Harpreet Munjal — December 1, 2019 Holiday season 2019 is coming fast, and it is the time when you can boost your sales and revenue many times. You can generate more sales than you have made in the whole year. Almost every big company like Walmart, Amazon, and Target receive millions of orders. In 2018, customers ordered more than 180 million product items during Amazon Black Friday sale. There are thousands of brands that generate millions of revenue during these few days.
If you’re still not actively planning your marketing strategy for holiday season sale, then you are reducing your chances of boosting your revenue. But if you haven’t started yet, then you will definitely be late for the holiday season.
It is the right time to plan your holiday season marketing strategy and to take steps. And that’s why I’m writing this guide to share some proven tips and insights so you can achieve your goals during this holiday season.
Start today
Many businesses have started their preparation for the holiday season. If you really want to take advantage of this years’ holiday season sale, then it is the right time to plan your marketing strategy and start preparing for that.
You can’t be prepared for holiday sales just at the moment. You need a solid marketing strategy and proper implementation to get success. And it needs time.
According to the studies, July to September is the best time to start preparations for holiday sales. But if you haven’t yet, it’s never too late.
Learn from the past
You should learn from the past and use it in the present. If you targeted holiday season last year, then you have a mine of gold.
You need to analyze last year’s reports data to build a stronger strategy for this year. Analyze your previous years’ reports for holiday season to get data about your best selling products, top-performing marketing channels, conversion rates, product return rate, your discounts, and more.
All the data can help you to figure out where you should focus more and where less. You can also get help and ideas to choose the right marketing platforms.
Plan new marketing campaigns
After getting some useful insights and ideas from the old data, you should plan for this years’ holiday season.
But if you have started a new business this year or targeting holiday season for the first time, then you do not need to worry. You can still get great success in the first attempt without any past experience. Old analytical data makes it easier to plan things much better, but it is not the most important factor to get success. Most important is how good you plan and implement your marketing strategy for this year.
You should understand one thing that you’re planning for the holiday season. People buy too much during this time because of the huge discounts. So if you want to succeed with your holiday sales, then you need to give as much discount as you can. No one will be interested and wait for your 10%, 15%, or 20% discount. Holiday season means huge discounts.
You need to train your staff (support, packaging, shipping, and the works.) to handle lots of orders during the sale time and also plan your inventory. Ensure that there will be no shortage of products during the sale season but if it happens then how you will manage. You should plan and implement everything from now. Only then you can properly handle everything at the time.
Create special landing pages
It is a proven strategy that you should create exclusive landing pages for holiday season sales like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas sale. These exclusive landing pages help users to easily know about your discounts, offers, products, and appeal them to purchase.
But many businesses don’t use special landing pages for their holiday sales. But exclusive landing pages for the holiday season can help you to boost your revenue.
Follow these tips to make a perfect landing page for your products:
- Your landing page must be simple and with the required details
- Don’t use too much content on the landing page
- Describe and highlight your holiday sale discount
- Use suitable call-to-action at suitable places on your page.
- Use countdown-timer to create urgency.
- Make it simple for the user to purchase easily.
- The landing page must be mobile-friendly and fast to load.
You can use any landing page builder tool like Thrive Architect (for WordPress) to create professional landing pages for your site.
Right channels for marketing
Once your website is ready to handle holiday sale orders, you need to focus on marketing. In this digital era, there are many platforms to promote your products. But you need to choose some of the most powerful marketing channels according to your business.
Top five most effective channels to acquire new customers during holiday season sale:
1. Facebook ads
Facebook ads are the best way to get new customers during holiday season sales, according to 72.5% brands. Facebook is one of the best platforms to market your business and acquire new customers because Facebook has a targeted audience for every business. That’s why Facebook is the first choice of brands to get new customers.
Facebook marketing is many times cheaper than other platforms (Google, Twitter) to promote your business. But during the holiday season, CPC cost increases by up to 140% due to the high competition. Facebook also takes more time to review and approve ads at that time.
You should start building your audience right now. Install Facebook pixel on your site so you can target your existing users during the sale time and also start to focus on growing your page audience from now. These efforts will help you generate more sales during the holiday sale time.
Here are some tips to get the benefit of Facebook during the holiday season:
- Plan ahead: Plan everything like content, media, etc. before the holiday season.
- Schedule posts: You can schedule your Facebook page posts.
- Facebook ads: You should create and approve your Facebook ads before the holiday season sale. I recommend creating ads a minimum of ten days before the sale.
- Use high-quality images.
2. Instagram ads
Instagram ads are the second most useful way to get new customers. Instagram has more than one billion users, and brands are getting 10x engagement on it than other platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Instagram marketing can help you generate more sales during the holiday season. You need to target the right audience to get results with Instagram ads. Instagram offers different types of ads like carousel ads, story ads, and some others. you can use videos to create Instagram ads too.
3. Google ads
Google ads are one of the best options to get new customers for your business. Most of the users search for the holiday sale queries during the sale season like:
- _____ Black Friday sale,
- _____ Cyber Monday deal, or
- Gifts for mom
- Gifts for ___ years old
You should bid for all holiday sale related keywords. Some users search for brands and others for products. You need to make sure that you are targeting all the keywords.
Land your customers to the special holiday sale landing pages so the user can easily know about your holiday sale and purchase from you.
You can also try Google Shopping ads. Shopping ads have more potential to boost your sales. It is an attractive and product-oriented ad type to acquire new customers for your business.
4. Instagram organic
Instagram ads are the second-best option according to the brands, but Instagram organic is also one of the top channels to acquire new customers during the holiday season sales.
You can get huge success with Instagram organic reach if you have a solid plan to get noticed and create a buzz for your business. Here are some tips to get success with Instagram:
- Business profile: Convert your Instagram profile to a business profile. There is nothing different in the business account than a personal account, but you will get analytics data to target the right audience.
- Influencers: You can collaborate with Instagram influencers from the same niche as your business. They can help you get noticed and create a buzz around your business and also generate sales.
- Customer stories and feedbacks: Customer experiences, pictures, and reviews are more effective content ideas to acquire new customers. Trust factor plays a vital role in the purchasing process. Real images and stories about your product can help you to win the game with the trust factor.
- Come up with engaging hashtags: Hashtags can play an important role to increase the reach of a campaign. But if you use your own but engaging hashtags to promote your campaign, then you can create buzz and community around your business as well. Choose an engaging and inspiring hashtag for your business. For example, Coca-Cola uses #ShareACoke, and RedBull uses #ItGivesYouWings, and there are thousands of posts on Instagram using these hashtags
5. SEO
SEO is also one of the best ways to acquire new customers during the holiday sale. As I told above that people search for holiday sale related keywords during the sale time. To get maximum results with SEO, you should choose all the related keywords to a holiday sale. Here are some holiday sale keywords to give you an idea:
- Amazon Black Friday sale
- Amazon Cyber Monday sale
- Ipad Pro Black Friday deals 2019
- Best smartphones Black Friday deals
- Best gifts for ____ (dad)
- Best gifts for ___ (five) year old
and many others.
Create different pages and high-quality content for every sale like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas sale. And optimize your site for search engines with SEO to rank on top of SERPs. It takes some time to rank a website in Google so you should focus on SEO from now itself. If your business allows then focus on global or national SEO to get more customers rather than regional SEO like New York city SEO to rank your SEO keywords in New York City only. But If your business doesn’t allow you, then you should focus on local-regional Keywords only.
6. Email marketing
Email marketing is the best existing customer acquisition channel. Segmented email offers, general email offers are best practices to get success with email marketing during the holiday season sale. Share details with your customers about your sale discount, top products and Use attractive headlines to boost your email open-rate.
Don’t ignore the mobile devices
People prefer to purchase online from eCommerce sites during the holiday season sale. And mobile was the top-performing device that people used to buy online during the holiday sale 2018. So don’t ignore the mobile when planning your holiday sale strategy.
Offer discounts, free gifts/ shipping.
Offering something free can boost your sales and revenue. Give a considerable discount to your customers if you can. But if you don’t then calculate your avg. Costs and profit-margins and give offers like “buy four and get two free” or “spend $ 300 and get $ 75 off.” Use some creativity that provides value to users as well as profit to you.
But shipping must be free. Customers like that and your competitors offer it.
Start early and end later
This is the best strategy that I learned from my experience. People become crazy to buy during the holiday sale. That’s why you should start playing before the competitors. how?
With early sales! holiday season starts from the Black Friday, but you should start your sale some days before from the Black Friday (is called early Black Friday sale). I used this strategy last year and generated six-figure revenue before the starting of the actual sale. That’s why I’m asking you to start early and end late.
But don’t use only one discount coupon for the whole season sale (Black Friday to New Year), you need to create urgency by using different coupon codes during the sale time as Hostgator does! Hostgator provides various discount coupons during the Hostgator Black Friday sale week, as showing in the screenshot:
Image Source: Hostgator
Final words
Holiday season sale can boost your revenue if you plan and implement in the right direction. Start working from now to implement your strategy to achieve your holiday sale goals. And tracking everything like sales, spending, and profit can help you to take the right actions during the sale time.
But if you’re unable to plan or nothing works for you then simply place ads or hire an expert to help you. 🙂
*Data source: Shopify holiday guide playbook.
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