.png)
The holiday season is here! It’s my favorite time of the year by far (who doesn’t love cooler weather, delicious food, and incredible decorations), but it’s no secret that this can be both a deeply stressful and highly-profitable time of year for businesses.
It’s important to have seasonally-specific holiday selling strategies in place so that you can connect with all members of your immediately-relevant audience (including gift-givers!) and maximize your sales potential.
This means opening up to new channels online, especially since consumer behavior is shifting slightly post-pandemic; we were already trending more towards online shopping, but that’s only continued since the COVID-19 outbreaks all over the world.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at eight solid holiday marketing strategies that you should be using this year, along with examples that you can draw inspiration from.
In the past few years, we’ve seen a new selling trend emerging: Live video consults.
These are online, private appointments utilizing video-calling tech that allows someone from your sales or customer service team to talk directly to customers. Help them learn how to use a product, choose the right gift for a friend, or otherwise make informed purchasing decisions.
Mejuri, for example, offers live styling appointments year-round called “virtual shopping" (lululemon does it well too!)
Customers are able to jump on a scheduled call with an expert salesperson. They can see what items look like “in real life” (or as close to it as possible), get advice on product selection, and even ask for help choosing a gift for someone they care about.
Mejuri only has a few stores on the North American continent, so this opens up that in-store shopping experience to those who live too far, or for those who either don’t want to shop in-store or whose busy schedules wouldn’t allow it.
Live video selling could be the secret to selling more this holiday season and beyond. Need help setting up video commerce on your site? Check out how Plaza makes this easy and accessible.
Who doesn’t love the idea of a holiday bundle?
Bundles group different items together, presenting them as a “gift package” and selling them as such. This not only helps you make more sales around the holidays while giving people an easy singular Christmas idea that seems thorough and thoughtful, but it increases your average order value, too.
Instead of selling a comfortable blanket, pair it with some fuzzy socks and a hot chocolate kit and you’ve got a “Christmas night in” gift bundle.
In addition to raising your average order value, this is a great way to sell more low-value or harder-to-sell items that you have plenty of by grouping them in with higher-value items.
Game consoles typically do this every Black Friday. A few years back I bought a PS4 and it came as a bundle with a Spiderman game and a controller. I didn’t care about the Spiderman game, but couldn’t get a PS4 without it, so their order price went up. This year, Nintendo Switch as a MarioKart deluxe bundle.
It’s always a good idea to offer suggestions to customers who are browsing your site as to what would make excellent holiday gifts.
Someone might not think of reusable silicone bags as a great holiday gift, for example, but Stasher’s on-site Gift Guide can change that. They have a dedicated “Gifts” tab in the navigation bar, and sent out an email promoting the guide, which helps customers find “bundled” gifts, best sellers, and gifts under different price thresholds.
They took a multi-channel approach which works exceptionally well.
You can:
Email is invaluable this time of year. It’s a direct path to connect with your customer, as they have to take some sort of action on your email (even if it’s just to delete it). A well-timed message and a strong subject line could be all you need.
During the holiday season, send your audience regular updates featuring different products or services. Offer exclusive access to sales or high-value items.
And remember: The subject line is everything. Don’t be afraid to use holiday-themed puns or emojis, and make sure that your subject lines are designed to create urgency to drive action now.
Urgency is everything during the holiday season. Every holiday seems to creep up on us a little too fast, and there will always be a healthy dose of last minute shoppers who are placing any order they can going “as long as it gets here on time.”
One of the best holiday selling strategies you can use with your online marketing is to take full advantage of this. Place microcopy around your site and on individual product pages telling people when they have to order to get the items in time.
“Order by Tuesday and get it Christmas Eve with standard shipping” and “Last day to order to get it by Thanksgiving!” can be added to product pages.
You can create lists of products that will arrive on time for holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas, which Williams Sonoma does below.
Sophistiplate has their own holiday shipping guidelines section on their site, which tells customers when they can purchase at each shipping speed in order to receive each category of item.
Remember to play it safe this year, as covid-caused supply chain issues and standard holiday delivery delays could slow things down. Send out an email one day before the last 24 hours customers can purchase, and watch the sales come rolling in!
Influencer marketing is already a fairly solid strategy— it can help you expand your reach significantly on social media sites while building trust and driving sales quickly.
This is just as true during the holiday season when people are looking for new products to give as gifts.
Let influencer marketing do some of the heavy lifting for your brand, offering up products as potential gift ideas. Instagram and TikTok are two platforms you should absolutely look at right now, though depending on your audience and industry there may be some YouTube influencers that could be a good fit.
If you need help looking for influencers, I’m a huge fan of BuzzSumo. You can find influencers based on the topic your audiences are interested in and quickly review them based on engagement rates, followers, and more.
Just remember that more followers isn’t automatically best; accounts with crazy high follower numbers are going to charge substantially more than micro-influencers, and micro-influencers may have the best chance at having strong trust with their audience.
Do you have rewards, referral, or loyalty programs? Now is the time to really let those shine.
Run promotions designed to increase impulse spending or referrals.
You can offer customers $50 instead of $25 credits when they’re referred customer converts, increasing the likelihood of driving a significant number of sales quickly. The same works with reward points, offering “double rewards points now through Christmas” to encourage people to buy gifts for others (or themselves!).
These messages are targeted to your existing customer base, so make sure you’re going hard with email marketing. Send an email announcing the promotion when it begins, and at least one more with 24 hours left before it ends.
Wishlists can be massive selling tools this time of year, making them an outstanding holiday marketing strategy to use.
You need to have an easy-to-use wishlist interface. It needs to have a quick setup process, and it needs to be simple for users to figure out how to add items to the wishlist and how to share it. Remind users that this feature is available with pop-ups on your site and in email. Each product page should have a wishlist button.
There are strategies you can apply to increase the likelihood that users are sharing those wishlists, too.
Tieks, for example, has a promotion every year that lets some customers win several pairs of the shoes they’ve added to the wishlist if they share. More shares means more entries. And since this is around the holiday season, people see that wishlist and think “well, easy gift idea” and purchase. It’s an incredibly effective sales technique for the holiday season that’s easy to copy at all price points and across all industries.
This is particularly true since just the act of creating the wishlist puts them on your email list and marks them as high-intent, and you can send them nurturing campaigns later on and hopefully, it means someone will buy an item as a gift. And even if they don’t purchase now, there’s always the chance to get them to purchase next year.
The holiday selling season is high-stakes for eCommerce brands of all industries, so going into it with solid selling strategies is an important step. These holiday marketing strategies will help every type of eCommerce brand sell more and sell faster, reaching your audience across multiple platforms.
Looking to start with live video to drive high-value sales to high-value audiences? Learn more about how Plaza can help here.
