The holiday season is the most profitable time of year for nearly all business across the board.
By some estimates, holiday sales can represent nearly 30% of a business’ annual revenue.
With that much business at stake, you need to make the most out of your holiday advertising campaign.
Getting the Maximum Return on Investment from Your Holiday Advertising
With all the day-to-day work that comes with running an e-commerce business, it is all too easy to forget to come up with a strategy for the coming holidays.
These five tips will help you get organized, come up with a game plan, and hit the ground running this holiday season.
1. Put a Plan in Place
Every holiday season there are a few hot items that will garner the most attention. Knowing your customer base and figuring out what is on their wish lists will give you a leg up in deciding what items you need to promote.
Figure out what your big-ticket items are, what your stocking-stuffer suggestions are. Once you’ve done that, you can begin organizing email campaigns, creating google ads and landing pages, researching keywords for your products, and pushing promotions for the items you need to push.
And speaking of email campaigns…
2. Clean-Out and Update Your Email List
A good beginning to any marketing campaign is a thorough purge of your email list.
Having a bunch of non-responsive recipients on your email list can seriously hamstring your efforts, particularly during the holidays. As users are inundated with a wave of holiday email ads, they’re likely to simply mark everything as spam rather than go one-by-one and unsubscribe from lists they don’t want to be on.
Clearing your list of recipients who don’t open the emails you send can help prevent your correspondences from being marked as spam. Email can be a potent tool for direct marketing, and you don’t want to lose it just because someone marked you as spam.
3. Analyze Previous Years’ Efforts
If your business has been around for a few holiday seasons, then you’ll definitely want to review your efforts from previous years.
What has or hasn’t worked in the past must inform how you formulate your strategy now. Maybe direct email ads or sponsored blog posts have been a big hit for you in the past. This information will help you determine where your core consumer base is and how best to reach them.
But almost more important is studying when you had the biggest surges in traffic. If you did the most business Cyber Monday or shortly before Christmas, but slumped the rest of the season, make a note of that.
Sprinkling in additional offers throughout the season may help encourage steady business throughout the season.
4. Sell Your Brand, Not Just Products
Americans will spend more than $460 billion on gifts during the holidays. The Indian eCommerce as well is very much impacted by Christmas. So, that huge influx of business is an opportunity to reach customers who might not otherwise seek your product out and potentially turn them into return customers.
For that reason, it is critical to use the holidays as a branding opportunity. Anyone can do their year-round shopping on Amazon. It’s up to you to give them a reason to come back to you.
5. Create Gift Lists
Many among us aren’t natural gift-givers. And that’s great because it gives you an angle to push content.
This is where your content creation abilities can really shine. By putting out blog posts, email ads and the like containing lists like “gifts for him/her” or “gifts under $20″”.
Use these lists to put the right gifts suggestions in front of the right audience, and you’ll end up selling your product while making your customers’ holiday shopping easier. It’s a win-win.
Ring in the holidays like your sales depend on it (They Do!)
Your holiday advertising game can make-or-break your fourth quarter. But with these tips in mind, you should have some very happy holidays in store.
