In a world where we are surrounded by a huge number of brands offering similar products, competition doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. The holiday season calls for an interesting shopping trend where brands try their best to provide you with deals and discounts.
Holidays are the perfect days to market your brand or the product that it offers, as the holiday season is marked by events and gatherings. Any holiday occasion requires shopping for multiple items, including decor, food, gifts, etc.
As a marketing expert, one needs to use the perfect strategy to grab the buyer's attention to their product. Making sure their product is what the buyer needs should be their top priority.
What is Holiday Marketing
Since holidays call for vacations and family gatherings, one must buy stuff for themselves and their loved ones. Buying is advantageous for every brand out there as it allows them to market their brand and its product in the holiday season. This entire process is called holiday marketing.
The brand's marketing efforts should be aimed at producing the highest revenues by creating awareness and breaking sales records.
Holiday marketing is not as easy as people think it is. It can be crucial and very challenging as it requires you to make a strategic plan for your brand. It requires you to offer the best deals and discounts while being mindful of people's emotions, as holidays can be a bit sensitive for some.
Hurting the customers for the benefit of your brand is wrong in every way. It would help if you were always mindful of others while developing a marketing campaign or strategy.
Importance of Holiday Marketing
With the rising number of brands today, the competition has reached its peak already. Holiday marketing is something that every other brand prepares for to increase its revenue. The constant competition calls for instant and regular improvements. Striving to be the best in the market makes them produce the best quality products with a perfect marketing strategy.
The brand must catch the customer's attention during the holiday period. They must push all the limits of their marketing creativity to reach the ultimate goal of attracting customers to buy their product. Marketers should develop relevant content for their brand marketing so that people can relate to it. Holiday marketing should be driven by the creativity of the team.
Holiday marketing is important for both brands and customers. The great deal of discounts that customers receive along with the gifts offered is the most valuable part for the customers. However, the brand also takes advantage of holiday marketing by increasing its revenue after high sales. They also gain a good reputation in the eyes of their customers, making them repeat customers.
The constant competition in holiday marketing tests the ability of a brand to check if it can grow in a competitive environment. It determines whether the company can survive in the market or not.
Holiday marketing provides customers and companies with a lot of benefits. However, if marketers don't know how to align their holiday marketing strategy with the holiday season and customer demands, the competition can become a real hell for them.
How To Prepare For A Holiday Marketing Campaign
Marketers often panic and worry about creating the perfect marketing campaign for the holiday season. However, it’s not rocket science, thus, sticking to the basics can be an excellent strategy.
1. Scan Through The Previous Marketing Campaigns
Regardless of whether your previous campaign was a success or a failure, you can still learn much from it. Learning from past experiences is even better if you want to achieve something more. It can help you identify the areas that need improvement. However, if some techniques helped you achieve higher sales, you can also re-use them for your current campaign.
At the same time, you can improve your previous campaign’s shortfalls to get better results this time. You also need to look at your previous year's customer data to determine if it's still the same or changed. Additionally, you need to check if the demographics are chosen properly as they are used to set the target audience.
2. Matching Your Holiday Marketing Strategies With The Target Audience
You can never gain success if you copy your competitor's marketing strategy. As such, it would help if you created something new while keeping the target audience in mind. Creating something modern and unique would be great if you targeted generations like Millennials and Generation Z.
If you are targeting an older audience, giving them offers for gifts on purchases would be more suitable.
3. Try to Keep Your Email Simple
Adding excessive content to your emails can irritate the customers and they might not even read the content. Creativity doesn't always require you to write too much content. It can be simple and to the point.
It is an opportunity to build a reputation among your customers; if you mess it up with bad emailing strategies, it can affect your brand in the long term.
4. Always Be Ready To React and Adapt
Since the holiday season is the busiest times of the year, you must have a team that uses a problem-solving approach and works with the information available at their disposal. Fast customer response time and satisfaction is the key to gaining their trust. You must react as quickly as possible if things aren't going according to plan.
5. Content Driven Approach
Using a content-driven approach when generating ideas for your holiday email marketing campaign can offer you great benefits. Sticking to the basics while upgrading some with the new ones will positively affect your sales. A content management system can help streamline your brand’s content.
6. Tough Competition
The holiday season brings tough competition with several brands vying for customers. While preparing the content for your email campaign, try to be more creative so that your work stands out in the crowd. Your message should also focus on how the benefits you offer are better than your competitors.
It is not enough to simply divert the customers to your website. They can always leave their loaded cart unattended on your website if you don’t offer the best deals to your target audience.
7. Give Them A Real Reason To Buy
Most of us must have come across people who would buy anything and everything just because they are afraid that the store will run out of products or the deal will expire. Many brands use this false urgency tactic, but it can bring a long-term downfall for them.
Haphazard discounting and unnecessary gifts can make the customers buy your product, but it will damage the company's reputation in the long term. People won't buy anything from you next time as they might not be willing to purchase products at a higher price.
Giving people a real reason to buy by setting realistic and genuine deals is the best way to make them your long-term customer.
Holiday Email Marketing Benefits
Email marketing is considered the perfect medium for your holiday season campaigns. Emailing your target audience during the holidays can lead to great benefits:
1. Brand Awareness
No matter how busy people are during the holidays, they always check their emails. Emails can help boost brand awareness among the target audience, while also allowing them to view the deals and discounts you’re offering during the holiday season. Emails are an effective way to raise your brand's voice amid the holiday chaos.
2. Include Contests
Engaging customers with different quizzes and games to get a prize on their purchase can be helpful for your brand and fun at the same time. Including games can increase their interest in getting to the core of your email and the discounts it offers.
That might also encourage them to recommend your brand to their friends and family so they can buy from you.
3. Attracting New Customers
The special offers, deals, and discounts you introduce during the holiday season will grow your customer base. Creating something unique and extraordinary can attract new customers instantly. It also makes your regular customers recommend the brand to their circle.
Keeping regular customers around is very important, as they are the reason your brand is able to attract new customers. Their recommendations and reviews make new customers want to buy from your brand. Giving them rewards for a particular number of purchases can be a good way to keep them connected during the holiday season.
Holiday Email Marketing Strategies
1. Webroom Your Products
You may have heard of showrooms that display the product in a way that allows you to see it from every angle. Webroom is very similar to that. Through marketing emails, you can direct them to a webroom that displays the product in a 3D form, giving the customers a view from every angle.
It is very important, especially if we talk about expensive purchases. Investing in developers and professional photographers for creating a webroom will benefit you in the long term. This can take months, so you need to start early.
2. Interact With Your Customers
Add options for choosing certain answers in the email for customers to interact with your brand. You can also include social media handles to allow your customers to interact with your brand on different platforms which will help convince them to buy your product.
3. Attractive Subject Lines
A Subject line is the first thing that pops up on recipients’ notification bar when they get an email. It should be attractive and creative enough to grab the customers. Your subject line should also be concise and give the customers a taste of what they can expect from your email.
4. Abandoned Shopping Carts
Many website visitors leave their shopping carts after filling them up or when they see the total amount. You can mitigate the effects by allowing customers to view special deals and discounts for the products waiting in their carts, they might rethink their decision to purchase those products again.
Attracting customers with emails is not enough. You must be with them throughout the experience until they order their product from your website. Consideration is an extensive process for customers who go back and forth on their decision before they actually buy a product.
5. Free Shipping
Free shipping can attract a lot more customers than you think. Customers might be willing to shop for products worth hundreds of dollars from you, but they will not be motivated to pay some extra bucks for shipping charges. Thus, offering free shipping can make customers feel a lot more excited than even with your deals and discounts.
6. Short Content
Extensive emails with a lot of words will only confuse the customers. Most of us do not even read the email if we see a lot of content in it. We skip through it, or even worse, close the email which defeats the purpose of sending emails.
Short content is always easy to read and understand. Your marketing content should be short so that readers can get a grip of what the email offers you. Using bold text for the most important words can highlight the sentence that can lead them to the website.
7. Fewer Emails – More Benefits
Sending several emails to customers can make them think of your brand as spam. The ideal number of emails you should send your target population is three. Bombarding your audience with emails can irritate them to the point that they can block your emails.
The fewer the emails and the more relevant the content, the more benefit you will get.
8. Limited Time Offer
The word 'Limited Time Offer' drives customers to buy your product instantly. Some people have an innate urgency to shop whenever they see this tagline in front of an offer. Deals and discounts matter a lot for them, and realizing that it is for a limited time will give them the adrenaline rush to buy it instantly.
9. Sensitive Times
Not all holidays are happy occasions, some people might have negative emotions associated with the day. For example, not all customers that receive Mother's Day offers will have a mother to buy your product for. It can be a really sad moment for them.
Be mindful of such customers while creating emails for such types of holidays. Tell them it's okay to unsubscribe from the emails if they don't want such offers to be sent to their inbox again.
Empathizing with such customers is good for your brand and a humane act. This simple act of kindness can make your brand excel in competition with others.
10. Be Unique
You might think your email strategy is the best one, but it can be similar to many other emails in the customer's inbox. Be creative and unique with your emails so they can instantly attract customers.
Subscribe to other brands' offers and get their emails to see what they are planning. That way, you can be different with your emails, so your customers get a one-of-a-kind email.
11. Focus on Charity
You might not realize it, but many of your customers would be into humanitarian acts of charity. You can do it for them. Please mention in your emails how a certain amount of their purchase will be donated to charity, which can motivate them to shop from you.
Keep in mind that deceiving the customers for your benefit is wrong; morally, ethically, and legally. If you are promising them such a great notion, you should actually be doing it in real life. Including some mere words in your email for temporary benefit can be harmful to you in the long term.
12. Follow-up Emails
Keeping the customers connected to your brand is not limited to the holiday season only. It would be best if you made them your regular customers. Send them emails post-holiday so that they can stay connected to you.
You can offer some post-holiday deals and discounts to make them permanently loyal to your brand. While keeping the permanent customers connected, do not forget to attract new ones. Your brand should be active enough to keep attracting new customers every other day.
Email Marketing for Holidays
Even though every social media platform is beneficial for marketing campaigns, emailing is especially suitable for holiday marketing as it targets the customer directly instead of just showing an ad on the brand's social media platform.
Online shopping has already skyrocketed since 2020 because of the pandemic. People feel quite uneasy about the in-person shopping experience these days. If they get offers with email notifications on their mobile phones so they can purchase the items in the comfort of their home, it will be easier and more convenient for them.
Customers are always ready to buy online if they see a good deal with reasonable discounts. Emailing gives them an option to do so instantly. The 2020 Pandemic has caused an increase in this behavior anyway. The 'Buy Now options that the emails provide gives them the convenience to shop with a click.
If the brands showcase their deals for a holiday on their social media accounts, they would have to do so in general for a large population. However, emailing provides you an option for customizing them, or even better, personalizing them, according to customers' behavior on their past purchases.
Monitor Your Results
Monitoring your results at the end of the day is important. Whether your emails give you a benefit or not, it is really important to find that out. Your efforts could go to waste if you do not get the required or expected results from your hard work.
It can also benefit you in the future to not repeat the same mistakes. Once you find out the negative points of your emailing strategy, it will be easier for you the next time to avoid repeating the same mistake.
Note Down The Points For Next Year
After monitoring the data analysis of your current sales, try to make a list of changes that you can come up with for your next year's marketing plan. We know it might be too early, but you never know, they might come in handy, and people tend to forget minor details of the events that happened a year ago.
Conclusion
Holiday marketing is a crucial time for every business out there. This is the season of high competition between businesses, which requires them to put effort into their marketing strategies.
Email marketing is the best way to showcase your brand and its deals. Holiday email marketing can be tricky, but investing in this marketing campaign effectively can give you long-term customers, providing you greater revenues and benefits. We hope our detailed guide helps your business in creating a suitable and successful email marketing campaign.
