The Holiday Shopping Season Is Upon Us!
Picking up from where we left off in Marketing Tips for the Holiday Shopping Season Part 1, Part 2 is here with even more tips to make sure your holiday shopping season brings you more customers, new fans, helps you build community, and goes off without a hitch! Without further ado, strap in for the best tips, straight from our team of marketing experts!
Consider Seasonal Giveaways
The very best time you can host giveaways through your social account is right before the busy shopping time hits – that means within the next 3-4 weeks. That way you will reach a bunch of new potential customers right as they’re thinking about their holiday gift lists – especially if you boost your giveaway through a collaboration with a creator or by advertising it on your highest-impact social platforms. Being top-of-mind at the right time is essential to ensure that your product is in the running when they’re weighing their options. Aim to have a prize worth at least $50, but the higher the prize value, the more entries (and eyes) you will attract. Another way to decide how much your prize pack should be is to take the product value of your best-selling product and double it – you can even frame the giveaway around ‘1 for you, 1 for your friend’ which increases the reach of your post and gets your product into double the number of hands.
Optimize & Test Your Website
In order to reach a highly motivated, high-intent purchasing audience, you need to make sure you can be found. This means an SEOptimized website is absolutely essential – what that means is that your website needs to have awesome content that ranks for keywords your audience is searching for and it needs to have all the right technical optimization in place to ensure it is highly ranked by search engines. Additionally, when it comes to frenzied checkouts (think ‘drop days’ of popular lifestyle brands), there is little that is more frustrating for both the consumer and the business than a checkout that crashes, orders that don’t get counted, or payments that don’t go through. Before the spike in traffic this holiday shopping season, make sure you thoroughly test your checkout process, double check your product pages for load speed (especially on mobile) and make sure your emails are sending properly so your new customers don’t feel like they just got ghosted immediately after purchase.
Email Marketing Is Your Friend
Speaking of emails, email marketing happens to be one of this writer’s (Hi, it’s Serene!) favourite topics because it is so much more than just sending monthly newsletters in MailChimp (although that is a great platform for specific use-cases too!). Email marketing, and its bigger, fancier, usually more expensive cousin, Automated Marketing Software (AMS), has the highest Return on Investment (ROI) of any marketing effort. This is because email marketing is inbound marketing, which means that people (your potential customers) are actively seeking a solution (your product) to a problem they’re having. All you have to do is send them the right message at the right time – and they’ve already agreed to hear from you! There are hundreds of ways to build your email list, and thousands of ways to segment your audience to nurture them along the buyer’s journey.
One of the best uses of email marketing is finding and encouraging brand evangelists. Brand evangelists are customers (or even fans who have not purchased from you) that spread the word about your business throughout their network for free. Not only is free marketing (almost) always great, the recommendation carries a lot more weight because they come from a highly trusted source.
If you’re curious about how to use email marketing or AMS this season, send me (again, it’s Serene here) a message via our sweet chatbot.
Nurture Your Following
There are many other ways to nurture your new audience, stay top of mind, and encourage those who have already purchased from you to buy again. One great way is through retargeting and lookalike targeting through digital advertising. Although they go hand-in-hand, retargeting and lookalikes work differently. Retargeting means that you are showing your ads to an audience who is already familiar with your brand or product – they’ve visited your website, or they engage with you or follow your brand on social media. They’re much warmer than other potential customers who may not even know you exist yet, and the more you target, refine (message and creative), and segment that group, the higher the chances of conversion. Lookalike audiences are people who have not yet interacted with your brand in any way but share the same characteristics as those who have. You can create lookalike lists from existing customer lists, existing mailing lists, or existing social followers or website visitors.
So... what does this all have to do with the holiday shopping season?! Once you have new eyes on your brand through giveaways or creator partnerships or new seasonal campaigns, as well as new customers on your website, customer list, and mailing list, you can use retargeting ads and segmented messaging via email to encourage repeat purchases throughout the year! One of the immediate opportunities that happens in Canada (did we mention we’re Canadian?) is Boxing Day, which is the day after Christmas and a huge shopping day up here in the Great White North. It was long considered Canada’s Black Friday, although now most retailers do similar promotions on both. Boxing Day (or really, the entire week after the gift-giving period worldwide) is the day many people decide to treat themselves, now that gifting to friends and family is done – so you will want to make sure you are there, with a great deal or opportunity (a free gift instead of a discount?), for them to jump on.
No matter how you choose to market your business this holiday season, we’re here to help! Get in touch with our marketing experts today – it’s not too late to make Q4 take off. Check out Part One in this series for more great tips.