How to Make the Most of Your Holidays Ups and Downs

Holidays are coming – Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday… This season the sales are set to be bigger than ever and you should be prepared. How to optimize the Holiday campaign to get the most of it? In this article, we are going to share some useful tips with you.

1. When start a Holiday campaign?

• Analyze your previous holiday campaigns. If you have started the campaign earlier last year – try to do it later this year (or next year).
• Keep your campaign as long as it is possible. Remember, there are always last minute customers you can profit from. According to the study by RocketFuel those, who start planning holiday shopping (and purchasing) in advance spend three times more than last-minute shoppers.

2. What to start with?

• Analyze what worked the best for you during the previous campaigns (PPC, SEO or SMM).
• Use the new Google service to analyze search requests and build your marketing campaign according to data obtained.
• Add specific keywords to highlight your holiday campaign, i.e. sale, discount, special offer, gift, black Friday deal etc.
• Prepare separate content / landing pages for your Holiday offers.
• Test different kinds of promotions (for instance, 15% off vs free shipping) to find out what works better for your business.
• Use Google Analytics to discover what ways of promotion gave the best relult in terms of converting leads into customers.

3. On whom to target?

• Concentrate on targeting new audiences during the Holiday campaign. After the end of the campaign, analyze the ration of new vs returning customers to consider for future campaigns.
• Price matters. Try to attract new consumers offering some extra-deals.
• Make purchasing with you easy and fast. According to Oracle study, more than 50% of customers said that a good shopping experience would make them loyal to a particular retailer.

• Make additional target groups from those visiting your website during the Holiday season and remarket them with special deals: visitors from a concrete marketing campaign, landing page, those who bought a certain product or took part in a social media activity.
• Set up Remarketing Audiences in Google Analytics (including segmentation on the total amount of purchase, abandoning shopping carts, certain landing page visitors, etc.).

4. Which ad channels to concentrate on?

• Blog content – optimize your blog content for search engines to make your blog valuable for your consumers. A good content can attract more visitors to your website. Consider your written materials for each of the major items of your content strategy.
• Email campaign – if you have already used this tool – the list of subscribers will be one of the most powerful tools in increasing your website traffic and converting your leads into customers. Furthermore, if you have made an analyses of your database after the latest marketing campaign and segmented the target audience – you will be able to target your emails according to that segmentation. If not – consider this option for future campaigns.
• PPC (Pay-Per-Click) – is an invaluable tool by Google Analytics to use during your Holiday campaign. Make sure to use a call to action in your ads, i.e. “Holiday Discount”, “Thanksgiving Offer”, “Free Shipping” etc.
• Facebook paid ads – will help you to target demographic. The good thing here is that you can try different types of ads to find out which work better, before paying for the whole campaign.
• Other social media – if have not used yet – now it is high time to start using other channels of promotion, raise attention to your brand, get followers and most likely, customers. If used already – you can refresh your accounts, adding special holiday offers and contests.

5. What products to use for special offers?

• Combine special offers from your star-products (i.e. those you sell most of all) with slow-moving products. It will give you a chance to raise attention to slow-moving products.
• Make special deals adding small cheap gifts to sets of products you have created.

6. What are the trends?

 We hope you will make your best from this campaign. Please, share with us your experience and issues arrived during the Holiday Season.