Our Top Christmas Marketing Tips for This Festive Season
The global pandemic has certainly caused major disruptions to the way we live our lives and the way we shop and consume content. Many businesses have been forced to adapt to the digital world and focus on building a strong online presence. With the festive season now upon us, we understand that many businesses might be concerned about competing online and cutting through the clutter. If your business is looking for ways to generate more sales or gain more longterm customers over this festive period, here are our top Christmas marketing tips you should be considering this December.
Look at the Insights and Trends
Facebook for Business recently launched an interactive data dashboard, which provides insights into the retail market as well as customer behaviour patterns in your country over the last three years. Insights from Australia in 2019 revealed that 51% of festive shoppers agreed that the festive season is the best time to find deals. 55% of festive shoppers also used this time to research gifts for themselves. Factors that Australian shoppers say they care about when making shopping decisions around Christmas time include price, product availability and free delivery.
The number of festive shoppers making purchases on mobile in Australia has grown significantly between 2018 and 2019, so it is safe to assume that this growth has continued in 2020. Ultimately, what this data dashboard reveals about Australian Christmas shoppers is that the mobile experience is very important, shoppers are prioritising good deals and savings (discounts and delivery costs), and that they are willing to buy themselves a gift to reward themselves or to stay positive. So, make sure you keep these insights in mind when planning your marketing campaigns or making updates to your website.
Improve Your Site Speed
With online shopping continuing to rise in 2020, if you have an eCommerce site, your speed and performance must be up to scratch. After all, time is money - the longer it takes for your website to load, the greater the chance your customers might leave your site to find similar products on another website. Site speed is also a critical ranking factor for both mobile and desktop. So, before you go ahead and with your Christmas marketing campaign this year, make sure your website has a load time of 2 seconds or less. A great tool to check your website load time is the PageSpeed Insights tool by Google Developer.
Host Contests & Giveaways
It’s the season of giving after all, so why not reward your followers and subscribers with giveaways and contests this Christmas? Running giveaways is a great marketing tactic for driving sales, increasing social media engagement and gaining more visibility on the social media platform that you are running your contest. It is also an incentive for people to follow you for a chance to enter future contests.
During the festive season, a lot of businesses tend to run a ’12 Days of Giveaways’ style of campaign. Make sure you devise a campaign in line with your objective - if the end goal is to increase your mailing list, use a lead form or direct people to a landing page on your website to collect email addresses. If the goal is followers, a simple “comment below” and follow on Instagram will be your best bet - partnering up with other brands who align with your brand will help you reach a bigger audience organically, and means a bigger prize pool for the winners. If you want quality leads over quantity, ask a question, or make it harder for people to enter (such as asking them to answer a question, or posting something to social media with a hashtag).
Facebook does have some rules and regulations around running competitions that they update from time to time, so make sure you check those out before getting started.
Leverage on FOMO
Christmas time is the perfect opportunity to offer limited-time-only deals to shoppers who are looking to save some money on gifts, either for friends, family or themselves. Offerings that are only available for a short period are what we refer to as FOMO marketing, or ‘fear of missing out’. We all have a fear of missing out on great opportunities, in this case, discounts and deals. The purpose of this technique is to push customers to make an impulse purchase rather than regretting the lack of action later on. Some Christmas marketing ideas using FOMO could be:
- A 20% OFF flash sale for 48 hours only
- Advertise bundles of products and services for a short period of time
- Use clever wording such as “For one weekend only” or “Super Sale Saturday”
Email Marketing
The holidays are a busy time for most consumers, with many of them running errands, heading to festive events or shopping for Christmas presents (online and in-store). With consumers now constantly on the go and relying on their phone for either communication or online shopping, Christmas is a great time to get ahead and run some creative email marketing campaigns. Emails offer convenient buying options with either clickable images to product collections or ‘buy now’ buttons linking directly to limited-time deals or specific products. This will help streamline the purchase journey for your customers.
The most effective email campaigns to run this festive season are welcome emails, promotional emails and abandoned cart emails.
Welcome emails are an excellent opportunity to set out what your subscribers can expect from you in terms of email frequency and content type (weekly deals and new products etc). A welcome email is also a perfect time to make a sale by offering a ‘new members’ discount code.
When sending promotional emails, make sure to include other important information like shipping information or discounts, gift card services and return policies.
Why might people abandon their shopping carts? Perhaps they found a similar product at a cheaper price, or the shipping costs are too high. Abandoned cart emails can be used to lure customers back to your site to make their purchases, by offering a small discount or free shipping.
Christmas is a crucial time to leverage existing customers for more sales. If you need assistance with your email marketing campaigns this year, please get in touch!
Get Festive with Social Media Ads
Now’s the time to create engaging and festive ads to drive traffic to your website and generate more sales. If your business is primarily an online shop, take advantage of Google Shopping Ads and dynamic ads on social media to automatically promote products to people who have already expressed interest in your business. You can also incorporate social media advertising with the Christmas marketing tactics listed above:
- Lead generation ads to build your mailing list (this could be a “sign up to receive exclusive deals this Christmas” ad or 1st purchase discount code)
- Get offer ads to promote flash sales or limited-time-only deals
- Engagement ads to run Instagram follower competitions and giveaways (although be mindful here that Facebook will sometimes diminish the performance of these ads for encouraging “inauthentic” engagement - and don’t forget the rules around Facebook competitions here).
The list is endless when it comes to social media advertising at Christmas time.
Speak to Our Team About Creating Christmas Marketing Campaigns For Your Business
These are some quick examples of what your business can do with regards to Christmas marketing right now, and into the new year to drive more sales and find new customers. We can work with your business to create engaging social media and Google ads, high-converting landing pages to promote your Christmas specials and captivating emails to boost sales. Please get in touch with our team to see what we can do for you!