Council Post: Four Ways To Master Your Holiday Marketing Strategy In 2020

By John Turner, founder of Seedprod, the most popular coming-soon page solution for WordPress used by over 800,000 websites.

Believe it or not, the holiday season is here. It’s time to start the festivities at home and prepare your business for seasonal shoppers. The fourth quarter of the year is always the most profitable, mostly due to consumers shopping for friends and family or picking up limited-time offers for themselves. 

Building your audience and getting sales during this time is crucial to your success. If you go into the new year with a lackluster lead list and below-average sales, you’re going to have a hard time. 

Today, we will show you four ways to improve your holiday marketing strategy, which could lead to more sales, engagement and awareness of your brand. 

Ready? Let’s get started. 

Focus on CX.

You could have the best product in the whole world, but if you’re not building a strong customer experience (CX), you’re missing out on countless sales opportunities. Consumers trust brands that implement a stellar CX because their businesses come off as authentic, trustworthy and valuable. 

There are several ways you can improve the CX of your website. The first thing we suggest doing is running a speed test and audit on your website. Again, the quality of your product doesn’t matter if people can’t access the website. 

Once you ensure that everything is running the way it’s supposed to, optimize your contact forms, banner placement and menus to help new customers navigate your website. You want the stream of holiday shoppers to see exactly what they need to do to contact your business or add items to their shopping cart. 

Finally, don’t forget to add valuable content to your blog. New visitors are likely to hang out on your e-commerce website if you have a blog that’s easy to browse and jam-packed with valuable information. Write and post great content, and you can bet that some of your holiday visitors will turn into customers. 

Build brand awareness.

Next, let’s talk about building brand awareness. If people don’t know your company exists, there’s a good chance they won’t get to see your holiday offers. Creating brand awareness ensures that as many people as possible know about your company. The goal is to get your target audience’s attention, with the hopes that they will visit your site. 

One of the best ways to get everyone interested in your brand is with a social media contest. Put one of your top products up as the grand prize, and encourage followers on Twitter, Facebook and even YouTube to enter for a chance to win. 

The key is to set rules that help spread your message. For example, you could allow two entries per person, but to qualify for both entries, users have to share your post and subscribe to your email list. Using this strategy, you’re building a lead list full of potential customers, and they are showing your brand to everyone on their friend’s list. 

We also recommend reaching out to your stale email leads. There’s a good chance that a percentage of your subscribers forgot all about your business. A friendly holiday greeting with a special promotion could be just the thing they need to get invested in your company this year. 

Create multiple offers.

When you create holiday offers, it’s essential that you create different campaigns. Consumers care deeply about personalized content. Many of them prefer to get marketing materials from businesses that are relevant to their lives. 

You can figure out which campaigns you should create by analyzing your customer personas. Every business has a slightly different target audience, so your segments may vary from ours. Let’s look at a simple example to show you what we mean. 

If you’re the owner of an online pet shop, you would probably segment your audience by cat owners and dog owners. Why? Because each segment has an interest in different products and services. The ability to send special offers about cat food to cat owners can be the deciding factor between a click-through and ignoring your email. 

Make retargeting a priority.

The last tip we have for you deals with retargeting. Retargeting is a marketing strategy where business owners reach out to consumers who abandon their shopping cart. Typically, this interaction takes place on social media or through email. 

If a user adds an item to their shopping cart but leaves without checking out, you can reach them later through social media ads. You can create banners that appeal to your customer segments based on what they added to their cart. Let’s use the online pet store example from earlier. A business in this industry might target cat owners by showing the cat food bag they added to their cart with a discounted price. 

Similarly, email can be used to reach out to people who signed up and added items to their cart but didn’t check out. As a best practice, only send up to three emails within one week of the abandonment. We recommend sending one immediately, after 24 hours and after one week. 

Back to you.

If you can get more traffic to your website, build your email list and social media followers, and create segmented offers for your customers, you’ll see a very successful holiday shopping season. Don’t worry if you’re getting a late start to your seasonal marketing. Generating new leads and creating promotions in the middle of the year’s biggest shopping season will ensure that you have a robust lead list filled with potential customers at the start of 2021.