The magic of the season is here!
Shopping bags, gifts, room decorations, fancy dinners… you name it and it brings a smile to your face. Holidays are certainly something that can make anyone around the globe happy as a lark. The joy is not limited to individuals; the holiday season works like a charm for businesses as well. This is the reason marketers need to invest in strategic holiday marketing ideas.
Every year people spend a lot of money during the holiday season. In 2021, more than 51% of consumers plan to holiday shop right around the time of Thanksgiving, with holiday shopping sales expected to hit $859 billion, a 10.5% increase over 2020.
At this time, if your company doesn’t invest the required time and effort in holiday marketing strategies and ideas, you might face a massive loss.
From social media to email marketing, content creation to social sharing, you need to create and place your holiday marketing campaigns everywhere. In addition, you need to swoop in some reward points and loyalty bonuses to ensure customer retention and boost sales.
Marketing automation is an important part of every successful marketing strategy, yet it is frequently underutilized.
Driving Sales in Increasing Customers with Automated Holiday Marketing Campaigns
Marketing has been the foundation of several holiday marketing strategies for years. According to Statista figures, over 80% of the American population shops online. With such massive potential online traffic, crafting a strong strategy for your end-users is prominent. Instead of custom-defining and creating every touchpoint, the best thing marketers can do is incorporate automation into their repertoire. This will not only help in saving time and resources but will also help in driving optimum outcomes.
So, to help marketers have a busy holiday season, we have incorporated 8 automated campaign ideas to boost sales this season.
1. Email Marketing to Increase Lead Quality
One of the most effective aspects of any marketing automation campaign is email. Personalized automated emails are one of the most effective strategies to increase email open rates and engagement.
Email marketing is an excellent way to communicate with not just current clients, but also to generate new prospects. Because it can be accessed immediately from mobile or tablet devices, email is the most effective way of direct connection with your target audience.
Timing is crucial. Send the email before, during, and just around the moment your sale is going to conclude. It’s a great strategy to increase last-minute sales.
2. Customer Retargeting
While people focus on quickly emptying their wallets during holidays, many companies rush to finish their final spending rounds before the end of the year, thus risking over-extending their budget. To avoid the risk, it is best to utilize this time to sell to previous customers rather than making efforts and spending too much to turn prospects into first-timers.
You may use retargeting advertising on Google’s Display Network as well as Facebook and Instagram to remind customers of products they’ve previously viewed, encouraging them to return to your website. Sending former customers early access to seasonal discounts is a wonderful strategy to take advantage of this important sales time.
If you want to convert people who are still on the fence, now is a great moment to do so! You can invest in sales content automation to create attention-grabbing content and marketing campaigns.
3. Strategy Building to Bring New Subscribers
To get the greatest results, combine your email marketing efforts with carefully linked direct mailings.
Using an email strategy will spruce in new subscribers and customers for your business. Marketers have relied heavily on email marketing for years as part of their annual holiday marketing campaigns.
Expect your email subscriber list to grow as well with the rise in website traffic. Create an email series that welcomes these new subscribers to your business as a method to automate holiday marketing communications for them.
Welcome emails not only make your brand look more human and welcoming, but they also tend to have a higher open rate, which makes them highly successful in attracting new subscribers.
4. Early Access to VIP Customers
Reward your consumers with early access deals before the holiday season rush. It makes them feel special and encourages them to make a purchase in advance of the shopping season.
To thank your regular customers, launch email campaigns that include a discount just for them. Provide unique prizes to consumers who share their stories, photos, and opinions on your social media platforms and offer preseason discounts to build excitement.
5. Leveraging the Power of Social Media
Using giveaways and sharing content to increase excitement for an impending event are all low-cost methods to engage your audience. You may usually enhance participation by encouraging your followers to leave a comment, post, or like your contest.
For a long time, companies have been using giveaways as a means to generate interest in their products or services and boost sales. Prizes and promotional competitions may rapidly get your target audience enthusiastic about the impending holidays and your company.
A Twitter hashtag contest, a photo caption contest on your Facebook page, a festive quiz, or a wish contest may all be done, depending on the size of your team and your budget, with relative ease.
6. Enticing Customers with Upsell
Upsells are just as effective as bundles in terms of raising your AOV. These are essentially add-on items to an order that are frequently connected to the original purchase in some manner.
The greatest thing is that they’re shown to consumers who are clearly in the buying mood since they’ve made it all the way to the checkout page.
Upsells not only boost revenue, but also customer happiness since you’re providing them exactly what they want, such as matching spoons for their egg cups or socks to go with a new pair of shoes.
7. Multi-Channel Marketing
You must already be committed to a multichannel approach; it’s time to automate your marketing efforts and processes to maximize your outcomes. Because it is prompted by a recipient’s own activities, automation is a crucial component of holiday marketing. It allows you to reach out to appropriate customers with the right message at the right time.
Automated campaigns, in other words, are hyper-targeted. Aside from that, using direct mail marketing techniques like these may increase your engagement by a substantial amount.
Include special offers for social media followers to entice them to join the cause. If you want to win items, you should hold a social media contest around your campaign. The more interactive it is, the better it is for you.
8. Seeking Advantage from Push Notifications
When it comes to holiday marketing, email should not be the end-all-be-all. When combined with other message channels, it improves sales. Browser alerts are a boon to digital marketers, who need to read and trash tens of thousands of emails every day. With browser notifications, you may create an auto-growing marketing list as your traffic rises.
With so many communications flooding subscribers’ inboxes, SMS and online push alerts may go a lot further than email alone.
Holidays are an excellent time to reach out to your internet following. Smart marketers understand that they must capture as much attention as possible within this brief window of opportunity in order to optimize profits and revenue.
Make sure, however, that you properly automate your notifications. Set your web push notification campaigns to autopilot and watch the money roll in. It makes all the difference to automate your web push alerts at the correct moment. Check when you can get the most traffic, which device consumers prefer to buy on, and send your notifications accordingly.
Insider Tips for Automated Holiday Marketing Campaigns
Even if you try all of the above-mentioned tricks, you might still not avail the best results if your campaign strategy is plain and monotonous. In order to get a marketing automation lead, you need to opt for personalization. When your customers feel that they are more than the number, they are likely to engage.
For multichannel marketing via social media, emails, and other marketing campaigns, personalization is the hidden key that most marketers overlook. The same strategy might have worked well previously, but it will not always generate the same results. Thus, you need to go above and beyond with your marketing campaigns. Personalized email marketing, social media marketing, or video marketing will help you to rise.
For instance, Facebook’s approach towards personalization is incredible. Time and again Facebook creates personalized videos for its users, whether it is for friendversary or Facebook’s anniversary, it creates a memory lane for you.
Around 80% of customers are more inclined to buy from a company that provides customized experiences. Modern marketers understand how personalization contributes to better client interactions. This is why they are tailoring content for all of their marketing channels such that it includes the information that customers care about.
Top 3 Tips to Succeed in Your Holiday Marketing Efforts
1. Observe Your Hits and Falls
You can’t expand, simplify, or change your holiday marketing campaigns, especially for seasonal events, without first looking at what has and hasn’t worked in the past. Thus, as you move toward your marketing ideas, you need to check customer analytics to evaluate the strategies that worked well and those that failed miserably.
2. Run Test Offers Before the Main Campaigns
For companies, the entire holiday season is important. Thus, to accomplish your marketing automation campaign goals, you need to test the offers early on. You can opt for test email sign-ups, push notifications for early access to VIP customers, or run online contests.
3. Special Deals for Loyal Customers
Your loyal customers are your source of massive sales and new customer acquisition. Making them feel important with special offers will not only help you grow your business but will also result in increased ROI. Thus, make sure your holiday campaigns are effective and help deliver customized and unique customer experiences.
Wrapping Up
Investing in an emotional bond with your target audience during the holiday season is one of the greatest ways to do it. By segmenting your consumers for a fully tailored experience, making your campaigns easy to share, and advertising the greatest bargains that are consistent across all of your platforms, you can set yourself up for ultimate success for the next season.
Take a page from our holiday marketing ideas playbook and get started right now with your holiday campaign planning. Plan ahead of time, use direct subject lines, broadcast value-adds, rely on automation, use SMS and push alerts, and retarget. Use some of the suggestions we’ve provided to establish trust, increase sales, and convert one-time consumers into loyal customers.