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9 Ways to Take Your Holiday Marketing to the Next Level

The holidays are often the busiest times for most businesses, so it’s no wonder you want to take advantage of the opportunities to find more customers.

Unfortunately, with more active customers, there’s more competition, so you must find new ways to take your holiday marketing to the next level to stand out.

Luckily, there are several ways to enhance marketing around the holidays to boost sales. Ready to succeed during the busiest time of year? Check out these ideas to improve your holiday marketing. 

1. Improve Customer Experience

Customer service is crucial during the holidays, and you can use your marketing skills to improve customer service throughout the season and the rest of the year. For example, you can enhance the experience by reducing the stress customers might feel around the holidays.

How you improve your customer experience may depend on the type of business you operate. For example, local companies may improve their in-person sales experience by having more customer service associates available.

Meanwhile, online businesses might produce more content around the holidays to make shopping easier. 

2. Start Early

Always start your holiday marketing early. You should begin planning your holiday marketing strategy as soon as possible to help you create the most extensive plan and goals.

Most people think about gifts towards the beginning of November when the holiday season begins. Therefore, you should work on your seasonal marketing campaigns early to generate buzz.

Your holiday marketing campaigns should launch before November to help early shoppers find gifts for friends and family stress-free. 

3. Use Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the highest-converting strategies available to businesses. Because you collect first-party customer data through your website, and they must permit you to contact them, email marketing allows you to target customers who actually want to hear from your business.

As a result, it’s more effective than intrusive ads that customers have trained their minds to ignore and allows you to remind potential customers of all the great holiday deals you have going on. 

4. Use Retargeting

Retargeting customers who have already visited your website or specific product pages can help you convert them.

Customers are more likely to make a purchase after at least two to three interactions with a brand, so while your website might not convert the first time, it has a higher likelihood of improving conversion rates the second time your audience views your site.

There are several ways to retarget customers, including social media and Google ads, but what works best for you will depend on your skillset and where your customers spend their time online. 

5. Show Holiday Spirit

It’s cheaper to reuse ads over several months, but during the holidays, your ads and marketing materials should be more festive to attract customers.

The holidays are the ideal time to make some changes to your website and social media content to make it more engaging and show off your unique brand identity. You can add a homepage banner or pop-ups to your site with exclusive holiday deals and promotions. 

In addition, you can highlight products that would make good gifts. Depending on your business, not everything you sell makes a good holiday gift.

For example, if you sell personal hygiene products, it’s unlikely someone would want to buy their loved one deodorant for the holidays. However, in this example, you could promote travel-sized personal hygiene products like body wash or any smaller products that might make good stocking stuffers. 

6. Review Last Year’s Campaigns

If you engaged in holiday marketing last year, you should always review it before beginning your planning. Data used from previous campaigns can help you make more informed decisions about where to spend your budget and what types of content, ads, and emails perform best.

In addition, you should always review your campaigns while they’re ongoing to ensure you can make changes to improve conversion rates and increase engagement. 

7. Prep for More Traffic

Since your website is a valuable marketing and sales tool, it has to perform well during the holidays. Unfortunately, an influx of traffic can lead websites to go down or slow, affecting your overall website user experience (UX).

If your website can’t handle more traffic and slows down, you’ll lose customers quickly. Remember, users may be on their phones or desktops and don’t want to wait for your website to load.

If you offer products similar to another business’ you could easily lose out on holiday shoppers with poor website performance. 

If you’re unsure whether your website can handle the traffic influx, you can work with a developer to help make your website faster. 

8. Segment Audiences

When using email marketing or audience targeting, it’s important to organize your audience into categories based on factors like recently viewed products, demographics, and actions they’ve taken on your site.

Segmenting your audience can help you convert more customers by offering a more personalized experience. Of course, how you decide to divide your customers depends on your business, but the easiest way is to segment customers by how recently they’ve made a purchase or viewed a product. 

9. Check Out the Competition

One of the best ways to help you determine what types of holiday marketing strategies work is by looking at a few of your competitors.

Make a list of your top competitors and look at their social media, advertisements, and website graphics to determine the types of marketing they’re using to attract customers.

Of course, you shouldn’t steal their ideas or copy their designs or messaging, but you can determine the types of promotions that perform well and determine whether they’d be a good fit for your business. 

Improving Your Holiday Marketing

One of the most important things to do when planning your holiday marketing strategy is to audit last year’s strategy to determine what works and what doesn’t. If your audience hasn’t changed, you can use some of the same elements in this year’s strategy and experiment with new campaigns to improve upon your results from the previous year.

Author’s Bio: Ashley Nielsen is a freelance writer who loves to share knowledge about general business, marketing, lifestyle, wellness, and financial tips. During her free time, she enjoys being outside, staying active, reading a book, or diving deep into her favorite music. 

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