Christmas is a magical time of year. After all, it’s the season of giving and as we all know, it’s also the season of marketing and sales. In order to make sure it’s your products that are being gifted and not your competitors, you will need a Christmas marketing and sales campaign that works. Getting it right means you make plenty of sales and all of your customers are left feeling great and carefree. Get it wrong and your customers will go elsewhere, leaving you with those January blues.
With Christmas just a few weeks away, it’s important to start building your campaign now if you haven’t already. Keep reading to find out some points to consider when building your Christmas campaign.
Establishing goals for your Christmas campaign is an important step to success. The goals you create will help guide your campaign in the right direction. These goals could be as simple as increasing sales, expanding your customer base or boosting brand awareness, all of which will guide your efforts. You could try something a little more complex, for example, you might decide you want to sell x amount of your top-selling product or you could use your Christmas campaign to launch and sell a new product.
You can never start a Christmas campaign too early. Many businesses start planning their campaigns in September and October, because this is when people start to do their Christmas shopping. Another great time to target your marketing campaign is immediately after Halloween because this is when all of the focus turns to Christmas. Of course, there will be last minute shoppers who buy in December but it’s better to attract sales throughout the peak shopping season. Create a comprehensive content calendar to identify key dates for your promotions and marketing campaigns and remember the crucial shopping days such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday and those last days leading up to Christmas.
You don’t want to be overwhelmed with last minute orders, especially if you can’t guarantee the products will be delivered in time for Christmas. Decide on a cut-off date for last purchases. This means you won’t be responsible for making or breaking someone’s Christmas if they order from you 48 hours before the big day and it means that you get to relax and enjoy your Christmas too.
It’s vital to make sure that you have all of your most popular products well-stocked in time for Christmas. You don’t want to sell out of your most valuable assets, especially if you’ve invested in a sales campaign to push those products. Your most sought after products will drive traffic to your website and if you run out, this could deter customers returning to your website in the future.
Email marketing is your friend, especially at this time of year. Ad space can be expensive in the lead up to Christmas with everybody competing to occupy the same spaces on the internet. For this reason, email marketing is so important and if you already have a comprehensive list of subscribing customer email addresses, you have one of the most powerful assets at your disposal.
Use email marketing to reach your customers and drive them towards your promotional campaigns. Be clever and seasonal with your email subjects and content; ‘Our top 3 gifts for dads’ may interest those who are indecisive and ‘Is this the perfect gift this year?’ may generate intrigue and draw people to view your top-selling, most sought after product.
Get into the festive spirit and create seasonal landing pages to sell your products and add eye-catching Christmas themed banners to highlight products and themed collection category pages for popular gifts and so on. It’s also a great idea to update your product imagery for Christmas. Christmas shoppers will want to see imagery of how the product will be packaged and wrapped. Festive image frames, props and backgrounds would be enough to entice the shoppers into the festive mood. You can use the new decorated imagery across your social media networks, your email marketing and on your ecommerce website to generate traffic and drive sales.
Free shipping is seen as a ‘must’ in ecommerce and it’s definitely psychological. Many shoppers would be willing to pay more for a product with free shipping than have to pay for products and shipping fees. If you don’t offer free shipping, consider running a promotion or special offer code for free shipping during the festive season.
Use Christmas keywords on your website and in your adverts to drive online traffic and encourage more sales. Do your research and decide which words work best for you. Including ‘Christmas’ in your list of keywords could increase the cost of your PPC campaigns but using it in your SEO could result in a festive bump in traffic.
Consider using other festive words and terms that could help to sell the product. Describing your product as a ‘stocking filler’ indicates its popularity and whilst it may not be a show stopping gift, it would be a good purchase nonetheless. Use emotive, festive language when talking about your products, for example ‘The perfect gift for dad’ or ‘Mum would love to find this in her stocking’ to boost sales.
What started off as an American ‘holiday’ to boost Christmas sales, Black Friday has come to the UK and now is one of the busiest times for Christmas shoppers looking to find themselves a bargain. Be prepared to run Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions and tailor your marketing for the entire Black Friday weekend or week to generate more sales.
For more information and tips on Black Friday, read our blog here.
A great way to create a buzz and build your social media networks is to run Christmas giveaways across all of your channels. Encourage people to like, share, follow and comment on your social media to take part. Offer a gift card that can be spent at your store or on your ecommerce website or offer a popular product or bundle of products – whatever you think is going to be most appealing to your audience. With any luck, you will gain lots of social media followers, drive more traffic to your website and those you didn’t win will hopefully buy something from you anyway.
Are you doing enough to get the most out of the seasonal shopping period? If you think that you could do more or are looking for some expert guidance, get in touch with Vertical Plus at hello@verticalplus.co.uk.