The holiday season, we know, is one of the most consumerist times of the year: after Black Friday and Cyber Monday fever and the rush to find the best deal, the sometimes desperate search for the perfect gift begins.
Lack of time and the search for original ideas make even the most “aware” and “crafty” consumers easily conquerable, which is why you need a well-structured and planned Christmas marketing strategy to put in place in order to increase sales and grow your revenue. The advice even on the brand and company side is therefore not to get caught unprepared, but, on the contrary, to start devising and planning activities as early as October.
But if this is not possible, let us not despair, there remain some activities that can still be carried out in the days immediately preceding Christmas and that find in timeliness, the strength of their effectiveness.
Personalized shopping experiences: profile your e-commerce users
VIP customers or one-time buyers, lovers of offers or novelties, men or women: knowing your users thoroughly, profiling and segmenting them according to master data, interests, buying habits, is the real key to the success of your online business, even in the run-up to the Christmas holidays (find out how to do it, reading our article dedicated to user profiling).
All this will allow you to build a customized offer with content and products in line with their needs and expectations.
Offer personalized gift idea lists or segment your best customers or VIP users and offer an exclusive selection of gift ideas accompanied perhaps by a gadget or a small discount coupon for a later purchase, or segment users who are used to buy within your e-Commerce only during promotion periods and present them with a selection of items on offer for their gifts. Also, don’t forget to customize the product reccomendation showing your users the products that are most relevant and interesting to them; even when it comes to gifts, we often choose what we like best for others as well.
Christmas newsletter: rely on the power ofemail marketing
Wide choice of products, ease of purchase and time savings: use the last days before Christmas to reassure your users by offering them the best solution to their “gift stress.” The advice is to set up a proper calendar to plan the mailings by choosing well the subject and topic of the various newsletters. For example, ideas and gift guides could be the topic of the newsletters to be sent in the first days of December (the example of Westwing, which also proposes a classification of gifts by spending range, is interesting), while the last days it could be interesting to send ideas for last minute gifts, also reassuring users about delivery data, perhaps with personalized messages depending on their geographical area. Importance to the content but also to the form: personalize the subject line of the newsletter by creating a real countdown and make the graphics eye-catching with images or GIFs that evoke the Christmas atmosphere.Finally, don’t forget to also personalize the abandoned cart recovery email, it can be a valuable ploy to increase sales. And after Christmas? Send a thank-you email to your customers with New Year’s greetings, and if they are really special customers, anticipate January sales for them.
SMS Marketing at Christmas: closer to your customers
Suggesting a sense of urgency or reassuring about delivery dates: an SMS marketing strategy shows itself to be an important piece both online and offline. If in the former case it can be useful to draw attention to personalized offers, gift ideas or simply to send notification messages inherent to shipping, for the point of sale they can be an effective local marketing strategy to invite customers, who have not yet shopped, to come to the store to discover all the gift ideas available.
Remarketing and Push Notification: the right offer at the right time
A large proportion of users, at least at an early stage, visit websites and eCommerce in search of the right gift idea. But why lose all the users who do not purchase at first?
Through an effective remarketing campaign and/or push notification it is possible to retrieve these users by showing them previously viewed products and/or creating ad hoc text content with gift ideas and recommendations.
The secret to success? Catchy copy (perhaps able to instill a sense of urgency) and clear call to action!
The success of a Marketing Strategy at Christmas? Playing in advance!
Even in Italy, the “Christmas digital experience” is already being talked about, with more than 63 percent of the population(data from research by Espresso Communication for Sodexo Benefit&Rewards Services) planning to use the Web for Christmas gift selection.
Whether it’s just research or purchase matters little, this is a trend that e-Commerce realities cannot miss.
Here then, that although there are activities to be put on track only in the run-up to Christmas, it is necessary to prepare a more substantial marketing strategy in order to be successful. This would allow, for example, to:
- activate Google ADS and Facebook campaigns aimed at increasing brand awareness. All of this will make it possible to collect enough data to subsequently optimize campaigns right around the holidays;
- Activate lead generation campaigns in order to increase the number of contacts to the database to which to send newsletters;
- devise targeted campaigns to promote particular products that we wish to push in the run-up to Christmas;
- Create targeted offers, product kits or gift cards to launch in the pre-Christmas period;
- Implement an SEO strategy to improve rankings even for keywords related to the period (e.g., Christmas deals 2019, Christmas 2019, gift ideas 2019);
