This year is coming to the end. You’ve already passed the main eCommerce red-letter dates like Halloween, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It’s admirable, and I hope most of you coped with these challenges successfully. Nevertheless, there’s no time to relax as the final boss is still ahead.
Christmas holidays are the goldmine, and you should take full advantage of these days. I sincerely want to help you to finish this eCommerce year on a positive note. That’s why I’ve prepared some Christmas promotion ideas for you on how to benefit from the holidays.
Use Gift Guides
A gift guide is one of the best eCommerce holiday features you can use to boost organic traffic and sales. You know how it’s challenging to find a perfect gift for lovely people. This search requires a lot of patience, emotional efforts, and can take hours or even days. Gift guides boost the user experience, making the gift search process fast and effortless.
First of all, you need to divide your gift guides into the next categories:
- Price. Divide your products into three price categories. For example, the first one is “under 25 $”, the second one — “under 50 $”, the third — “over 100 $”. The thing is that customers tend to buy items from the second category. People don’t want to buy too cheap items as gifts. However, at the same time, they don’t want to spend lots of money. Products under 50 $ seem to be a middle ground for online shoppers.
- Role. Simply put, this category may look like “Gift Ideas for Mom/Dad/Parents/Wife, etc”. Use your Google Analytics data to define the age and gender of your customers to understand what roles to use.
- Age. It’s the best category if you sell toys or products for children: “ages 2 and under”, “ages 3-4”, “ages 5-7”, etc. This way you will significantly help parents to choose gifts for their kids.
- Hobbies. If you know your target audience it won’t be difficult to differentiate your products according to their hobbies: “music”, “sports”, “art” etc.
- Product types. If you offer your clients special offers, you can use this category. For, example “Trending products”, “Bestsellers”, “New Holiday Items”, etc.
Customers like personalization and gift guides fully provide them with this experience. Moreover, you can use these guides to promote your bestsellers or overstocked items. Combine these categories for better effect (gifts for kids under 50 $, etc.). It helps your buyers to make a purchase decision quicker. Besides, use these gift guides in your Christmas email marketing campaign.
Secret Santa Sale
Secret Santa sale is an extremely powerful tactic that will boost your brand credibility, traffic and customer retention. The idea is that you should host a secret Christmas sale only for your:
- VIP clients
- followers on social media
- newsletter subscribers
As soon as your shoppers will hear about this sale, they will generate buzz across all their friends and colleagues, increasing traffic to your online store and social media.
Exclusive Christmas sale for the most valued customers shows how much you appreciate them. It’s a great way to make customers feel special and nurture your brand as it boosts client retention. This way, you increase your customer lifetime value as a boost in client retention by 5 % increases profits at least by 25 %. Try out this strategy during the upcoming Christmas holidays.
Host Christmas Themed Contest
Interactivity is a nice tool that helps to drive traffic and brand promotion. It’s not necessary to organize charity events to stimulate user activity as not every brand can afford it. There’s a more cheap and effective way of customer involvement. All you need is just to organize a contest.
Any contest implies the next level of communication between customers and a brand, as they are not only spending money at your store but create user-generated content and express themselves. This form of activity also helps a brand to get to know their customers better.
Christmas holidays provide great scope for themed contests. Some ideas for your Christmas contest:
- The best Christmas outfit
- The ugliest Christmas sweater
- The best Christmas carol singer
- The best Christmas carol author
The only limitation for the contest’s idea is your imagination. Reward the best vocalists, outfits, carol writers with coupons, items, discounts, etc. Publish all the works on your social media profiles and link these contests to your online store. This way, you’ll increase your brand awareness and have fun together with your customers.
Decorate Your Site and Landing Pages
Christmas is a magical holiday that fulfills hearts with a cozy atmosphere and warmth. One of your goals during the holiday period is to provide your users with these feelings. Your site design should shout about the festive mood but, try not to overdo it.
Here’s a list of things you need to create a balanced but at the same time chic Christmas landing page design:
- Festive Product Images. Use eye-catching images that evoke festive feels and entice customers to make a purchase.
- Minimalistic design. Your Christmas landing page shouldn’t look like a confusing cluster of offers. It should be as clean as possible. Your bright design should attract customers but not distract them from buying things.
- Enhanced Search Opportunities. Your shoppers should easily and smoothly navigate through your Christmas offers. Include to your landing page such filters as price, style, product, etc. You can also implement a smart search box (autocomplete) to boost the user experience.
- Highlight Delivery Information. Pinpoint delivery dates or free shipping banners to encourage uncertain buyers.
- Clear CTAs. Use striking call to action buttons to carry out customers through the purchase funnel to checkout.
After Christmas Sales
At the end of each year, people make New Year resolutions. If you know what people expect from a new year, you can offer them a product that will help them to embody their resolutions.
One of the most popular New Year resolutions is to lose weight.
Retailers who sell healthy food and sports products can use these resolutions to create successful promotion campaigns. Use in your emails and on landing pages the following tagline: “New Year, New…” (whatever you want starting from me to your product or service). You can also use this strategy to promote customers to love their current state of the body. Decide what products from your catalog promote a healthy lifestyle.
Continue to promote your brand even when the Christmas holidays are over. Usually, sales are not so great after Christmas, but you shouldn’t stop all your marketing campaigns. You can even use the same promotions you used before the New Year if you can’t develop a new one. However, it would be better to create fresh posts and emails to attract a new audience to your brand and make some money.
Wrapping Out
I’ve chosen these tactics as they don’t require lots of time and effort for realization. The Christmas holidays are almost here, so you simply might not make something global on time. Happy Christmas and much success in the new year!
