The year 2020 has been challenging for virtually all businesses. The business owners who are negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic are rightfully feeling discouraged about achieving year-end targets. Though things seem grim at the moment, there is still hope.
The holiday season is here, the time when consumers become active. Despite the ongoing pandemic, market research indicates that people are willing to go shopping this holiday season. It might be the perfect opportunity that you were looking for to end the year on a happy note.
In 2019, customers spent about $7.4 billion on Black Friday alone through online platforms. This figure will most probably rise in 2020. Research suggests that while 42% of people are willing to spend the same amount as last year, 13% are ready to spend more than the previous year.
So you can see the potential buyers are willing to make a purchase. All you need is to offer them the right thing the correct way, and you will generate revenue this holiday season. Below you will find the tips that will help you plan and execute a holiday promotion campaign to boost your income.
Start Preparing Now
It cannot ever be too early to start your preparations for the holiday season, and it is certainly not too late to be now. With your passion for your business and tips from this blog, you still have plenty of time to create and run a campaign or program to boost your revenue.
Important Tips to Boost Your Online Sales
The following is what you should consider when preparing your business activities for the holiday season:
Product Inventory
Check if you need to stock up on a specific popular item or if you have to bring new things for gift-wrapping or seasonality.
Marketing strategy
Try figuring out which marketing channel will be the most effective for communicating your message to your audience. Also, what message do you want to convey via your holiday promotion material?
Promotional materials
Decide how you will get the word out. Design your promotional material based on your communication channel. Content for online ads and social media posts is vastly different from Print ads and in-store flyers. So choose your promotion material carefully.
Sales and offers
Find out what you can provide the customers that will appear to their immediate needs and desires.
Budget
Use advertising budget to full efficiency. You can also allocate some funds towards giving discounts on specific products to boost your sales.
Customers
Learn how customers are adapting to the changing world around them. Find ways to appeal to your altered needs and wants in the COVID-19 world.
Be COVID-19 Conscious
Due to the raging pandemic, businesses are making adjustments to the holiday season marketing strategy this year. It would help if you considered these as well; COVID-19 has changed everything, from the content in the marketing copy, and preferred promotional channels to the offers that businesses are providing.
It is vital to prepare a holiday marketing strategy keeping in mind the safety of your customers. A well-thought-out marketing campaign that appeals to customers’ new priorities in light of the global pandemic.
While businesses typically use the reports from previous years to analyze crucial things like popular discounts, top-performing products, marketing channels, and product return rates, this year is different. Things that were successful the previous year might not be now because of COVID-19. Make sure to take that into account while preparing a marketing strategy for this holiday season.
Choose The Correct Marketing Channels
Choosing the proper marketing channel for promoting your holiday campaign will ensure that the time, money, and effort you are putting into the will not go to waste. The right marketing channel will also help you better target your audience, ensuring more success and sales.
Best Marketing Channels to Boost Holiday Sales & Revenue
The following marketing channels will help your message reach your targeted audience:
Social Media and PPC
Both organic social media posting and paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, or your preferred PPC platform can help you target the right audience.
Search Engines
Google and Bing are the most popular search engines that you can take advantage of via SEO techniques. You can run paid ad campaigns on these search engines to attract potential customers.
Email Marketing
You can start a new holiday mail series, or you can inform your potential customers about special holiday deals via regular newsletters.
Offline Marketing
You can use local newspaper ads, ad spots on radio and TV, in-store flyers, and many other mediums for running an offline marketing campaign.
Every marketing channel has a unique audience, and not all of them are well-suited for your business. Try to look at your marketing data from the past years and analyze which platform has given you the most leads and conversions. Figuring out your top-performing channel can save you from wasting resources on the non-performing ones.
Create Unique Landing Pages
Many businesses are guilty of not creating separate landing pages for the particular products and services they offer during the holiday season. It is crucial to create a campaign-specific landing page, especially during holidays.
The specialized landing page will help you give your website a more holiday-friendly theme and flare. Try also making it clear on the designated landing page that you are offering a particular product or service only for a specific time. It will create a sense of urgency, prompting a response for your potential customers.
A detailed and pleasing-looking page with a single call to action will significantly increase your holiday conversion rates.
You can utilize various landing page builder tools to create a beautiful landing page specific to the holiday season. Try using a feature-rich and reliable landing page builder tool under your budget that provides the essentials of creating an excellent landing page for your website.
The following are some of the essential tips to make a high-converting landing age for your holiday sales:
- Use countdown times, as they have a scarcity effect and excitement.
- Use a strategically placed and the right call to action on your landing page.
- The page should have an excellent user experience.
- Avoid putting too much text on your landing page.
- Make the landing page clean, so visitors can quickly identify what’s in it for them.
- Try putting as few steps as possible between the landing page’s call to action and the final checkout page.
- Make it easy for your customers to figure out how they can buy and apply discounts.
- Don’t forget to check if the landing page is mobile-optimized. Most people shop using their smartphones, so if your landing page isn’t optimized well, you will lose many potential customers.
Do’s and Don’t in Boosting Sales
Start Early And End Later
People eagerly look for discounts and offers and go crazy shopping for the holiday well in advance, so you can capture a considerable number of customers if you start your holiday marketing earlier than your competitors.
Similarly, extending your promotions for longer than your competition can also help you generate sizeable revenue. Longer duration promotional offers often give people a chance to consider your product because they have ample time to make a purchase decision.
Ensure You Can Handle Increased Demand
Before you get all hyped about launching your holiday marketing campaigns, ensure that everything is ready according to plan. Try double-checking if you can handle an increase in orders and sales. Make sure that:
- Your website can manage a sudden burst in traffic. Try contacting your website host to confirm that.
- Your staff is well prepared and trained in managing higher than usual demand. It includes packing, shipping, support, and other related activities.
- You have enough stock that there will be no shortage of products. It’s essential to have a backup plan in case you do run out of stock.
Offer Time-Limited Deals
Running short-duration online sales is an excellent way to boost your sales during the holiday season. In this method, you have to increase your discount or offer an exclusive deal for just a few hours, like giving a 50% discount for only an hour. You can repeat this offer 2-3 times a day for multiple days. It will generate excitement in customers and increase your revenue.
The following are some tips for using time-limited sales effectively:
- Promote a heavy discount on your website through social media and email.
- Use a unique coupon for each sale. It will help you track top-performing deals or time slots.
- Use countdown timers or pop-ups to alter visitors about your limited-time sales.
Create Gift Guides
People use the internet, especially Google, to find the best gift ideas for their friends, spouses, children, relatives, parents, etc. You can create gift guides to help your visitors, attract more customers, and amplify your SEO.
The following are some examples of gift guide titles:
- 20 thoughtful and useful gift ideas for Christmas
- Top 10 laptop deals you shouldn’t miss
- 20 Best Christmas Gifts for your loved ones in 2020
These are the generic yet effective headlines that you can use in your gift guide. You can also follow the below-mentioned guidelines while putting together a holiday gift guide:
- Use keyword research tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush to find popular gift guide queries.
- Include the products and servers that you offer in the gift list. Explain all the product details via a compelling copy to convey why it would be a great gift.
- Try to keep the guide more specific. Consider focusing on age, gender, hobbies, personality type, marital status, and other similar things.
- Use carousels on social media to showcase your products or services that could be great gift items.
Offer Free Stuff
Who doesn’t love getting stuff for free? Offering something for free is an excellent strategy to boost sales. People are usually in the shopping mood during the holiday season, so offering them something for free will entice them to buy from you. You can provide free shipping, free products, or gift cards to your customers.
Free shipping is a non-negotiable deal during the holiday season. Virtually no business charges for shipping during this time of the year, so you are deliberately placing yourself at a position of severe disadvantage by not providing free shipping.
If a customer sees shipping charges included in their order, they are more likely to go to your competitor. E-commerce giants like Amazon have made free shipping a norm that everyone comes to expect at this point.
Before you start giving out free stuff, do the math, and make sure that your offering is valuable for your customers and is ultimately profitable for you. You will have to calculate the product cost and your profit margins to create offers like “Buy 2 Get 1 Free” or “Spend $500 and get $50 Off.”
Run Referral Discount
Word of mouth is still the most effective way to communicate your product to your potential customers. Referral marketing is a way of doing just that. This marketing strategy works particularly well during the holidays. Try encouraging your customers to refer your products product to others in exchange for an increased discount.
This tactic can help you grow your sales and revenue without much investment. It will also build loyalty among your customers.
Use Virtual Reality
As the world shows unusual online behavior because of social distancing, businesses are coming up with unique solutions to attract customers. If you run an e-commerce site and looking for success, you might want to check out virtual reality.
It can enable customers to browse your products in a virtual environment from the safety of their homes. Though virtual reality is a new technology, early adoption of it can ensure long-term benefits.
Create Organic Social Media Posts
With billions of users, social media platforms servers as a great place to showcase what you have to offer. Effectively using social media can save you a ton of money on advertising and help you connect with your audience at a deeper, more personal level.
It is useful for finding new customers and re-engaging existing ones. It would help if you had a constant social media presence, so you don’t have to worry about audience and engagement when launching your holiday marketing campaign.
Advertise Your Product On Social Media
If you don’t have a million followers on social media, don’t worry. You can still advertise and push your content to many people via advertising on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.
Targeted advertising on social media can be an excellent way of getting potential customers interested in your offers.
Improve Your SEO
SEO is among the best ways of getting free targeted traffic to your website. If a person is searching for a particular thing, then they are more likely to buy it. For effective SEO, you will need to target queries relevant to your audience during the holidays.
You can target product-oriented keywords to boost your e-commerce SEO. Such as:
- Holiday clothing for kids
- Best Christmas laptop sales
- Hanukkah decoration
If you are operating a local service-oriented business, you can target keywords such as:
- DIY Christmas decorations
- Home cleaning tips for holidays
- Healthy holiday recipes
Create individual pages on your website that have high-quality content that targets these keywords. Implement SEO best practices, so your page can rank higher in Google search results.
Remember that it takes time to get results with SEO, so you should publish these posts early. However, if you are late in posting, you can still use SEO by making your posts evergreen, so they can continually bring traffic during upcoming holiday seasons.
Send Out Marketing Emails
Email marketing is an excellent way of nurturing leads into customers and maintaining customer relationships. If you are building a mailing list throughout the year, it will become an asset during your holiday marketing campaign.
You can announce your holiday discounts and other offers and promote your holiday material, including links to your SEO posts via emails.
When sending a holiday marketing email, don’t forget about the best email practices like segmentation and personalization to make the best of it. Try to write an effective holiday email subject line so that the recipient will open your email.
Conclusion
The holiday season sale is the final chance of generating revenue this year. There is a multitude of holiday marketing strategy ideas that you can follow. However, regardless of which one you choose to implement, ensure your preparedness. Plan, test, and track everything from sales and profits to return rates to spending.
Planning will help you take the correct steps at the right time – during the holiday campaign and in the years to come.
