25 Christmas Marketing Ideas to Boost Your Holiday Sales
Christmas is the biggest holiday celebrated all around the world. During this time, people buy gifts not only for themselves but also for their loved ones. The hike in shopping makes this season incredibly important for ecommerce store owners. It is a perfect time when business owners can increase their profit if they utilize the right marketing ideas. Starting this early will give you a competitive edge. The best time to start implementing these ideas is from the start of October, giving you enough time to rank on SERPs as it takes 2-3 months for results to show. Let’s find out 25 Christmas marketing ideas to boost your holiday sales and put yourself at the forefront of the customer’s mind.
Create a Christmas Gift Guide
Creating a Christmas gift guide to help customers find the product that they are looking for is one of the best ways for Christmas marketing. This also shows the customer that your products are organized in an appealing manner.
Ensure usage of high-quality images, detailed product descriptions, and direct links to purchase the product. Users should be able to find gift guides easily on your website. These guides can be promoted using your marketing channel.
Offer Christmas-Themed Products or Services
Everyone loves to buy products that are based on festivals. Adding a Christmas-based time-limited design to your product on the ecommerce website will create a sense of urgency. This could include festive variants of your existing products, holiday-specific packaging, or entirely new items designed specifically for the season.
If you are a service-based business, you can offer promotional offers and packages specifically for businesses.
Run a ’12 Days of Christmas’ Promotion
Use your social media, website, or any other marketing channel and start to make the excitement build up, just like an advent calendar. Promote it all over your marketing channels.
Run the “12 Days of Christmas” promotion and generate excitement for return visits. Have something different every day, such as a special offer, discount, or giveaway. It could be like X percent off certain products, free shipping, or the buy one, get one deal.
Implement Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is one of the best ways of reaching customers during the holiday season. Plan your email campaigns way ahead, so they keep coming through steadily and interestingly all season long.
Divide your email list by preferences and purchase history for the most relevant content. Use the gift guide to offer exclusive deals and create a sense of urgency through countdown timers or limited-time-only offers.
Go here to learn some Email marketing tips to increase your sales.
Optimize Your Website for the Holidays
Give your ecommerce website a holiday makeover to help more customers get into the buying mood. Add banners, switch to a red and green color scheme, or integrate holiday imagery. You can do whatever makes sense based on your particular audience.
Ensure that your site is properly optimized for mobile, as much of your online sales will happen there. Also, it should be able to handle added traffic during peak shopping times.
Leverage Social Media for Christmas Marketing
Social media platforms are excellent for engaging with customers and promoting your Christmas offers. Create a content calendar that includes a mix of product promotions, behind-the-scenes content, user-generated content, and interactive posts.
Offer Gift Wrapping Services
Offer gift wrapping and make the lives of your customers easier. It can be the best way to add value to your products and increase satisfaction. You can offer it free with purchases above a certain amount or as an added service for a small fee.
Display this service clearly on your website and on marketing materials for the busy shopper, this may be the point of purchase decision-maker.
Create Christmas-Themed Content
Develop interesting Christmas-themed content to engage customers through the holidays and stay sticky thereafter. Optimize Your Content Properly to ensure your content is SEO optimized with regard to keywords. This will ensure your high rank in search counts during this competitive period.
Implement a Refer-a-Friend Program
You can give your current customers incentives to help them talk about your business with your refer-a-friend program. A refer-a-friend program can offer incentives in the form of discount codes for your customers or store credit from either the new customer, or both the new and existing customer in exchange for talking about the business.
Host a Christmas Event or Workshop
Organize Christmas-timed events or workshops to directly connect with customers. This event can as be simple as a product demonstration, crafting workshop, or charity fundraiser.
These events usually manage to create communities around the brand and provide invaluable face-to-face contact with customers.
Partner with Influencers or Bloggers
Leverage influencers and bloggers who write in your niche to amplify how far your reach is. This may entail sponsored posts, providing products to be reviewed, or allowing influencers to feature your products in their own gift guides.
Offer Free Shipping or Extended Returns
Eliminate the headache of a purchase by offering free shipping during the holiday season. If feasible, extend the return time to enable gift buyers to have more flexibility. Many shoppers like the idea that they are free to return items after Christmas.
Promote these policies on your website and in marketing materials to inform customers that your store is trustworthy.
Create Christmas Gift Sets or Bundles
Generate special gift sets or bundles, saving money and helping make shopping easy for the customer. They could be tied around specific interests or help to solve common dilemmas of gift-giving.
Implement a Loyalty Program
If you have not had a customer loyalty program yet, the holiday season is a good time to introduce one. Provide points or rewards for purchases, which can later be used for special discounts or privileges.
Reward points on Christmas purchases or specific shopping periods. Highlight the potential repeat business.
Use Retargeting Ads
Set up retargeting ads to catch all those customers who have shown interest in your products without converting. These can show them the items they viewed, introduce limited-time discounts, and highlight the unique selling points.
Spend money on creating creative ads that are part of your entire Christmas marketing campaign.
Create Urgency with Countdown Timers
Adding countdown timers to your website, and even in your email marketing list, can really make a difference in putting urgency for the Christmas offers. This may be about shipping deadlines, limited-time discounts or ending holiday promotions.
Visual countdown timers can be really attractive in getting the consumers to act before it is too late.
Offer Gift Cards or E-Gift Certificates
Provide gift cards or e-gift certificates as a convenient impulse buy option or as the procrastinator’s easy gift when they can’t decide on what to get. Add some incentive to those higher-value purchases, like a small bonus ($5 bonus with each $50 gift card purchase).
Gift cards should be accessible from your website and should be able to be sent via e-mail at the very last minute.
Implement Live Chat Support
Provide live chat support on your website during the holiday season to respond to a customer’s queries and worries quickly. This will go a long way to improving the conversion rates.
During Christmas, even though everyone is out to have a merry Christmas, ensure that your chat support team is well equipped on your Christmas offers as well as your policies so that they can provide the best information.
Create Christmas-Themed Video Content
Create videos that interestingly depict your product or service during the festive season. These can be demonstration videos, how-to videos on wrapping gifts, or a glimpse behind the scenes of preparing for holidays. Share these videos on your website, on social media, and through your email marketing to bond and add value to your customers.
Optimize for Local SEO
If you have a physical store location, make sure your local SEO is optimized for Christmas shoppers. Get on Google My Business and update your holiday hours, any special events, and festive photos.
Build location-specific landing pages on your website that call out your in-store Christmas offers and promotions.
Need Help! Selecting the Right Ecommerce SEO Agency.
Participate in Small Business Parties
If you are a small business, you can take advantage of Small Business parties. Prepare special offers for that day. Work together cross-promotion with other local businesses to create an overall community-focused shopping experience.
Implement Abandoned Cart Emails
Set up abandoned cart email sequences from which you can possibly recover lost sales. During the holiday season, many shoppers check out prices to compare. These same shoppers will probably abandon items in their carts as they continue to shop.
Customize your abandoned cart emails with holiday language and perhaps a small discount or free shipping to encourage them to complete the sale.
Create a Christmas-Themed Landing Page
Create a specialized Christmas landing page which will serve as the hub of all your holiday promotions and offers, as well as holiday content. Make this page reachable easily from your homepage, and ideally it should be well optimized for all the relevant Christmas-related keywords.
On the page you can add, the gift guide with highlighted products with shipping information and links to Christmas-related content.
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Use User-Generated Content
Encourage your customers to send their fun moments using your products in the form of photos or videos. You can create a branded hashtag and give them prizes for the best among the submissions.
Publish these user-generated contents on all your social media sites and your website to help you build social proof and establish a community identity for your brand.
Offer Post-Christmas Sales
Post-Christmas shopping also should not be overlooked. Gifts that people had given during the holidays such as gift cards or cash, and customers are looking for bargains immediately after the holidays. Prepare your post-Christmas sales event ahead of time and market it through the last few days of the holiday season.
You may even offer a deep discount on remaining holiday merchandise or introduce new products as a means to celebrate the start of the new year.
Conclusion
Christmas marketing strategy is a combination of thoughtful and strategic execution of a wide range of Christmas marketing ideas that enable you to achieve seasonal sales success. The sooner you start, the better, and when you merge a few of these 25 strategies, you are sure to create a merry shopping environment that will attract customers and boost your holiday sales.
Monitor your results and collect all your data during the season. That will be important information to refine your strategies for next year’s holiday marketing campaigns.
Never forget to put some real holiday cheer into your marketing programs. Thank your customers for their business. Keep on spreading the cheer within your message. And strive to create lasting experiences. After all, the holidays are more than the number of sales, they are the chance to make lasting connections with customers and communities.
The fact is, all this will do is improve your chances of having an efficient Christmas period as you’ll be in a better position by Christmas itself as you start planning early and continue to implement the strategies you opt for throughout the whole season. Wishing you the best holidays and good marketing!
