Christmas shopping is no joke! Many consumers spend more shopping online and in-store leading up to and throughout the holidays than the rest of the year combined.
For businesses such as small e-commerce firms and small to mid-sized brick and mortar stores, this is a huge opportunity that should be a driver for all Christmas marketing campaigns.
Holiday Marketing Creative content
Many brands, both small and large, work with outside creative agencies to create needed web, ad, print and tv content that will be the majority of the content that consumers see throughout their marketing campaigns.
It’s really important to start developing holiday-themed ad content early, and work to create a cohesive look that can be shared throughout your various marketing channels and ad vendors that you work with. Even a very basic branding guide created as a pdf or word document can make maintaining a cohesive look to your content much easier! Cloud-based project management software or even just using google sheets can be a great way to build collaboration between your team and your various advertising vendors.
Time Limited Deals
Q4 marketing plans, can and should typically use limited time offers for a variety of deals. Language like “ Now through New Year’s day”, etc can be used to build urgency within your audience and prompt purchases. Many consumers are looking to buy “now” anyway, more so than normal through the holidays.
Holiday Video Marketing
Themed video ads can be used across all of your marketing channels, regardless of PPC, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook etc. and are much more engaging than static ads. Even email marketing campaigns will be successful and thus generate a higher ROI by using videos embedded vs just static images in your emails.
Media Placements and Ad buys
Media buys such as Adwords planning for search, display, Youtube ads, and Facebook, Instagram, plus even Tiktok should be planned out way ahead of when you expect the bulk of your holiday sales.
Get your website touched up!
Make sure your e-commerce site works flawlessly and looks good. There are so many options to create and refine e-commerce stores that there is little excuse for having a website that looks like it was made in 2003. E-commerce stores that function poorly and look outdated are less legitimate-looking to consumers that have become used to buying on websites like Amazon. The checkout process and general ease of use can absolutely affect if customers buy from you or move on to a competitor.
The shipping process from your web store should also be quick and easy to understand. No one likes a surprise $14.99 charge for shipping that’s only visible once you’ve entered payment information etc. Shipping charges should be calculated into the shopping cart as early as possible. Customers will see this as a more transparent practice.
Many more consumers than ever before are making a substantial amount of purchases through their mobile devices and tablets, so it’s very important that your e-commerce stores function well in tablet/ mobile form.
Email Marketing
Do you have segmented email marketing campaigns built around your prior customer and forms collection lists? You absolutely should always be building an email list of everyone who interacts with your website. Depending on the level of complexity, this list can be heavily segmented into those that just signed up, those who have bought from you in the past, and those who abandoned items in the shopping cart, etc. Over time further segmentation through these lists will help you build email marketing campaigns that are more tailored to each person’s interest which will increase the probability they will click through the email.
Marketing to prior customers should easily be one of the highest ROI areas of all your marketing. Once a customer has bought from you- unless they had a bad experience, it will be much easier to get them to buy from you again vs someone completely new. This is why It’s critical that you email market to prior customers, if possible at least broadly segmenting your email messaging based on what they bought in the past.
Building off of Past Holiday Sales Campaigns
If you’ve marketed holiday sales in years past, you should thoroughly review past sales data, web traffic, email open and click-through rates in an effort to see what worked vs what didn’t. This should be the basis to creating a new campaign this year. For PPC campaigns, you can import keyword data from past holiday campaigns but bid prices will like need to be updated. Tweaking prior keywords, adding negative keywords and utilizing fresh creative can all compound to generate ROAS improvements over prior campaigns.
Youtube pre-roll ads and Facebook/Instagram video ads should also at minimum be experimented with. Typically this will have a 40-50+% if not higher CTR than static ads on those platforms. While the creative content will be slightly more expensive the massive click-through rate increase can easily make these campaigns much more profitable.
Shipping Delays
Are you expecting items to arrive late or have shipping delays through your e commerce store? These delays should be clearly communicated with consumers. A mismatch of expectations vs reality is what’s most likely to cause customers to leave you a bad review. Consider also working with the shipping partners you generally use for fulfillment and attempt to negotiate reductions in rate increases or assessorial shipping charges. Depending on your e-commerce shipping volume, you might be surprised at the willingness of parcel carriers like UPS or Fedex to work with you.
Want to up your Christmas and holiday marketing ?
We’ve worked with numerous clients to plan and execute holiday marketing campaigns, often creating video ad content that will be featured in a range of marketing channels.
How much does video marketing cost? – Take a look at our prior article.
Want to learn more about integrating video ads into your marketing channels – Get in touch!
