Holiday Checklist

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Once you have a plan and schedule in place, the next task is to make sure that your website or shopping portal is holiday ready.
This can seem overwhelming, right?
There’s so much to do, with so little time.
The best piece of advice we can give you is to break it into chunks and prioritise your tasks.

Design – that doesn’t mean you have to go back to the drawing board!

• Tweak or adapt the overall theme of your site
  Make it feel more festive during the Christmas season and spring-like in the run-up to Easter. Just as high street stores decorate their aisles and make the shops feel cheery and enticing, you should endeavour to do the same with your ecommerce site.
• Create your holiday landing pages or special deals pages
  These will be the pages that you drive traffic to through your marketing campaigns. These pages should be very easy to navigate and customers should be able to pick an item and get to the checkout within one or two clicks at most. The less confusing it is to buy your products, the better.
  should be very easy to navigate and customers should be able to pick an item and get to the checkout within one or two clicks at most. The less confusing it is to buy your products, the better.
• Check your UX
  We’re sure that you’ve already got your website UX spot-on, with visitors able to add items to the caTest thoroughlyrt and head to the checkout within a couple of clicks. But, it’s vital that you apply this to your holiday-specific landing pages too. It’s all too easy to get carried away with your special offers and deals and neglect the user experience, so don’t make this mistake!
• Test thoroughly
  During the holiday season you should allow extra time for testing your site as you’ll be adding lots of extra pages and content. Test your landing pages to destruction. If you don’t someone else will, and you don’t want that dent in your reputation!
• Make your offers stand out
  Compile all your special offers and bundles. Create call outs and banners that highlight these deals on your actual site and make sure they jump off the page!
• Enchance your SEO
  You also need to adapt your content to include seasonal keywords to enhance SEO. Use Google keyword planner to find the holiday keywords that have the highest volume and make sure you include the primary ones with a 1 to 2% density.
• Don’t forget delivery
  If there are special delivery arrangements for the holiday period, make sure that these are clearly explained. Try to be as flexible as possible with delivery options during this period, as it can make all the difference between getting a sale or not.

Sort out the technical stuff

You also need to make sure that your site is technically ready for a surge in traffic. The holiday season could be the most profitable period for your online store. Don’t let a poorly optimized website lose you valuable holiday traffic. You don’t want slow checkout processes causing customers to abandon their carts!
If you follow the advice in this guide, you can expect a spike in traffic when you run your marketing campaigns. The last thing you want is your website or checkout crashing due to demand!

If you’re not a techy person, ask your web developer or host to check the following:

• Ensure SSLs don’t expire
  The last thing you want is for your SSL certificate to run out before or right in the middle of your holiday campaign! If they are set to expire during this time, make sure you’ve got tech support standing by to install them beforehand to avoid site downtime.
• Verify hosting and scheduled backups
  If the worst case scenario happens and your site goes down in the holiday season, you want to make sure that it’s back up and running pronto! Check that all backups are in place and that your hosting server is ready for increased traffic.
• Test site speed
  Hooray! The holidays have arrived and people are flocking to your site to check out the goodies! Then disaster strikes – everything starts slowing down to a snail’s pace due to the high server-load. Your reputation is in the pan and nobody is sticking around to buy anything. Avoid this by putting extra effort in to optimise page load times and server speeds before the start of the holiday season.
• Consider using Content Delivery Networks (CDN)CDNs are a useful way to reduce the load on your server. For example, Cloud Flare is a popular choice that has great cache options. Plus, if you opt for their Pro level plan or higher, they’ll even convert your images to WebP as part of the “Varnish” caching. This saves bandwidth and lowers pages sizes, which speeds up your site. Bonus!
• Perform stress test
  Stress tests are essential if you want to get the best from your site, especially during times of increased traffic. They test the stability and reliability of your site under different conditions. Any performance issues are then highlighted with tips on how to improve. You can then change things and retest to optimise the performance.
• Check mobile responsiveness
  Don’t miss out on customers! More and more people are using mobile devices to shop online. Make sure that your site converts well to different mobile devices and displays nicely.
• Ensure cross-browser and platform compatibility
  Don’t forget that there are a lot of different browsers and platforms out there these days. Not everybody is using Chrome, Edge or Safari. Ensure that your site functions well on the major platforms and there are no display or technical glitches.

Finally, you should do several run-throughs of your customer journey. Identify pinch points, any confusing options, or other off-putting elements and seek to rectify them before the holiday period begins.
The customer journey is super-important. If there’s any kind of friction or slow-down in the journey, people will look elsewhere. Each stage of the customer journey requires a “conversion” to the next stage. If people are not being converted at any point, this is known as a “funnel leak”.

A good customer journey will flow through the funnel stages without interruption or hassle. The stages of a funnel are shown in the diagram below.

In a nutshell, this is how a good ecommerce customer journey looks like. First, customers become aware of your brand after they identify a purchasing need and are browsing the internet to find the best option for their needs (interest). They will evaluate pros and cons of each option (which usually means comparing you with your competitors) and only then will make the purchase decision. As a brand, you should continue engaging with your customers after the purchase so that they continue buying from you and become brand advocates.

On the other hand, a poor customer journey will have obstacles or snags along the way. This could include things like:

There are countless other things that can create a poor customer journey. Make sure you are constantly monitoring your website performance and campaign metrics to identify any issues. Busy holiday periods are actually best times to test as your customers flock to your site. There’s no better time to be testing and observing site traffic then when it’s at its peak.

Now is the time to get into the nuts and bolts of your overall marketing strategy.
The problem is – there are so many factors to consider.
The online marketing landscape can be confusing. Which channels should you use? Which strategies yield the best results? How many campaigns should you run?
There’s no simple answer to these questions.
One thing is for sure, however. You need to avoid the common pitfall of putting all your eggs in one (or maybe a few) baskets.
Unsuccessful ecommerce marketers will rely on only one or two strategies or channels, such as paid ads or blogging.
What should you do to be successful?
Diversify.
You need to build a marketing strategy for paid, owned and earned media.

Paid Media

Paid media can include paid ads on social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. These ads can drive traffic to your website or other content that promotes your products. Facebook works on an auction basis, so the price to target certain audiences may vary depending on their popularity and availability.
Another form of paid media is paying popular influencers or industry authorities to promote your products through their channels. This could be in the form of YouTube videos, blogs, or podcasts for example.
Finally, you can also use search engine ads to attract the right target audience. This can be a valuable way to increase traffic and conversions.

Owned media

Owned media includes web channels that you own or display your unique branding. In other words, it is any web presence that you have some or complete control over.

Reliance on SEO can also be seen as temporarily owned media, as you do not own your rankings. Multi-million dollar sites have been hit by Google penalties and frequent algorithm changes. In other words, you can lose your search ranking in the blink of an eye.
To sum up, the more owned media you control, the bigger web presence you can command. Increasing your owned media will also give you a bigger launchpad for your marketing campaigns.

Earned media

To put it simply, earned media is web-based “word of mouth”. This encompasses things like viral posts, social media shares and likes, reviews, recommendations, guest blog posts.
It also includes inbound links. Your web presence can be enhanced by strong backlinks earned by, say, shit-hot digital PR campaigns. This is why it’s so important to have engaging, shareworthy and valuable content. This can be in the form of blogs, videos, podcasts, press releases, downloadable e-books, etc.
In other words, earned media is all about creating a buzz about your brand and getting your content shared to increase your SEO ranking and drive more traffic to your ecommerce site.

We will look at these different types of media and how you can run marketing campaigns on each of them in a moment. But first, let’s quickly revisit your customer journey (you might want to take a second look at the funnel image in the section Ensure your website is holiday-ready.

Let’s suppose you sell travel packages online. You could attract your audience with a Facebook ad redirecting them to a series of blogs on popular holiday destinations for the winter months. At the end of each blog post, they can opt in to download a special holiday guide. You can then use an email marketing campaign to make them aware of special offers and deals throughout the holiday period. You engage with your audience not only before but also after the purchase. And continue remarketing to visitors and customers to encourage repeat purchases.

Smaller ticket items may use a shorter funnel. It could even be as short as a targeted paid ad that leads directly to a special offer in a landing page. From there the copy and presentation of your product will help convert prospects into customers.

The most important thing to get right is the content at each stage. You need to make sure that it’s both engaging and that it communicates your sales message. The tried and tested techniques below help you increase conversions:

Now that you have a clear understanding of how your sales funnel looks, it’s easier to identify which channels you should be using at each stage. Let’s take a look at some ideas to attract and convert customers and how to continue engaging with them after the purchase.

Getting visitors to your website is the first phase of the sales funnel.
It’s not easy though. Competition is already high and during the holiday periods it will be even higher. Paid ads are expensive, especially during the holiday seasons.

On Black Friday Facebook ad cost-per-click (CPC) prices shoot up by 140%. (Shopify)
Instagram CPC increases by 40% in the Christmas season compared to January – March (AdEspresso),

However, you’ll struggle to beat the competition if you only use your owned media presence.
In fact, the only way you’re going to beat the competition in today’s crowded marketplace is by applying a combination of paid, owned and earned marketing strategies. Using all 3 types of media effectively will maximise the number of people you drive to your website.

Paid media strategies

When it comes to holiday season advertising, the key is often to communicate your special offers in a fun and enticing way. But it’s not all about the creative part – poor campaign management is directly responsible for a bad ROI. Wrong targeting, lack of A/B testing, bad reporting… There are multiple ways you can screw up your paid marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look at some good practices:

Social media ads for attracting new visitors

Let’s take a close look at a few high-performing holiday season ads from ecommerce brands from recent years and analyse why they work so well.

One thing that all the ads shown above share in common is that they have been designed really well, they clearly communicate compelling offers, and highlight certain products that are big holiday sellers effectively.
With most social media platforms, including Facebook, you can set up and schedule your ad campaigns in advance. We recommend that you take advantage of this and ensure that everything is scheduled at least two full days in advance. The reason for this is that it sometimes takes up to 48 hours for Facebook to approve ads, especially during the busy holiday periods.

Here are a few tips to make your ad copy more effective:

• Include numbers and percentage to get customer’s attention
• Mirror the user’s goal in your ad copy
• Use strong and creative call to actions
• Check the character limits before writing – You don’t want the platform to cut off half of your message
• Use keywords!
• Use emotional triggers – it’s that holiday feeling!

Remember that the tips above are also valid for search engine ads. And since we are talking about them…

Search engine ads – PPC

No section on paid media would be complete without mentioning search engine ads. This section covers ads on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Obviously, Google is the big player here, but it is worth considering placing ads on some of the smaller search engines too to pick up more niche markets.

The most important factor for a successful PPC strategy is to choose the best keywords within your budget. You can use Google Adword Keyword Research Tool to find the keywords with the highest search volume, with the cost per click displayed alongside.

As you are looking to maximise sales over the holiday season, you should look to bid on seasonal keywords that are related to your products. For instance, if you sell clothing, you may want to bid on “Christmas jumpers” or “knitted Christmas sweaters”.

The timing of PPC ads is also crucial. It’s worth realising that a lot of people leave their holiday shopping until the last minute with 40% of holiday sales occurring in the 10 days immediately before Christmas. In other words, make sure you schedule in some of your PPC ads for the week before Christmas Eve.Split testing

Here are some actionable tips to improve your PPC results:

• Widen your target audience
  The last thing you want is for your SSL certificate to run out before or right in the middle of your Consider going beyond your target personas to attract more customers. For example, grandparents may be looking to buy electronics as Christmas gifts – they are a great target audience even though they wouldn’t necessarily fit into the normal demographic for this market.
  standing by to install them beforehand to avoid site downtime.
• Optimise your campaigns
  During these busy periods, it’s even more crucial to automate tasks – consider using ad automation tools, email autoresponders, etc.
• Split testing
  Also known as A/B testing, split testing involves making small changes to your ads to identify what performs best.
• Check for negative keywords
  Excluding the right keywords is as important as including! Make sure you’re excluding irrelevant search terms to keep a positive CTR and cut down the campaign costs.
• Test PPC landing pages
  With increased traffic come increased stress on your site. Run stress tests and optimise your site before the onslaught! Also make sure that the design and UX are good by getting various people to test it before going live.

Retargeting ads

Don’t ignore this type of paid media. Retargeting is a super-effective way to drive traffic back to your website. Retargeted ads are focused on re-engaging people that visit your store, but didn’t buy, as well as previous paying customers.

Why is retargeting such an effective strategy?
The main reason is that most people need to be exposed to a brand several times before buying. Salesforce revealed that people need at least 6 to 8 touches with your brand before having the confidence to buy something. The best way to encourage these multiple engagements with your brand is to target people that have already visited.

Retargeted ads can also be used effectively for cart abandonment scenarios. For instance, you can set up retargeted ads to appear on Facebook new-feed, Facebook sidebar, Google, and Instagram sponsored posts, every time someone adds an item to their cart on your website. After all, if they liked one of your products enough to add to their cart, chances are that the ad will entice them back if they leave.

Here are a few great tips to build a great retargeting campaign:

• Optimize ads and landing pages to ensure the message is consistent
• Segment your list – an ad for website visitors should look different than an ad for people who
  abandoned the shopping cart
• A/B test your campaigns – try out with different images, copy, headlines, etc
• Offer coupons and discounts when possible
• Create urgency

Earned and owned marketing strategies

Getting “free” traffic is the holy grail of marketing. It’s challenging, but achievable. The trick is to not view it as entirely free. You’re going to need to put quite a bit of time and effort into it, and let’s face it – nob ody views their working time as “free”.
By creating a strategy to build and use earned and owned media, you’ll be able to take advantage of the fruits of your labour later on down the line, especially during the holiday season.

Why should you focus on earned and owned media?

Ok, let’s state the obvious first – earned and owned media strategies can save you a lot of money as you don’t have to shell out for paid ads. This is especially important in the holiday season when ad costs go through the roof.

So, yes, earned and owned media are EXTREMELY important.

But, it’s best to strike a healthy balance between paid and earned/owned media. The ideal situation is to have techniques and workflows in place to shift people away from paid media, over to earned and owned media. In other words, a typical journey could be:

Facebook Ads -> Landing Pages or Blog Posts -> Email List

Ecommerce SEO strategies

During the holiday periods, you need to make sure that your SEO is tip top. Even though it takes time to start seeing SEO results, you can still do things that have an impact short-term. But if you create the right pages, you can set up seasonal pages to benefit the site in future years – this year is just the beginning! Let’s take a look at a few tactics you still have time to implement:

• Refer to Google Trends to see what search patterns emerge during the specific holidays. Look for keywords (and related keywords) with a high search volume in the holiday season – Here you have to think beyond your buyer persona. If you sell video games and your target audience is teenagers, you have a good understanding of how the young crowd searches for your products online. However, remember that, in the holiday season, they might not be the ones buying these products. Parents and grandparents might use different keywords when they are searching for gift ideas online. Enter your top-level keyword into Google’s Keyword Planner and take a look at the terms with a spike around the holiday season. Do a competition assessment and don’t just ignore the terms with a low search volume (remember that the average monthly volume reported is lowered because there’s less interest in that keyword throughout the rest of the year).
• Build out a list of keywords based on what’s being searched for, then optimise your existing pages across your website with content focused around this list of relevant keywords for the holiday season. After updating content across the website to resonate during a particular holiday, keep monitoring results to ensure pages are performing as planned or if they require further optimization. Later on you can create permanent holiday landing pages optimised for holiday keywords – as your content gains SEO traction and authority year-round, and doesn’t have to start from square one every year.
• Create shareable content optimized for your chosen keywords – Blog posts, holiday gift guides, videos… There are plenty of ideas of content pieces you can create for the holiday season. Following the example above, you could create a gift guide for parents and suggest the best video games in different categories (players age, theme, etc). Don’t forget to share that content on social media!
• If there are existing blog posts along these lines from previous years, then updating them for the current year instead of creating new ones could help get results quicker in the short term, especially if the old one is ranking for any of the key phrases. It will also stop users accidentally landing on last year’s content.
• People are drawn to click on specific words, presented in a specific way and time frame. Optimize page titles and descriptions with the keywords you chose and test variations if you have time. Alternatively, you can run ads to identify the best performing combinations and optimize your content with them.
• The lead up to the holidays is a great time to do a keyword targeting review on the site – to make sure that what the user searches for is what they actually find on the page they land on. If it turns out it doesn’t match up then you can either tweak the content, create new categories/pages, or signpost a more relevant area of the site. None of this relies on Google processing anything (though that is an added benefit longer term) as it’s all on site so this can be a quick win for conversions and making the most of existing organic traffic.
• Leverage structured data to enhance your appearance in search results almost instantaneously. One way of doing this is by adding Frequently Asked Questions inside of your product page and applying a code into the header of your content (search for JSON-LD or Microdata schema to learn how to do this). Google will create a collapsible menu under your SERP so that the user is encouraged to click to read the questions and answers. Working with FAQ rich snippets is a proven way to increase your organic visibility and engagement with your content.
• Review your use of structured data and focus on the more basic markup like price, stock levels, reviews etc which could help with CTR and give an advantage over competitors.

Digital PR strategies for the holiday season

Public relation strategies become more important than ever. People generally start to switch off from work and responsibilities in the run up to Christmas, which means they spend more time online reading blogs and news items or watching YouTube influencer videos.
You can capitalise on this by sharing details of your campaigns and offers with bloggers and journalists. This will increase the hype around your brand. A good idea for piquing the interest of journalists is to offer stat-based content. For example, if your ecommerce business sells fashion items, you can create a guide on which fashion items sold the most last Christmas. It makes for easy, eye-catching headlines for news items.

Ecommerce social media tips for the holiday season

During the holiday seasons you want to join in with the atmosphere of fun and joy, especially when it comes to your social media posts.
To do this effectively, it’s a good idea to liven up your posts so that they offer something different. Rather than dry sales posts, why not try a few of the following ideas:

• Run a competition – a caption contest on Facebook or a photo contest on Instagram for example.
• Conduct a poll – many people love taking part in polls and surveys. Come up with a question that is engaging and is related to your brand. E.g. if you sell video games you could ask – What is your favourite video game of the year? Or what do you prefer out of First-person Shooters, Strategy games or Sports Sims?
• Share or invite interesting or funny stories – share an interesting festive story or ask people to contribute their own.
• Share the joy – create cosy images, tell heart-felt stories, to get people into the holiday spirit.
• Hold a giveaway – give away popular items in return for the best comments or highest number of shares or likes.

Affiliate marketing

Whether this is something you do all year around or not, you should definitely consider some affiliate marketing during holiday seasons. With more people spending time online at this time of year, you can increase your sales by bringing some affiliates on board.
Affiliates are bloggers, review websites, influencers, niche websites, that are related to your product in some way and agree to promote your product in return for a small commission on the sale. All you need to do is set up an affiliate program using one of many affiliate apps available out there such as Refersion or LeadDyno. Then approach relevant potential affiliates with an offer and entice them to sign up.
If you already have affiliates on board, a good way to get them to promote your holiday deals is to run a seasonal affiliate contest. For example, you could offer prizes to the top 3 highest earning affiliates during holiday periods.

Summary of “How to get visitors to your website”

The key takeaways here are:

1.  Utilise all 3 types of media – paid, owned and earned
2. Apply diverse strategies for each type of media.
3. Use a combination of social media, PPC, SEO, PR, retargeting, audience engagements techniques and affiliate marketing to attract customers to your website.

The next section will look at the next part of the funnel – how to convert visitors into paying customers.

Any ideas what the biggest and most common mistake ecommerce sellers make?

Focusing too heavily on generating traffic to their website and not enough on converting those visitors to customers or getting them to sign up with their emails.

Optimising the rate at which visitors convert to paying customers is even more important in the holiday seasons. Why? Because ads are more expensive at this time of year, which means profit margins are lower. To counteract this, you need to increase the amount people spend.

In other words, you need to use methods to convert more of your website traffic and increase the average basket value to drive higher profits.

Definition of conversion rate

To clear up any confusion, there are a few different types of conversion for ecommerce – actual sales, adding products to cart, email sign ups, social media shares, etc. Basically, anything that involves the website visitor taking a positive action can be considered a conversion, as it keeps them in the sale funnel and can ultimately help to boost sales.
Therefore, the conversion rate is the percentage of people that take an action determined by the KPI’s that you deem to be important – sales, email sign ups, products in cart, etc.

What is the average ecommerce conversion rate?

Average ecommerce conversion rates are between 1 and 2%.

1 to 2% may seem like a small amount, but if you are getting tens of thousands of site visits per day or more, this can lead to a healthy profit. With the right approach and strategy to conversion rate optimisation, you should be setting your sights on 2% or higher as a target rate during the holiday periods when people are primed for buying.

How do you measure conversion rate?

There are plenty of third-party apps and tools that you can use to measure conversion rate accurately. Google Analytics does a pretty good job and is free to use, as long as you only want to implement the basic features and metrics.

Effective ways to increase conversions

Once you know what your current conversion rate is and you have a system set up to monitor it, next you want to start implementing some techniques to boost conversions.
It is vitally important to capitalise on creating extra conversions while people are on your site, as this will make the difference between ‘revenue increase but profit decrease’ and ‘revenue AND profit increase’, which is important for long-term profitability.

Here are some examples of methods that will help you to optimise conversions.

• High quality design
  Ensure that your customer experience oozes quality and does not look cheap or low-end.
• Offer free delivery or shipping
  People are used to companies such as Amazon offering free delivery, so you should offer it too, if possible.
• Upsells and cross-sells
  An easy way to increase your average order value is to offer another deal to customers immediately before or after buying a product from you. You can include upsells and cross-sells on the product pages or just before checkout. Post-sale upsells such as a “before you leave” popup or follow-up email are effective as they have already proven that they are in the mood for buying, so now’s the time to make them an offer they can’t refuse!
• Order bumps
  An order bump is like an upsell, but only appears on the checkout page and is usually an item that complements the purchase. It can be on offer or full price. For instance, if a customer adds a printer to the cart, when they go to the checkout an order bump may include extra ink cartridges or toner to match that model of printer.
• Tripwires
  Tripwires are best suited as a way to sell high value ecommerce products, by offering a low priced or heavily discounted product initially. The idea is that once someone has become a happy customer, they are more likely to buy a more expensive product from you. For instance, a company that sells shoes may sell laces or shoe polish at a ridiculously low price – even possibly free with shipping. Then the company can offer them deals on shoes after the sale or use their details to send email marketing for future offers and deals. The laces or shoe polish are the tripwire, which will often lead to a sale of a higher value item.

How to build an email list for your ecommerce business

We’ve already mentioned email marketing a few times in this article. By now, you may be asking “Great, but how do I build a decent-sized email list?”
Well, here’s some good news for you. Our team of expert digital marketers have put their heads together to come up with this exclusive guide to building an email list and how to use it.

Holiday email marketing ideas

Successful email marketing is all about engagement.
Unfortunately, most ecommerce businesses get it wrong. The two biggest mistakes are either over-complicating things with “high-concept” marketing ideas or making the copy too long or boring.

First, you need to catch people’s attention. This isn’t easy when most people are receiving 100’s of emails in their inbox each day. You need a strong subject line to get people to open the email in the first place. A good subject will convey the content of the email or highlight the offer you are making.

Use strong verbs such as “get” or “grab” at the beginning of the subject line to create urgency and inspire action. For example, “Get 10% off all items for the next 24 hrs!”, or “Grab these bargains now!”.

The body-copy of the email should also be straightforward, conversational, and clear. Make sure the offer is front and centre of the body and is highlighted in any image that you use.

We’re living in a time of momentous change.
Covid-19 has changed the global landscape in many ways, not least in the way we shop. It has also changed the way people shop online.
For a start, more people are shopping online, which is good news for ecommerce. The not-so-good news is that competition from brick and mortar businesses moving online and more people looking to set up ecommerce businesses from home has grown.
The net effect of this has been increased advertising costs, meaning lower profit margins, and a change in online shopper’s expectations. They are now expecting the best deals and lowest prices, combined with fast delivery and the best customer service possible.
In other words, ecommerce business owners are having to fight harder than ever before for each dollar, pound or euro spent.
With lockdown regulations looking like they’ll be tightened in most places over the winter, the 2020 holiday season is shaping up to be a profitable one for ecommerce. People are stuck at home, but still want to treat themselves and families at Christmas, possibly now more than ever.
For example, Deloitte is predicting a 1 to 1.5% increase in holiday spending this year in the US compared to last year. More tellingly, they predict that ecommerce sales will grow by 25% to 35% this year, compared to just 14.7% in 2019.
Our advice is to plan for a strong holiday season in terms of sales, but a more competitive environment, which demands a solid marketing strategy. And if you haven’t planned ahead, the good news is there’s still lots of improvements you can make right up until a holiday season! And possibly even during!

Tips for ecommerce holiday marketing

Ok, so we know why things are different this year. But what should you do differently this year in terms of marketing?
Here are a few top tips to get your marketing on track for the unique opportunities and challenges of the 2020/2021 holiday season.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the run-up events to Christmas, but don’t forget that the first few weeks of December is an excellent opportunity to boost sales.

But don’t worry if you haven’t started planning and there’s only a couple of weeks to go. In the fast-paced digital world, you don’t need to start months in advance.
Even with a few days of planning, if you have a great idea and some even better offers, you can still create an ad campaign that makes your holiday season go Kerr-ching!

Here are some ideas to maximize sales during this period.

• Tweak your website design to add Christmas touches, such as decorations on your top banner and product listings.
• Consider adding Christmas gifts during checkout.
• Run Christmas-themed promotions – An advent calendar of daily deals for example.
• Encourage user-generated content on your social media pages. Ask people to share their favourite Christmas stories for instance.
• Offer a gift card or wrapping service for gifts.
• Send customers an e-card in early December.
• Offer free shipping – it’s at the top of everyone’s list!
• Consider wish list capabilities or sharable carts, if you don’t have them already, to give the consumer the option to share their holiday picks on social. The easier it is for someone to share your product online, the more visibility you have
• Research which products will sell well at Christmas and optimize your campaigns to suit.
• Produce Christmas related content that is SEO keyword-rich.
• Get your followers involved on social media – Contests, sharing spooky stories, etc. Also, add relevant hashtags to your posts

The email below shows how ecommerce company Ivory Ella made the most of the holiday season to promote its gift guide in a fun and engaging way, using a 12 days of Christmas theme.

Easter Sunday falls on April 4 in 2021. This means that you only have 4 months after Christmas to prepare for Easter, which is one of the top three holidays in terms of ecommerce sales.

Get a head start on your competitors this year by planning your Easter ad and marketing campaigns early.

After Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving, Halloween is the next most popular holiday, with the US Halloween market worth $9.1 billion! This makes it a great opportunity to boost sales if you get your marketing right.

Here are some ideas to get your Halloween marketing on-point.

• Halloween design – Tweak your images, website theme, and copywriting to include a spooky feel!
• Add relevant hashtags to social media posts
• Add Halloween related free gifts or treats to your shopping carts. Spooky candy for instance.
• Get your followers involved on social media – Contests, sharing spooky stories, etc.
• Apply retargeting and remarketing strategies
• Create a branded spooky video – Could be a parody of a famous spooky movie such as The Shining
  or Blair Witch Project for example.
• Create Halloween promotions and content

With everybody jumping on the Black Friday bandwagon, you need an A+ marketing campaign to get things moving.

Now, more than ever, your offer will make or break your campaign, due to rising customer acquisition costs and the increase in competition from other ecommerce retailers. Grabbing attention with a great offer and ad campaign is essential!

Here are some tips to make the most of Black Friday:

• Create smart content
  to promote your Black Friday deals. Aim for a mixture of organic SEO traffic and paid ads to drive up sales.
• Increase brand awareness
  in the run up to Black Friday. Gift guides with sale-offers displayed are a good example of content that is shareworthy and will build awareness.
• AVOID site-wide blanket discounts
  Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) has become more than just a 4-day weekend sale. Many retailers now spread out their campaigns right up to Christmas. Avoid the temptation to just apply a 50% discount across the board on BFCM. Many ecommerce sellers already do this throughout the year to build their email list. It can hurt your profit margins if you go all-in on BFCM as advertising costs go through the roof.
• Go for the “buy more, save more” approach
  Instead of the blanket discount model, try something like “Get 25% off if you spend over £100”. This way you capitalise on your ad spend by encouraging a higher average order value.
• Smart planning
  If time is against you, use smart, achievable goals to maximise your chances of success. It shouldn’t take more than a few days if you’re focussed! Use previous store performance data to inform your revenue goals. Then work out how much revenue you should generate each day to hit your goal. You can then calculate the top-of-tunnel traffic you need and also the traffic mix from various predictable sources.
• Set your ad budget and stick to it!
  From your revenue goals, you can work out your budget. With ad costs high, make sure you don’t exceed the amount you need to reach your goals.
• Set a target profit on each order.
  From your ad budget and revenue goals, you can calculate how much profit you need on each order to zero-in on what your offers and deals will look like. Take into account your production and supply costs, combined with ad costs, to work out how much you can profitably discount your goods. You may need to bundle items together to maximise profit. Or you may discover that you can discount certain products more than others.
• Create daily deals
  To keep the momentum going through the sales period running up to Christmas, you should think about extending your Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaign for a week or more. To keep people interested throughout the sale period, you can offer different deals on one-day flash sales. Make sure you build anticipation for these by sending out emails, using promo banners, etc. which announce the upcoming deals or hint at what they might be.
• Offer extra services
  Many ecommerce retailers offer extra services on Black Friday to make gift-giving easier. Gift wrapping, Christmas messaging, personalised cards, and target delivery dates, all make life easier for the customer and can be sold as one-click upsells at the checkout.
• Gift card incentives
  An interesting alternative or addition to discounted goods, is to offer a gift card for purchases over a certain value. This is appealing to the customer as they can then give the gift card to somebody else as a gift, which means you potentially get a new customer to boot! (Note – Shopify now offer gift cards across the board).
• Mystery bundles
  People love a good mystery. It taps into the curiosity part of our brain that creates a strong drive to solve the mystery. You can offer the mystery bundle as a free gift for larger purchases, or just sell it as it is. Just make sure that you target your mystery bundle to the correct market – you don’t want bundles of complaints from disappointed customers!
• Gamify your offers
  Gamification means using something like a “spin to win” wheel to apply offers. In other words, people play some sort of game to win special deals such as 25% off orders over £100, or free gift with a certain purchase, etc. You could run these alongside a traditional offer, as an extra perk, so you don’t exclude people who don’t want to take part in a game of chance.
• Partner up
  At this time of year, other brands and influencers are also looking to promote themselves. You could approach influencers in your niche about promoting each other. For instance, you could include images and quotes from a well-known influencer in your promos, with links to their content, so it’s a win-win for both parties.
• Be charitable
  Finally, Christmas is the time of good-will to all. So why not use it as a time to make a donation. You can use your increased sales and profit margins on Black Friday to announce that you’ll donate 2% of all sales to a good cause, for example.

Black Friday is the ideal time to release a gift guide. For example, Trouva tapped into the eco-friendly market on Black Friday by publishing and promoting their “Gifts with a Conscience” guide.

This example of a great Black Friday website from SHEIN includes a good “buy more, save more” offer, a countdown to create urgency, details of a free shipping offer, and a Black Friday themed promo banner + hashtag. They’ve basically covered all the bases! And they’ve done it well, as it doesn’t look forced or overwhelm people with information overload.

Missguided used the topical theme of 2020 being a year to forget, to announce their Black Friday sale. Being creative like this and using a clever message or twist can help your campaign get traction.

Finally, the promo banner above gives you an idea of how to extend Black Friday offers throughout the month of November.

Cyber Monday is the next business day after Black Friday. Traditionally, Cyber Monday has been associated with deals on tech goods and gadgets, but in recent years has become an extension of Black Friday for all types of online shopping, with US sales exceeding $9.4 billion in 2019.

The idea behind Cyber Monday is that people have been frantically shopping on the high street over the weekend and just want to relax at home on the Monday, but still want to buy gifts or holiday treats online.

It’s definitely worth focusing as much effort on Cyber Monday as Black Friday, especially when you consider that spending has grown from $484 million in 2006 to $7.8 billion in 2019.

Follow the same tips as Black Friday, but also see the examples of good Cyber Monday campaign below to get some ideas for your marketing efforts.Riffraff makes good use of GIFs to catch people’s attention and clearly promote both their special offers and some of their product range.

Riffraff makes good use of GIFs to catch people’s attention and clearly promote both their special offers and some of their product range

The number one tip we can give you is – DON’T PANIC!

Ecommerce retailers feel pressured to make BFCM go with a bang and all-too-often rush into crazy deep discounts or blanket offers that aren’t profitable by the time you factor in the high advertising costs.

Slow down. Even if you’ve only got a few weeks or days left – you can still come up with a profitable campaign and offer!

Yes, you want to stand out and create a buzz, but not at the expense of your bottom line. If you follow the advice laid out above and plan a marketing strategy that is based on good business sense combined with creativity, you won’t go too far wrong!

Online shopping is experiencing a golden age right now.

Covid-19 has accelerated the growth of ecommerce even further, with more and more people preferring to shop in the comfort and safety of their own home.

This has led to an increase in competition however, with higher ad costs.

This means that you need to use smart-marketing ideas to complement any paid ad campaigns. You cannot just rely on posting a few Facebook ads and expecting good traffic as you may have done in past holiday seasons.

Despite the challenges, holiday seasons present some of the best online sales opportunities ever for those that get their marketing right.

To finish up, here are a few “quick-wins” that you can get to work on now to get your holiday marketing moving:

• Finalise your offer – go through previous sales and find the most attractive items to discount (remember to avoid blanket discounts if possible)
• Create eye-catching promo banners – stand out from the crowdseason.
• Create urgency – use persuasive copywriting and countdown timers
• Highlight free delivery options – or let people know how much they need to spend to qualify for free delivery
• Use hashtags – find out which holiday-related hashtags are trending and use these in your promotions
• Update your website theme – use fun, holiday images, headers, content, etc.
• Test your site and UX – enlist several people to test out your website for glitches, bottlenecks, etc.

As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into planning & running a SUCCESSFUL holiday marketing campaign! But it’s never too late, with the right support! Want a hand with your holiday marketing, or prefer a team who will create a holiday marketing campaign customized to your business? In either case, let’s chat!