As the saying goes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year! But for retailers, it’s the busiest. It’s never too late to start planning and leveraging holiday ad campaigns. December is here and customers’ porches are filled with wreaths and Christmas lights – thus the holiday season begins.

Important Upcoming Holidays to Consider

Christmas 
Although Christmas is on December 25th, shopping for this exciting holiday starts much earlier. Overall, consumers spend $650 billion on gift shopping during the Christmas season.

Boxing Day 
This occurs the day after Christmas, on December 26th. Boxing day is considered the most popular day for returning Christmas gifts to stores. Online shopping is common during this day as 69% of shoppers prefer shopping online during boxing day.

7 Tips to Optimize Your 2021 Holiday Sales 

Let’s take a look at some holiday specific marketing strategies to increase your holiday sales this year! 

1. Personalize Your Holiday Content

Personalization allows you to provide a unique experience to customers, increasing your ROI. Nearly 89% of marketers stated that including personalization in their marketing strategy increased their revenue. Consider the following tips to target your customers with personalization: 

• Analyze historical data – Use insights from visitors’ previous browsing history to provide relevant content, and remind them of the gift they browsed last time they were on your site.  
• Determine who they’re shopping for – It’s more likely that customers are shopping for others rather than themselves during the holiday season. Conduct surveys to ask customers who they’re shopping for. Providing incentives can result in huge response rates. Try offering coupon codes, small gift cards/vouchers or digital resources such as eBooks.

2. Design Holiday Landing Pages

Festive landing pages help set the mood for the holiday season and urge customers to purchase early. Here are some ideas to use for your landing page:

• Holiday-themed landing page – Use festive colours to create the holiday season feel (e.g. use red and green for Christmas or black, red and grey for Black Friday). If you’re an apparel store, feature your models wearing seasonal clothing to encourage purchases. 
• Landing page with limited offers and deals – Include the day and time your products will be available on sale. For instance, use a countdown timer on the header of your landing page so customers are aware of how much time is left to purchase items on sale. 
• Landing page to help customers find gifts – Feature categories sorted by personas such as “for her”, “for him”, “top gifts for mom”, “top gifts for coworkers”, “Holiday Favourites”, “Holiday Bestsellers”, “Holiday Bundles”. 

3. Set up Heat Maps

Heatmaps provide a deeper insight into customers’ behaviour compared to standard website stats. It shows you the places on your website users engage with the most. This will help you layout and design your website according to engagement.  For instance, if you put your holiday deals near the bottom of your homepage and realize users have been clicking on that section the most, you can move it up to the top to make it more visible to new customers visiting your site. Use tools such as Hotjar to put this practice into use.

4. Improve Your Navigation

Customers are constrained by time during the holiday season, and poor navigation can cause customers to leave your site. Consider the following tips to navigate your website better:

• Include drop-down menus – Make your site look more organized and help customers find products easily. 
• Provide an option for auto-complete – Automatically suggest products as soon as users type in a keyword in the search bar. 
• Add a filtering option for your search results page – Include filters for minimum/maximum budget for bargain shoppers, and product reviews for research shoppers.  

5. Make Use of Your Email List

Did you know 38% of shoppers indicated that emails helped them learn more about holiday deals and promotions? Not only that, but emails were responsible for 20% of site traffic during last year’s holiday season, and customers who discovered holiday deals through emails spent 138% more. 

Here are some email marketing ideas you can use to promote your holiday sales: 

• Holiday sales announcements: Send announcements early on to inform customers about the upcoming holiday details, send them reminder emails, sneak peeks of the items on sale, and announce when the sale officially begins. 
• Hot deals: Send hot deals only to email subscribers to make them feel special. This can encourage more customers to sign up for your email list to access exclusive offers! 
• Greeting customers: Use your email list to send greetings or wishes to customers during the holidays. For instance “Merry Christmas [name]! We appreciate you being a dedicated customer and hope you have a jolly Christmas this year”. This shows customers that you genuinely care about them, and are not only reaching out to them to sell.

6. Give Back to Your Community

Studies show that customers are four times more likely to buy from brands that support a cause. With the holiday season approaching, you can use this as part of your marketing strategy. Customers will be more satisfied with their purchase if they know that a portion of it is going towards a helpful cause. For example, Broken Riders sends 10% of each Black Friday purchase to a mental health charity called Mind.

7. Provide Special Offers 

Providing generous add-ons can strengthen your brand’s reputation. Here are two ways you can add a special touch for your customers:

• Gift wrapping services – During the holiday season, visitors are more open to add-on services. Add-on services can increase the value of the product and make the purchase more memorable. Provide gift-wrapping services to elicit the holiday feeling, and offer to add a special message. This takes away the hassle of customers having to wrap the gift themselves! To increase sales, you can also offer free gift wrapping above a certain price to encourage customers to spend more. 
• Gift Cards – Lots of shoppers buy gift cards during the holidays, usually because they are unsure of what the other person would like. Gift cards can benefit your business in two key ways:
  • Increased spending – A survey by FirstData found that shoppers spend $59 more than the value of their gift cards.  
  • Reduced returns – Compared to customers purchasing a product they’re unsure of (right-sizing, item or colour), gift cards let customers choose what to buy. This reduces the number of product returns and hassles like restocking and shipping fees.  

Let Growvare Help! 

If you want to gain a competitive edge during this holiday season, start executing your strategies. Growvare is an AI-driven ad platform that can help you strengthen your holiday campaigns with tools such as split-testing, AI-driven targeting, multi-channel advertising and 24/7 campaign monitoring! Chat with us to find out more!