Best Holiday Marketing Strategies for Success

It’s the most beautiful time of year! That means, as marketers, it’s time to shake up our tried-and-true approaches and take advantage of all the holiday cheer. With new ways to connect with customers, optimize holiday marketing campaigns for success, and generate revenue for your business this season, now is the perfect time to brainstorm and develop some winning strategies.

We have complied holiday inbound marketing tactics to help maximize revenue while still keeping you jolly. Keep reading to learn about our top tips for holiday marketing success!

Let’s go first to holiday email marketing strategies.

Holiday Email Marketing Strategies to Boost Sales

Customers will begin looking for deals and reductions as soon as possible. To capitalize on this purchase intent, you must create an efficient email marketing campaign that targets customers when they are most in need.

For an effective holiday email marketing campaign, follow these six steps below:

Grow Your Email List 

Before emailing your subscribers, spend some time expanding your mailing list! This will not only enhance your entire Black Friday marketing but also help you increase your seasonal sales reach and profit.

A more extensive list equals more reach, which means more revenue over the holiday season. There are numerous opportunities to collect email addresses onsite.

Every online retailer should have a sign-up form in their site’s header or footer. In-line forms on your most frequently visited pages are also simple and effective.

Another simple way to gain new subscribers is through your checkout sequence. Popup is also a powerful tool for collecting customer emails. Start with a little discount (10-20% off) to avoid filling your list with unengaged contacts who will harm the health of your program.

Furthermore, you can develop a holiday landing page with an enticing offer that will compel your website visitors to give you their email addresses. Just don’t forget to provide value to your audience by using a clever Black Friday email template, converting graphics, and an easy-to-complete newsletter signup form!

Make The Perfect Black Friday Email Subject Lines

Your subject lines are an essential part of your holiday email marketing. Festive season email subject lines can be utilized to create urgency, express the magnitude of the discounts contained within the message, and build enough enthusiasm to improve purchase intent.

Divide the holiday into three mailing periods to make things work: 

• Pre-holiday: It can begin as early as soon as possible. Teaser emails or early-bird discount vouchers can be used to entice your audience and make them want more wonderful discounts from your company.
• During-holiday: Your Christmas emails must be intelligent, fascinating, and valuable — we’ll get to that later! To ensure that your email list interacts with your marketing, you must send it at the appropriate moment.
• Post-holiday: The offer should not end at the end of Christmas yet. Instead, build a post-Chrsitmas email marketing campaign to target the weekend with last-minute bargains for your late-night shoppers!

Then you’ll know what subject line to write for your target audience and can add all the specifics to your email marketing calendar!

Generally, ensure effective holiday email subject lines are part of your overall promotion strategy. Understand the length, tone, and content that drives click-through rates all year.

Make Your Holiday Email More Urgent

Your holiday marketing strategies must instill a sense of urgency to encourage people to do transactions with your business. 

Elements such as countdown timers, GIFs, and dynamic content blocks will provide a feeling of urgency to your campaign while also making it more intriguing and unique.

For example, include a timer or scarcity with your products so that your customers understand that the promotion is only accessible for a limited time. It significantly increases the conversion rate.

When you advertise your goods as scarce, you should show how many are left. If you have ten pieces available, show that just two are available. Notifications of others looking at or purchasing the same product will also significantly impact.

Integrate Email Marketing And Social Media

If you want to improve the outcomes of your holiday email marketing, you can integrate it with other channels.

In fact, social media networks offer high levels of engagement and can aid in brand visibility and awareness. Instagram and Snapchat have an engagement rate of more than 80%, while Pinterest is used by 55% of consumers to make a purchase.

Given the preceding, it is clear that the holiday social media campaign can assist your business increase engagement. You can use them for your email strategy in a few simple steps, beginning with social networking buttons! These will direct your subscribers to your social profiles, allowing them to connect with you.

Aside from that, you can design dedicated email campaigns for Christmas giveaways and even employ user-generated content to increase your business’s trust!

Of course, social media isn’t the only way to motivate your followers to take action. SMS marketing, referral marketing, and influencer marketing are all strong channels that can be integrated with email.

Create Automated Workflows

To target Christmas buyers with personalized messages and offers tailored to their specific needs, you should leverage the power of marketing automation.

This vital tool is ideal for creating sequences that will be given to the appropriate person at the proper time. You’ll need an advanced email marketing automation solution with a workflow builder, triggers, and pre-made recipes to use it.

Some of the most common sequences for boosting your Black Friday email strategy are

• Website engagement messages: Offer a VIP deal to shoppers who visit specific pages and products on your website.
• Upsell/cross-sell sequences: After a consumer purchase from your online business, you can target them with more Black Friday specials on related items. In this way, you can engage first-time buyers and encourage them to return for more.
• Reminders about special offers: Create an email series to remind your email subscribers about your exclusive holiday deals to increase sales.
• Emails from abandoned shopping carts: Set up a specialized cart abandonment sequence to recoup lost revenue by offering Black Friday discounts and free shipping to cart abandoners.

Track Performance & A/B Test

From your open rate to conversions, you must monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine whether your work is performing as planned.

Among other things, some critical email marketing criteria throughout the holiday season are open rate, click-throughs, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate. 

You can use the information to run specialized tests when you’ve finished tracking your email performance! And this is where A/B Testing comes in, a procedure that allows you to test various features by developing variations of the same campaign.

For example, A/B testing of email subject lines is an effective way to increase the open rate. You can enter two distinct versions and compare their performance, then decide which works best for your customers

A/B testing can be done by distributing version A to 25% of your recipients and version B to the other 25%. The winner should be whichever subject line has the most responses from people who open them!

Create Social Marketing Post Series

Create an early access email list on your social media channels

According to Shopify analytics, email is the highest converting channel for this holiday season, with a 4.29% conversion rate. If you don’t have an email list, Black Friday may be the ideal moment to start collecting information from your current and potential clients. 

In the Steve Madden example below, you may notice that the company requests that its followers sign up for a specific email list on Black Friday. A long-term relationship and involvement with those customers is the extra value for this type of content.

Add a freebie or offer free shipping

Doing a giveaway on your social platforms might be one of the practical holiday marketing ideas for small businesses than offering a high percentage discount.

Make it clear if you intend to include gifts with purchases as part of your holiday sale! Incorporate it into your social media plan and watch your followers turn into buyers.

If you don’t have anything to give away for free, try offering free shipping. Customers will appreciate it, so advertise it on your social media channels. According to Walker Sands’ annual Future of Retail research, 90% of survey participants indicated free shipping was their top motivator, and over 50% favored firms that offered same-day shipment.

Put together a gift guide

Customers typically use holiday offers to shop for future holidays such as Christmas or birthdays. Purchasing gifts for others is never a simple chore. As a result, the holiday social media campaign focusing on gift suggestions will help buyers make decisions and purchases faster.

Take a look at Sephora’s case:

Customers not only learned about the items with the best discounts, thanks to Sephora’s guidance. They also received numerous recommendations, which aided them in deciding whether to purchase for themselves or others. This is an excellent method for raising your average order value.

Work together with influencers’ partnership

Collaboration with influencers has shown to be incredibly beneficial for eCommerce firms. With their opinions, these social media figures can easily influence committed followers. As a result, marketers can publicize their items through influencer-generated content to raise the year-end purchasing incentive.

Using social proof marketing, you can easily encourage your audience to try out your items. People are more likely to trust your brand if a well-known figure recommends the products.

Community and seeding Daily

How to Seed Content? 

Seeding may appear straightforward because it is broadly used; nevertheless, not all seedings are effective. 

As an outcome, here are some starting methods for ensuring the success of a seeding campaign.

Examine your audience

Using solid and reliable primary market research and secondary databases, you should thoroughly evaluate your intended audience.

Before beginning your research, consider the following:

• Which channels does your target audience spend the most time on?
• Why do they favor those channels?
• What kind of content do they prefer and participate with the most?

When you have these things in mind, you can identify appropriate data sources and conduct proven ability research.

Define your goal

Even if the eventual aim of seeding is to enhance your brand, you must still set specific goals.

For example, giving information about your brand’s recently released features X, Y, and Z or offering them quality standards for using your products.

Prepare your content

Before you or the influencers begin creating content, the following questions should be addressed:

• What is the overarching brand message?
• What exactly are information topics?
• What exactly are content forms? (Video, postcard, article, and so on.)

Choose and bargain with influencers

This step aims to find influencers who match the demographics of your campaign (voice, content style, audience demographic, language, etc.)

Among these factors, the influencer’s viewer is probably the most important to understand before entering a partnership.

After you’ve decided, start negotiating with them about how you wish influencers to encourage your product, the cost, and the strategy.

Promote Content and Track its performance

Whereas the information will almost certainly be shared on the influencer’s social networking site, you may still need to encourage it on your own social media pages, websites, newsletters, and so on.

You must evaluate the efficiency using precise numbers related to relating goals, such as

• Is the website’s traffic growing? And how many people?
• How has the interaction of the intended customers started changing? (Changes in followers, messages, comments, and so on.)
• What has happened to the conversion rate?

Wrapping up

The holiday season is a great time to try out new marketing strategies and connect with your customers in different ways. With so many options available, it can be overwhelming to decide where to start. That’s why we’ve compiled our top tips for holiday marketing success, complete with actionable steps you can take to make the most of this cheerful season!

We hope the holiday marketing plans above can lend you a hand in building a perfect campaign for the holiday season. Best luck!