With December almost here, your holiday marketing plan should be ramping up!
Typically we recommend running near-continuous deals and sales promotions from November through the New Year. These sales can vary in items offered, discounts, shipping discounts etc, and should be rebranded moving from black Friday into Christmas to New Year themed events.
Product Costs and Pricing Discounts
Think carefully about available inventory and the type of offers that can be run profitably if your product costs have risen. Many retailers have experienced massive supply chain disruptions that have reduced the amount of inventory and number of products available to consumers during the 2021 holiday season, in addition to increasing the cost of products. This all means that retailers are more hesitant than in prior years to offer large discounts on popular items.
This can create challenges for your marketing team, thinking through how to promote a more limited number of items at prices that are less competitive than before.
Often other factors besides strictly the price can come into the purchase decision including shipping costs, how positive your reviews are and return policies.
Return policies are important to review regardless, as returns can be extremely expensive to handle for e-commerce businesses with the costs of UPS, USPS, and Fedex rising, in addition to the handling required to deal with the returned items and check whether they are able to be resold or not.
Build a Marketing Plan
Building a marketing plan to clearly schedule your sales offers, when certain themed promotions will run, what content will be posted when and on what marketing channels is a great way to keep your team connected and on the same page throughout the busy holiday season.
Work with advertising partners well ahead of time to craft content, such as video ads, specific sales related landing pages, static ads, and email copy.
Keep your Customers Buying
Keep in mind on holiday sales promotions that new sales to prior customers are key for an overall successful campaign. Often over half of all sales are from prior customers! While the initial customer experience is highly important, staying in touch with prior customers is absolutely crucial to keep them buying more. Just like how when you buy a pair of shoes online from Nike, etc, you’ll continue to receive emails reminding you about promotional offers and deals. You should be doing this as well, even if in a less complicated and lower frequency manner.
You need to build and maintain a large email list of prior customers which can then be segmented depending on what the customer bought previously. Email marketing containing new offers, when sales start, new product promos, etc can then be sent to this list. You’d be surprised how many of your prior customers will continue to buy more items from you during holiday sales if you stay in touch with them and maintain great customer service.
The more relevant your email marketing is the more likely that repeat customers will buy. Segmentation can become pretty complex depending on the number of items that you sell, but this isn’t needed for most smaller e-commerce stores.
Holiday Ad Creative
Landing pages, email marketing, display ads, any video content, social media and catalogs should share a visual style that is holiday themed. This is a great way to reinforce both your brand’s image and that a holiday sale is different from other sales throughout the year. Depending on how you create your advertising creative, it can be helpful before to create a very basic set of brand guidelines just for the holiday sale so that different advertising partners will be on the same page and deliver content that fits your brand’s visual theme for the holidays.
TV content
Depending on the type of business and niche you are in, regional and local tv advertising can be highly effective during the holidays. Creating a 30 second tv spot and buying a budget conscious media placement program for a month, isn’t generally as expensive as you might think and can yield strong results.
Many automotive marketing clients we work with will run a number of tv spots, all of which are also used in digital and social media channels, with minor variations for the last week of the year, etc. This helps to build more urgency into the marketing content.
Holiday E-Commerce Remarketing Campaigns
Some of the most effective digital marketing campaigns are heavily focused on retargeting prospective customers. Remarketing in short is putting ads in front of people that have already looked at an ad, watched a video of yours, have visited your website, etc.
Essentially these people haven’t bought from you but have in some way interacted with your brand.
Remarketing can take many forms, whether through Facebook’s marketing platform or often through Google’s ad network, then the type of ad, the interaction that triggers the retargeting, and then the level of sophistication etc will vary with company size, products offered, and current marketing plan.
Retargeting via video content has become very popular, so if a customer watches 5 seconds of one of your videos, then display ads will be presented to this person. The display ad content itself can also be in the form of video content or even youtube pre rolls ads.
Video being so much more interactive and engaging often drives a higher return on total ad spend than traditional static marketing does.
Using the opening of an email to trigger retargeting ads is also popular and effective. An example in the context of this article could be that if a customer opens an email previewing holiday sale items, then that person will be targeted with display or youtube pre-roll ads with holiday themed creative featuring your holiday offers.
Remarketing is a highly effective way to encourage iffy buyers to make a purchase and not forget about your products. Remarketing is a cornerstone of any successful eCommerce sales funnel and can represent some of the higher ROI on ad spend types of marketing available.
Building and managing retargeting / remarketing campaigns is however more complicated than setting up basic search and display campaigns, and we’d recommend working with a digital marketing expert to avoid wasting money and time running inefficient campaigns.
Analytics and Tracking
Using analytics to make data-driven marketing decisions should be a given in 2021, but many brands still do not even have google analytics or search console accounts set up, much less are they reviewing SEO, on-page actions and ppc metrics like they should. These mistakes are costly and can lead you to making incorrect decisions which will lead to additional wasted marketing budget.
Basing marketing decisions off hard data is necessary to properly tweak and optimize campaigns over time.
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!
Volan Media is a top Knoxville, Tennessee video production and marketing agency with years of experience working on a range of projects, everything from 1800s steam railway locomotives to the most cutting edge cancer treatments. If you turn on the tv in East Tennessee, chances are you’ll see one of our ads! We are a top Knoxville, Tennessee video production firm, with projects commonly being used for explainer videos, broadcast/cable tv ads, digital ads, recruitment. Volan Media also is a top Knoxville Tennessee virtual Reality video production firm, having made a large number of 360 videos and VR productions across a range of industries, including various tradeshow VR 360 videos, treatment and branding VR videos, and VR experiences.
