The Holiday season is here! Knock-knock! Trick or treat?! In this article, we will talk about the Holiday season 2015 and the ways to increase your sales. This years’ Halloween falls on Saturday, which means it is going to be one of the largest shopping weekends of the year. National Retail Federation expect the sales to increase 3.7% (to $630.5 billion) this year, making it 1% higher (even a bit more) than an average 10-year increase of 2.5%. With these numbers in mind, we are pretty sure you have planned to spend a solid part of your annual marketing budget during the Holiday season. But what to do if your budget is not that big? The answer is – stay creative and play on your personalized attitude towards each customer. Let us discuss some good ideas for you to boost the sales and strengthen your brands’ reputation:
1. Think about special Halloween Emails
If you do not use email marketing yet – it is a high time to start! Create your Halloween templates, or use ready solutions to provide your consumers with the information on holiday discounts and special offers. While there are still a couple of days before the Halloween – you can announce some special deals for the subscribers and put a topical sign up the copy on your website (btw, you can change the copy each time before the Holiday – it will get you additional subscribers). If you still think you have a lack of time – use one of email marketing services (e.g. MailChimp). Take a chance to collect as many emails as possible – it will be helpful for a non-Holiday period when consumers activity decreases.
2. Make a Mobile-optimized Landing page
The study by KPCB shows, that an adult in the US spends approximately 2.8 hours daily browsing Internet with his/her mobile devices (which is 51% of all the time spent online daily).
Source: KPCB
Make a user-friendly mobile version of your website to compete with the retailers who do not have such. As there is a little time before the Halloween now – you can start with making a topical mobile-optimized landing page, using one of numerous free tools and proceed with renovating the whole site. Again, Holiday season is a good time to raise attention to your small business – use this time wisely!
3. Be Social
Create additional Halloween-themed activities to – Collect content from your consumers to use in the upcoming marketing campaigns; – Get additional subscribers to your social media pages; – Raise attention to your Holiday offers; – Increase the awareness about your brand.
4. Add Halloween Design to your Website
While everyone is decorating their premises with topical-specific items, think about adding special holiday banners to your website. It can be either decorated navigation buttons, or images promoting discounts, or links (and redirects) to Halloween landing pages (or all of the above). You can also add a pop-up plugin to your website to pay additional attention to your subscription.
5. Craft a Retargeting Campaign
If there are consumers loyal to your brand but are not still your customers – this is the time to make them buy. Retargeting banners will allow you to bring back bounced traffic and amplify the marketing channels you use. Show ads to the consumers, who’s already been on you website – they are more likely to come back and make a purchase, as they are aware of your brand already. This method is good to be used together with other marketing strategies – like pay-per-click or direct ad buy.
6. Pack it all
Halloween is a holiday when people buy little things as gifts – and package here matters. The more creative package you have – the more likely you will be chosen among the number of similar retailers. Design several packages and offer Halloween sets of products, combining the best-selling items into special Halloween deals. Below are some ideas for you to start with – but, again, your imagination and creativity here is the main factor of success. 
7. Create a Halloween Video (Woo)
Your video can be scary or funny, educative or entertaining (depends on the video marketing strategy you have chosen). But stay creative. You can make a series of videos teaching how to prepare for Halloween using stuff you sell (as Tesco did), or make an entertaining video, showing the history of a Halloween costume, for instance (if you retail in a fashion segment). A good video nowadays requires little budget – you can shoot it with your smartphone and share through social media.
8. Make a Pinterest Marketing Campaign
Pinterest is a great visual tool! If you collect visual content from your consumers on other social media platforms, think about posting (pinning) it on Pinterest, mixed with your Halloween offers and ads. According to the study by Shopify, Pinterest consumers spend 50$ more, than those from other social networks. We have already posted a material on how to use Pinterest for ecommerce marketing, look at it to create your holiday marketing campaign.
9. Partner with Global players
Now, when the world becomes global more and more global brands are thinking strategically on getting new consumers through partnerships with small businesses. Your business can bring some fresh air to the well-known brand (as well as new audiences) while you will get recognition and brand awareness. Here is a good article by Inc.com on how to collaborate with big brands. As an example here, let us look at GAP&VSCO partnership, and their “Make Love” campaign dedicated to St. Valentine’s Day.
Hurry up!
The holidays are coming! However, you can still jump into the passing train and make a profit from this season. Stay creative and personalized and start your marketing campaign now! We hope, the ideas we shared with you will inspire and motivate you! Please, share with us your Halloween marketing success stories! And wooo hooo, let’s celebrate!
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