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Is your ecommerce shop ready for the holidays?
As a new holiday season approaches, brands are optimizing their digital campaigns and holiday promotions to capture sales during this lucrative time of year. There’s an arms race for consumer attention and if you don’t grab it, your competitors will. Be sure you have an omni-channel campaign strategy with the right message, the right offers, and in the right channels to capitalize on holiday sales.
In this guide, we explore the latest trends, strategies, and tips to help you maximize your sales this season. This guide will provide you with valuable insights and actionable steps. If you have questions or want to bounce your campaign ideas off one of use, reach out on our contact form and request a call with one of our strategists.
Preparing for the holiday-buying season
How will the holiday season look this year compared to previous years? Let’s take a look at some interesting consumer trends:
- 71% of retailers reported concern about consumers cutting down on holiday spending due to inflation, rising interest rates, and federal student loan payments getting reinstated. (CNBC)
- Despite this, 43% of global consumers still plan to increase their online spending. (PwC)
- Amazon Prime Day was a huge success, teaching us that inflation-conscious shoppers are actively seeking out the best deals and promotions. (Forbes)
- 53% of global consumer spenders are researching more and prioritizing product quality. (Salsify)
Promotional campaign ideas
Create urgency with timely product-specific sales
There’s no hard fast rule that your sales need to be exclusive to Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Buyers expect deals all season long. But you can still create urgency and excitement by offering discounts on an exclusive collection of products in timely intervals, only to be replaced with a new collection. These deals can run hourly, daily, weekly. Choose whatever makes sense for your business. Target is notorious for announcing weekly promotions every November, all culminating in a blowout sale Thanksgiving weekend.
Encourage bundles
Online shoppers are in a different state of mind during the holiday season as opposed to the rest of the year. They are searching for products for multiple people, and multiple gifts for the same person. Give them ideas by creating bundles of similar or related products and showcase it as gift ideas. Add a bundle option on the checkout page and encourage consumers to buy multiple items with exclusive shipping discounts.
Gift guides
We see a spike of traffic to gift guides during the holiday season. Create a dedicated landing page for those shopping for Christmas, Hanukkah, and winter birthdays. Have fun with it! While a standard collection page is better than nothing, you can get creative and stand out by giving shoppers ideas on how to bundle or present your products as gifts.
Cross-channel marketing strategies
Website
Take stock of inventory
Before you activate targeted campaigns, make sure you have enough products in place to fulfill the offer. Or strategically run campaigns for products not at risk of running out of stock.
Audit each product and collection page in a campaign to ensure your product data is up-to-date, photos looks great, copy is optimized, and add any engaging video or UGC to optimize conversation on the page. How does the page render on mobile? Are important incentives, like free shipping and coupon codes, highlighted properly?
Test the add-to-cart process to ensure there are no roadblocks holding back purchases. Proactively make those optimizations before your holiday traffic increases.
Add promotions where possible
Treat your website as a billboard for your campaigns throughout the holiday season. Your online shop will not look the same from November-January. Shoppers are in a different state-of-mind during this time of year, make sure your brand reflects those desires.
Here’s an example of Wayfair last year. The entire real estate of its homepage is 100% dedicated to Black Friday sales.
SEO
Optimize Google Business Profile
If you own a brick-and-mortar store, don’t forget to utilize your Google Business Profile (GBP). This will show to online searchers looking for your location, so make sure your hours are updated accordingly for days like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas. GBP is also a great resource to highlight customer reviews and add seasonal promotions and coupons to your Google posts.
Review technical health
If you’re not already conducting regular site health audits, make sure you do so before the busy season picks up. Review technical basics and make sure your site is ready for the heavy increase in traffic. Optimize for page speed, redirect broken links, and check the site’s performance on both desktop and mobile.
Perform keyword research
During the holiday season, shoppers are looking for deals. Optimize your landing pages and create new ones dedicated to popular keywords including “Black Friday Sales” and “Cyber Monday Deals”. We recommend using Google Trends for this keyword research, as it shows you what terms are searching for at different times of the year.
Email marketing
Grow your subscriber list
According to WordStream, email subscribers spend 138% more on average than non-subscribers. Put in the work now to build your subscriber list so that by the time the holiday season rolls around, you’ll have a wide loyal audience to market to.
Then leverage the high traffic during the season to grow your list even more to fuel your email and SMS marketing throughout the year.
There are a number of strategies to help get more subscribers, including adding a subscription option to your footer and checkout page. Be sure you have a pop-up form that offers an incentive to sign-up.
Build up Black Friday & Cyber Monday excitement
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are cultural moments that are top of mind for all shoppers throughout the month of November. Use this awareness to build excitement for what your brand has to offer.
Update your email capture in October to promote Black Friday & Cyber Monday offers. Your Black Friday & Cyber Monday promotions should be better than your standard offer, so leverage that to capture additional emails that you can market to when those two days arrive.
Plan additional email campaigns that drive excitement and provide sneak peeks to your sale in the weeks leading up. Showcase a product or bundle and drop easter eggs throughout your lead up to the biggest shopping weekend of the year.
Add-to-cart abandonment
Update your abandoned cart and browse abandonment flows to highlight your sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you’re using a tool like Klaviyo, you can create universal content blocks in your flows, which can be easily updated for big sale moments like this. Just be sure to remove this highlight following Cyber Monday to save yourself from customer service tickets.
Shorten your time delay on your abandoned carts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. With the purchase intent that exists on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, each abandoned cart is a missed opportunity to grow your revenue and expand your customer base. Each hour that goes by on an abandoned cart is an hour that is spent shopping elsewhere, so shorten your first abandoned cart to trigger after 30 minutes.
Post-purchase flows
Black Friday/Cyber Monday customers are not your normal customers.
Whether your product is a big gifting product, or you acquire new customers through discounts, be sure to treat this cohort differently. Create a unique post-purchase nurture that recognizes their motivation for purchasing. Highlight complimentary products, gift ideas for different relationships, or product bundles.
If your holiday customers are discount-motivated, be sure to include them in campaign sends when you have other sales down the road. They may not engage with your ongoing email campaigns, but odds of them engaging with a sale are good.
If your product is a gifting product, be sure to email this segment during other gifting moments throughout the year like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Graduation season.
Social media
Sell directly on targeted platforms
Most social media platforms these days offer a shopping feed that is linked directly on your profile. This now includes TikTok, who recently added a shopping option for influencers.
A study conducted by We Are Social found that over 26% of internet users ages 16-64 use social media solely to find products they can buy. Not every platform will work for your target audience, so you’ll want to conduct some further analysis to figure out where they live.
Here’s an example of a holiday-focused Pinterest board curated by Michael’s. According to Pinterest, this targeted strategy drove a 120% incremental lift in store visits and generated over $!2 ROAS. As a DTC home goods retailer, Pinterest is the perfect audience for Michael’s. They saw results by honing in on what works for their business instead of spreading themselves thin across all platforms.
Schedule posts to highlight promotions
If you’re not already using a social content calendar, the time is now to create one for your strategy this holiday season. Plan out content for each month well in advance, so you can strategically get your copy, images, video, etc. all set, while keeping branding consistent and your followers engaged.
Tease out promotional campaigns early and create urgency when sharing discounts and or exclusive referral codes. Utilize seasonal hashtags like #blackfridaysale or #cybermondaydiscounts to reach new potential customers as well.
Paid media
Retargeting
According to Truelist, retargeting beats all other ad placement strategies with a 1,046% efficiency rate. Proactively set up a Facebook pixel on your shop now so that you’ll be able to effectively target users who have browsed your site and/or added to cart without purchase. It is more likely that deal seekers will be comparison shopping during the holidays, so this strategy is crucial to keeping your brand top of mind.
Optimize Google Ads copy
Plan your paid ad strategy in advance and increase click-through-rates by highlighting special discounts and offers in both your Headlines and Descriptions. If you created a promotional landing page, like a gift guide, add this to your Site Links.
Ecommerce marketing holiday checklist
The key to a successful Q4 is in the planning. Follow this checklist to get you on the path to maximizing your revenue and avoiding last-minute rush.
September
- Decide on your merchandising strategy
- Decide on your offer/promotion
- Create a gift guide
- Outline your promo distribution plan:
- Email Schedule (Pro tip: increase send volume to 1.5x – 2x from Nov. 1 – Cyber Monday)
- Social Calendar
- Web Banners
- Ads
- Videos
- Paid Media
- Design your landing page
- Audit your website technical health and make fixes adjustments
- Capture content to support the distribution plan
- Set coupon codes and schedule
October
- Update an email capture to highlight holiday deals
- Design assets outlined in the distribution plan
- Establish an influencer and/or referral strategy
- Launch your gift guide
- Launch distribution plan
- Ensure customer service is set up for success
November
- Set up “Back-in-Stock” notification app for your store
- Daily social monitoring and engagements
- Boost product-focused social posts
- Update your abandoned cart and product abandonment email flows
- Launch custom post-purchase flows for holiday purchasers
December
- Push slow moving products with deeper discounts or bundling
- Send “Order Before [date] to receive by Christmas” notifications
Start preparing now for the most wonderful time of the year
By implementing the strategies outlined in this guide, businesses can confidently navigate the challenges of the digital landscape and achieve remarkable results. So, gear up, plan ahead, and make the most of the holiday season with a well-crafted marketing strategy.
LimeLight Marketing helps a wide range of DTC ecommerce businesses with cross-channel holiday marketing strategies. Looking for assistance? Let’s chat.
