How many times has a holiday come, only for you to realize that you never prepared a promotion for it?
Sooner is always better than later, but if you know what to do, you’ll still be able to give your competition a good fight and your customers a great deal this holiday period.
In this post, we will look at what you should be doing right now to end 2015 on a strong note by preparing your online store for the holiday season.
So let’s get started.
1. Look For Related Bloggers
Bloggers are the modern day experts on everything hip, cool and worth having. They post the latest products and gift ideas online and in real time, to thousands of followers.
So if you want your products to be where the cool kids are… send them to a blogger for a shout out.
To start, enter your niche on YouTube and you’ll see a lot of videos by bloggers reviewing products. Contact them by going to their page by clicking the name under the video’s title, click “About”, and look for the “Send Message” button.
Sometimes they also display their email address on the same “About” page.
2. Contact Your Past Customers
If you have an email list, this is going to be an important promotional channel for you. Customers who have bought from you in the past will appreciate you touching base with them and letting them know what’s new.
If you’ve written promotional emails before, you know they can take a good deal of time and hitting the send button can be nerve wracking. This is because once you hit send, you can’t take it back. This is all the more reason to prepare this channel ahead of time.
Give people a reason to come back and buy from you by sending them a VIP Christmas offer that’s just for them.
Everyone loves a bit of personalised attention and your great service will remind them why they bought from you in the first place!
Tip: A tool called Klaviyo can help you segment, prepare and track your email efforts over the holidays.
3. Use The Power Of Social Media
Start your social media campaign early using a teaser campaign encouraging consumers to be inspired by your products and services.
Facebook Ads is a great way to get your promotion in front of your target demographic. Even if you have never used Facebook Ads before you can be up and running in less than 30 minutes.
Instagram is the new Facebook, so don’t ignore the impact of Instagram on your Christmas marketing campaign.
Using both along with Twitter will ensure that your gifts are top of mind, shared and most of all “liked”.
4. Make Your Products Marketable
It’s one thing to have a great product, but does it match and translate to what you are saying and doing online?
If you are selling the world’s greatest handmade jewelry how can you translate those exquisite goodies into beautiful images, communicated through an enticing story to capture the imagination of your readers? And most importantly… get the customer to come in and buy?!
Make sure your story, imagery, service and product offer are consistent at every stage of the selling process and you’ll have loyal customers for life.
If you’ve done enough marketing to expect a spike in sales, you also need to stock up on inventory, as you wouldn’t want to run out of your bestselling items in the heat of the season.
The holiday season is notorious for impulse buys, particularly in the eCommerce world. Humans are visual creatures and we process images much faster than we do text, so a professional well-lit product image could be enough to get a customer’s attention and make a sale.
5. Marketplaces
You can spend all of your time trying to push new shoppers to your site — or you can go find them where they already shop.
No digital marketing plan is complete without at least considering marketplaces, and chief among them are Handmade at Amazon, Etsy and now, the new eBay artisan collective. If you’re not already set up on the site, now is the time to open an account.
It might be too late to do this now but this will definitely help you on your Christmas marketing strategy next year if you start early as now.
There you have it. A holiday last minute game plan you can begin implementing and preparing for immediately.
Make 2015 the best year yet for your business and take advantage of the gifts the holiday season naturally brings to your business, in the form of increased conversions and average order size.
Start reaching out, connect to your customers, and most of all have a fantastic and profitable Holiday period!
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