Sales in 2022 vs Previous Holiday Marketing
- Plan a Holiday Marketing Strategy ASAP
- List of Marketing Strategies for the Holidays
- Examples of Holiday Marketing Campaigns
- Want More on Great Holiday Marketing?
Successful Holiday Marketing for Businesses
What can successful holiday marketing do for your business? As a reader of this article, you may find it fearful to build so many different holiday campaigns, so let us bring the fun into the creation and management of holiday marketing.
What will holiday marketing specifically do for your business? People purchase everything and anything for loved ones. Have a site geared toward teens and young adults, selling skateboards? Or do you have a laundry service or salon and spa? Consider making campaigns to gain a new customer who will buy a gift card as a gift for someone.
Why else is holiday marketing so special? Testing. You can collect a myriad of data on your landing pages, email messages, SMS messages, chatbots, and website activity from more users. Especially your target audience.
Don't have a specific target audience yet? That's another reason 2022 is the best time to push out holiday campaigns. You will be able to see what type of person is attracted to what you put on the screen. And you'll be able to see how successful you are at marketing to certain groups of people, such as teens or adults.
What Should a Holiday Marketing Campaign Do for Your Audience?
Let's see what customers not only expect from your campaign, but what you can easily do to meet those expectations.
1) Offer the best customer experience
Whether it’s through your website, blog, or social media accounts, you have multiple platforms to engage your audience. While your company can focus on interacting with consumers during the holiday season, it’s essential to communicate with shoppers year-round.
For example, you can make an Instagram post to ask followers what they’re most excited about this holiday season. Then, your team can respond to the user comments, providing personalized responses that users remember.
No matter when you interact with your followers, it’s imperative for your team to respond to negative and positive comments. If a user posts something negative, but your company doesn’t reply, it sends the wrong message to other followers and customers.
2) Show gratitude to shoppers
During the holiday season, consumers can spend a significant amount of time debating what — and where — they want to spend their money when it comes to purchasing gifts. That means even loyal and long-term customers may shop elsewhere this season.
If your business wants to pull potential and previous shoppers back into your store, then you need to stay top-of-mind. An excellent holiday marketing strategy for keeping consumers dedicated and loyal to your brand focuses on gratitude.
Show shoppers how valuable they are to your business. While there are many different ways you can thank customers, sending out a thank you email or a physical card are both simple acts that can motivate consumers to do their holiday shopping with your business.
3) Offer free rewards
While many consumers focus on purchasing gifts, they’re still attracted to the idea of buying something for themselves. That’s why providing a free product or purchase gift is such a compelling holiday marketing strategy in 2018.
With this strategy, you can motivate shoppers to not only buy your product but also spend more with your company. For example, if you offer a free item with a $50 purchase, it encourages users to spend more. Rather than buy $25 worth of product, they splurge and spend $50.
If your company isn’t sure about offering free rewards, you can make the reward free shipping.
The holidays are a time of giving — and your consumers want to be on the receiving end of gift giving from time to time too. Highlight special offers, savings, and free promotions whenever possible to amplify your sales during this time of year.
4) Encourage discussions
How can you get your audience, customers, or potential customers more involved with your company? Whether it’s through your website, blog, or social media accounts, you have multiple platforms to engage your audience. While your company can focus on interacting with consumers during the holiday season, it’s essential to communicate with shoppers year-round.
For example, you can make an Instagram post to ask followers what they’re most excited about this holiday season. Then, your team can respond to the user comments, providing personalized responses that users remember.
No matter when you interact with your followers, it’s imperative for your team to respond to negative and positive comments. If a user posts something negative, but your company doesn’t reply, it sends the wrong message to other followers and customers. Making customers feel like they have a say or great impact on the business is important in terms of keeping those customers or having leads remember you during the holiday sales season.
5) Appeal to shopper emotions
The holidays ignite a mixture of emotions, from excitement to nostalgia. A smart holiday marketing strategy appeals to these emotions, which can encourage users to make your company apart of their holiday shopping.
When you’re building your holiday marketing campaign, pay extra attention to the emotional appeal of your content. Share inspirational messages on social media, for example, or provide a behind-the-scenes look at how your company celebrates the holidays to evoke powerful feelings.
6) Market Early
Too many businesses procrastinate when it comes to developing their holiday marketing strategy.
Your target market should start thinking about your business and their holiday shopping before December rolls around. That’s why your team needs to work on its seasonal marketing campaign early, like in August or September.
A holiday marketing campaign can also launch well before November or December.
While many consumers are prone to last-minute shopping, others buy gifts early. Capture this audience by sending out holiday advertisements and seasonal offers ahead of time. With this approach, you can motivate these early shoppers to purchase your product.
What to Expect for Holiday Sales in 2022 vs Previous Holiday Marketing
With US retail eCommerce sales projected to reach $236 billion in 2022, you don’t want to miss out on that piece of the pie, and getting a jump on the competition means starting your holiday marketing campaigns early.
The way people shop has changed drastically since the pandemic. And now most customers expect businesses to have some sort of online store or at least a way to communicate digitally. While holiday shopping once meant going to the mall and piling your car with gifts, the pandemic resulted in a dramatic shift to eCommerce. This, however, was not a permanent shift, with only 14% of customers reporting that they would stick to strictly shopping online for the holidays in 2021.
That being said, things have not returned to the fully in-person model of holiday shopping either. More than 70% of shoppers surveyed in 2021 reported that their holiday shopping experience would involve some form of digital.
As a result, holiday marketing trends for 2022 cater to the shopper who wants to shop online and offline.
Plan a Holiday Marketing Strategy ASAP
First, you will need to decide what your goal is for each holiday marketing campaign you create. Marketing strategies and tactics differ from holiday to holiday, so keep up to date with google to see how similar visitors respond to a similar business to yours around this time of year. The sooner you make your campaign plan the better.
What do we mean by that? You can accomplish higher conversion by knowing what your visitors want from a business around a particular holiday. For example, a Christmas or Black Friday ad will do much better for a wider array of types of businesses because chances are good your target audience is looking for a gift (or something for themselves). Easter, on the other hand, requires completely different optimization (different SEO keywords) and will have a different target to turn leads into customers. You're not likely to want to sell snowblowers or outdoor winter services around Easter, right?
So, when should you plan it out? You'll notice most businesses put out a holiday ad about a month before the actual holiday. More and more email campaigns advertising particular holiday deals will go out a few weeks (almost everyday) to contacts before the day.
And to top it off, have you noticed the content and deals start to become more relevant and targeted to just you? Personalization is a huge part of digital marketing. Businesses, like yours, can monitor (with the right digital marketing program) what you and other visitors are watching on their website and campaigns. Viewed a green sweater and now see it on your email, begging to be bought?
But when do you need to start planning it? It depends on the complexity of the ads. For example, if you plan to have many google ads or want to advertise special events leading up to the holidays, it is a good idea to start creating these at least 6 months in advance. However, this all depends on how many campaigns you have.
What else can make email sending take no time at all? Automation. You've surely opened emails from marketers once a day, asking you to check out a website or view that sweater in your shopping basket. You can automate any email to go out to a visitor on your site who has an abandoned cart (provided they already gave you a contact email).
TruVISIBILITY's Messages app has one of the best and easiest ways to automate this type of email to get higher conversions. Even for mobile!
List of Marketing Strategies for the Holidays
Great holiday marketing doesn't point to just social campaigns and certain topics for particular religious denominations. It can be anything surrounding the holidays. But creating a holiday campaign is more than putting a Christmas tree on any content marketing you have to offer.
Create User-friendly Content to Convert Leads into Loyal Customers
The holiday season will almost certainly lead to spikes in sales, but converting these customers into loyal ones can be a challenge. With 25% – 40% of the total revenue of many businesses coming from returning customers, this pursuit is worth it.
One way to do this is by creating user-friendly content to increase brand engagement both before and after the holidays. This can be done via follow-up communication with holiday buyers. Utilize email, social media, chat, whatever, as long as you’re communicating.
Review customer data to understand upselling opportunities amongst holiday shoppers and send them emails throughout the year to try and regenerate interest. You should also send up updates about new products or sales to customers regularly so that they feel included and engaged beyond the holiday season.
Send Out Holiday Newsletters
This slightly covers branding your content for the holidays, but we will discuss this further in a little bit.
People almost always have their phones on them and they don’t only use them to check social media, which is why email marketing is a great tool for businesses to utilize for holiday marketing campaigns.
A simple and effective holiday marketing strategy is to send out holiday newsletters via email. A newsletter can be sent to multiple segments of customers and doesn’t need to be overly personal to be effective.
Use your newsletter to announce holiday promotions or share gift guides. Sending your customers a seasonal greeting is another great idea. You can play with the content so long as it is in line with your brand identity and voice.
Use Hashtags for Social Channels
Hashtags are your friend! How else do you expect to gain visibility on social media platforms? Hashtags allow you to reach an audience beyond those that already follow you.
Hashtags also allow for a great source of user-generated content. For the holidays, host a giveaway in which users upload photos and use a predetermined hashtag. This is one of the best ways to spread the word about holiday promotions while expanding brand visibility on social media.
You can also follow existing hashtags to figure out what your customers are interested in this holiday season.
Want to know what hashtags are trending? Hashtagify.me is a great resource.
Offer Free Rewards and Discounts
Incentivize customers by offering free shipping or a gift with their purchase. Even if customers are shopping for their loved ones during the holiday season, they will appreciate a little something for themselves. 30% of customers make a purchase just to gain something.
72% of customers look for discounts and sales from brands when making their purchasing decisions. Holiday shopping can break the bank for a lot of customers which is why they appreciate a discounted price.
You can also show loyal customers that you appreciate them by offering a holiday gift or special discount.
Make Your Holiday Campaigns Branded and Unique
You don’t want your marketing campaigns to blend in with the countless others that customers will see during the holidays. When building your campaigns think about what makes your company unique and use this as a focal point. You want your marketing campaigns to be in line with your brand identity and show consumers that you bring something special to the table.
Try to think of something that will get customers’ attention like catchy subject lines for your email marketing campaigns and use email signatures as part of your branding strategy. This will give a personal yet professional feeling to your holiday email campaigns.
Use Retargeting
Retargeting is a marketing strategy that involves utilizing the client information already available to you. By reviewing existing data, you will be better able to understand the motivation of different segments of your customer list and market to them accordingly.
For example, segment your one-time buyers and send them a marketing campaign informing them of new products related to what they purchased in the past, or bringing a discount to their attention with the hopes of re-engaging them.
Boost Your SEO and PPC Campaigns
SEO campaigns help to drive organic traffic to your website when customers search via keywords related to your product. To boost your SEO campaigns for the holidays, make sure your content strategy reflects your holiday marketing strategy. This way when customers search for holiday gifts, they will be more likely to find your brand even if they have never shopped with you before.
On a similar note, you want to make sure your PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns reflect your holiday marketing campaigns. People are more likely to engage with ads for a product or brand that represents what they are looking for around the holidays.
If you already have PPC ads, make sure they are updated to match the holiday spirit. If you don’t usually use PPC campaigns, it might be worth implementing them to drive traffic during the holiday shopping season.
Examples of Holiday Marketing Campaigns
Let's put marketing strategies specifically for the holidays aside for now and take a look at examples of previous holiday marketing from ecommerce brands and contractors alike. We hope you feel inspired with these holiday marketing ideas from Christmas, New Year's, and more. You can even make a profile and campaign with TruVISIBILITY's digital services today - just in time for the winter holidays and beyond!
Holiday marketing tips wouldn't be helpful if we didn't include a Christmas-time example from a popular ecommerce store, Express (which often has stores in malls). Their deals are geared toward online shoppers and in-store shoppers alike. Sometimes, they will share online only deals to leads and customers as well.
Photo Credit: Express
What makes it holiday?
Notice the "merry" language used? Since it's primarily a clothing store, they decided to focus on more festive and bright colors versus pastels, which you'd often find in Easter marketing. This also helps solidify their brand as trendy, particularly for the winter holiday shopping season.
Photo Credit: BookBaby
What makes it holiday?
Bookbaby.com publishes books for authors who want to publish their work through a more nontraditional route instead of relying on literary agents. Since this is a service, their holiday marketing is sometimes more subtle (which also goes with their branding). This company knows their audience likes simple.
Notice they advertise an entire blog based on selling books during the holiday season, which undoubtedly is intended to encourage authors to use their service.
Photo Credit: Net-a-Porter
What makes it holiday?
Net-a-Porter is a popular fashion and beauty company trying to sell beauty products in a New Year's campaign. Notice the language is surrounding the "resolutions" many contacts may relate to. There is subtle celebratory images as well.
Not all holiday marketing has to have imagery, though, to catch the attention of your target audience. Depending on your business brand, of course, you can add the fireworks, Santa hats, and Dreidels and eye-catching colors which do help excite contacts to make a purchase.
Want More on Great Holiday Marketing?
How can there be even more tips on holiday marketing strategies? Well, we've got 'em. Read about how holiday marketing has changed over the years. Social media has taken a rise as well as email marketing, believe it or not.
Check out one of our other holiday marketing articles here.
Want to see more traffic this holiday season? Simply copy some of the ideas here, and don't forget to explore everything your marketing apps offer. Check out TruVISIBILITY's platform, which you can use free forever, to create multiple campaigns from templates that are built specifically for high conversion rates.
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