The holiday season is about to arrive and it’s the best time to pay attention to such marketing ideas which can generate more sales.
The festive season brings plenty of opportunities for brands to scale up their sales graph. Looking to make the best use of this holiday season? Here are the 13 Holiday Marketing Ideas and Tips for 2021 to kick-start your holiday season journey and boost sales.
1. Focus on planning
The foremost holiday marketing tip would be to plan your offers early. Customers do know that brands would be competing to outperform each other to attract more people with their exciting rewards and offers and be ahead in the competition.
Think and try something different. Keep an eye on what your competitors move and figure out what they aren’t doing or haven’t done before. Furthermore, plan your promotions, get the customers excited. And when the holiday season begins, keep bringing changes in your offers at regular intervals to surprise your customers.
Capturing more holiday sales would require unique as well as enticing offers.
2. Decorate your store as per the occasion
Besides decorating your houses, you should also decorate your website in the holiday spirit following the coming festivals. For example, change the theme, give it a new look & feel so that your customers get the holiday feel by visiting your website.
For instance, if you have implemented a Spin and Win popup on your website, you can customize it as per the occasion. You can even add addons like Spin and win depending upon the eCommerce website you are using.
Knowband’s Spin and Win popup module provide several attractive themes for almost every important occasion like Christmas, Halloween, New Year, Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, etc. For every platform, Knowband offers a Spin and Win popup module hence you can.
Check out Spin and Win for PrestaShop, OpenCart Spin and Win extension, Magento Spin and Win extension, Magento 2 Spin and Win extension, Spin and Win for WooCommerce.
Spin and Win for Prestashop has recently launched incredible features such as Theme scheduling and customizing slice for the wheel.
The number of slices in the wheel can be changed to suit your needs. By simply pressing a few buttons, the administrator can change the look and feel of the spin wheel. The merchant can control the spin’s display location, frequency, and gravity from the module’s backend.
With the assistance of the theme scheduling feature, the store admin can set a date and even time validity for a specific theme that will be shown for the duration of that time.
3. Provide Gift Cards
What’s best than offering gift cards in the holiday season? Digital gift cards can boost sales. Having occasion-based gift cards would be an effective holiday marketing idea as Gift cards capture huge sales during the holiday season. In 2016, around $26 billion were spent on gift cards during the winter holidays.
The upcoming months are going to be hectic for online shoppers as they would have to buy a number of gift cards for their loved ones. You can lessen the burden on your customers’ shoulders by providing them with the Gift card facility.
Get your gift cards ready for the coming holiday season. Give your digital gift cards a look at the festival. For example, you can make theme-based Gift Cards for Christmas, New Year, etc. Gift Cards will have the upper hand in your holiday sales.
Read: Why Digital Gift Cards are important to your Business?
Want to add the gift card section to your store? Try out our Gift Card Manager module for PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento and Magento 2.
Have a look- PrestaShop Gift Card Manager, OpenCart Gift Card Manager, Magento Gift Card Manager, Magento 2 Gift Card Manager
4. Make your loyal customers feel special
We understand that acquiring new customers is important. However one should even focus on retaining existing customers as they are equally important for the website. Bring them back to your store and show that you care.
Offer a special gift to your loyal customers. Make them feel that you miss them in your store. Existing customers contribute to 40% of your sales. So, do not go behind the new customers only.
Read: 6 customer retention strategies
5. Optimize for Mobile
Adding to the holiday marketing tips would be optimizing your eCommerce website for mobile.
Mobile commerce accounted for more than $35 billion in revenue in the 2017 holiday season. (Source: Marketing Land) The numbers went higher in 2018 and it is expected that mobile sales are going to outpace desktop sales in 2019.
Whatever ideas you have, plan them keeping mobile users in mind. Make sure that your site is mobile-friendly. If it isn’t, optimize it today! Failing to do so can cost you a huge loss in your e-commerce sales.
It would be great if you have a mobile app for your Brand.
6. Run contests, offer giveaways
Launching holiday campaigns is another holiday marketing idea. Host contests related to festivals. Ask users to share user-generated content. For example, on Christmas, you can ask your customers or followers to tell how they celebrated Christmas during Covid-19 and provide giveaways to the people coming up with the most interesting stories.
In this way, you will be able to witness maximum participation and keep up with the festival spirit, at the same time. It is one of the best ideas to grab user attention and catch more user engagement.
7. Create Urgency
Active online shoppers wait eagerly for the festive seasons to collect heavy discounts and offer on products. Though customers show the intent to purchase when the holiday season arrives, they take a lot of time while making a purchase decision.
Create a sense of urgency by setting up a timer for the sale. Let customers feel that they have a limited time to grab this opportunity. Highlight the timer clearly on the top of your website. This will help you in scaling up your conversions graph.
8. Leverage the power of Social Media
Customers are highly active on social media networks during festivals. Set a plan as to how you are going to utilize Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to shout out about your holiday sales. Promote and advertise your campaigns. It is the best time to get noticed by the people. Come up with some interesting and creative posts.
9. Start doing Email Marketing
Start sending emails to your subscribers. Get them ready for the coming holiday season. Let them know what is waiting for them this festive season.
Push your emails at regular intervals but do not spam. An effective email marketing campaign can bring you a lot of customers.
This might interest you: How to grow your email list using popups and make them effective?
10. Launch a Referral or Loyalty program
There is no better way to boost your holiday sales than a referral or loyalty program. When the shopping fever is high, it will help you maximize your sales.
Offer loyalty points every time a customer makes a purchase during the holiday season. Apart from a loyalty program, start a referral program. Ask users to refer your store products to their friends or family and reward them with a gift or cashback on a successful referral.
With KnowBand’s Affiliate and Referral Program module, you will not only get the option to set a referral program but you can also allow customers to be your affiliate partner to earn gift vouchers.
Check out: PrestaShop Affiliate and Referral program addon, Magento Affiliate and Referral Program extension, Magento 2 Affiliate and Referral Program extension
11. Free Shipping
A study by Invesp reports that 9 out of 10 consumers say that free shipping is the primary reason to shop online.
If not on other days, you should definitely consider the idea of providing free shipping during the festive season. Feed it in the mind of customers by reminding them repeatedly about free shipping.
If you are worried about the profit, you can adjust the shipping cost in the product amount. The tag of “free shipping” shifts the focus from the increased product price. This would make a smart holiday marketing idea.
12. Make use of Hashtags
Hashtags provide you with a high organic reach and increase your product visibility.
Set an occasional hashtag for your brand and start using it actively on the major social media platforms, mainly Instagram and Twitter. But make sure the hashtags are relevant.
Your brand hashtags will allow your followers to easily look around your brand, products, or info just by searching with the defined hashtag.
Read: 4 reasons why you should start using Instagram Hashtags
13. Prepare a video
It is the trend of Video marketing. Videos grab a lot more attention and engagement than images or texts. Use this to your advantage. Brands try to share happiness by creating a short, funny, and message-giving video clip.
You can follow a similar approach to make your brand stand out from the rest. A video can make a personal connection between your brand and your followers.
Final word
E-retailers rejoice the second half of the year as this is the time when the sales graph rises drastically. If you follow the right approach in implementing your holiday marketing ideas, you can earn huge profits too.
There are many more ideas that you can get, however, I find these 13 Holiday Marketing Ideas and Tips to be the most effective to boost your holiday sales.
If you have some more points to add, do let me know in the comments below.