Ecommerce merchants and marketers share their best holiday marketing tips — that AREN’T just “dump all your money into ads.”
For an ecommerce business, the rewards of a successful holiday season are huge. But so is the competition for shoppers’ attention, clicks, and purchases.
Adam Bastock, a consultant who helps small businesses grow online, explains a common challenge his clients run into. “I see a huge uptick in cost per click (CPC) and a loss of impression share over the holiday period as everyone scrambles to get their slice of the action,” he says. “It can be hard, as it really squeezes product margins and makes some keywords and campaigns unprofitable!”
What’s a small business to do?
This is where owned marketing comes in. Klaviyo found that in 2018, nearly half of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales came from people who had engaged with the stores they purchased from prior to November.
By building an engaged email list, an active blog, and other assets that you truly own, you can decrease your reliance on fickle third-party marketplaces like Amazon and advertising channels like Google. This gives you a big competitive advantage — for Black Friday, the Christmas season, and beyond.
The keys are building that audience when it’s most affordable and then being prepared to convert them when it’s most valuable.
Easier said than done, right?
Fortunately, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Plenty of ecommerce merchants, consultants, and marketing experts who have done this before are more than happy to share their secrets to success. So, we talked to a dozen business owners and marketing professionals to learn their best advice for successful holiday marketing.
Key Takeaways
- Create holiday gift guides for shoppers.
- Use social proof to build trust.
- Use your blog to grow your email list.
- Segment your email list to triple your email revenue.
- Build anticipation with subscriber-only offers.
- Be human.
- Go analog with direct mail.
- Don’t overcomplicate your offer.
- Remember: Your job isn’t done come December 26th.
1. Create holiday gift guides for shoppers
Holiday gift guides have the potential to accomplish a lot of things at once. They can:
- Build trust
- Make gift buying easy for shoppers
- Drive more organic traffic to your website
- Promote your products at no cost
- Help you build partnerships with other online businesses
Media giants like Buzzfeed have been cashing in on this type of content for years. Being featured in a third-party gift guide can be huge for holiday sales, but you should also be creating your own to bring shoppers straight to your website.
As you compile your collection of gifts, make sure you don’t try to boil the ocean. Instead of dumping all your products into one massive guide, create a variety of guides targeted at different buyer personas.
The key to making gift guides especially useful is segmenting them as much as possible. For instance, it can be filtered based on budget, type of relationship, interests, age, and hobbies. The exact segments will vary based on your customer’s profile and products.
– Maggie Simmons, Digital Marketing Manager at Max Effect Marketing
Here’s how one online store does it.
Our most effective holiday marketing campaign is always our holiday gift guide. A lot of people struggle to think of gift ideas for their loved ones, which makes our Gift Guide for Gearheads such an effective piece.
You can’t be everything for everybody, so keep it niche and create a gift guide that appeals to your target demographic. If you can play to your niche — auto enthusiasts, in our case — you can attract a lot of views from purchase-oriented users who are not sure what gift to order.
– Jake McKenzie, Content Manager at Auto Accessories Garage
Make sure you keep keywords in mind so that your gift guides can easily be found on search engines. Use a tool like Google Keyword Planner to learn what types of gifts people are searching for, and use those keywords in your content.
Your goals should be clear, measurable, and timely. Setting up email marketing goals can help expand the size of your subscriber list, increase engagement, and grow your business, as they provide a framework for improvement over time.
Create collections focused around seasonal keywords. Searches including gift increase 300 to 400% during October through December, so make sure you’re creating specific content and landing pages that match this.
Write blog posts that answer common questions your target audience may be asking around this time of year too, such as ‘What to buy my boyfriend’ or a collection of products with ‘gift’ or ‘gift set’ in the title. These are often ignored by competitors and can provide quick wins in traffic that’s looking to purchase.
– Adam Bastock, Ecommerce Manager & Consultant at abastock
You can also partner with companies in your niche to create and comarket gift guides. When multiple brands promote the guide, you can exponentially increase the number of people browsing your products during the holiday season.
Our plan is to publish holiday gift guides on our blog before Christmas. We will include some of our own products as well as products from online retailers in tangential niches that our customers are interested in. This will allow us to collaborate with other companies by creating aligned incentives to help amplify our content.
– Jacob Edwards-Bytom, Director of Ecommerce at Made4Fighters
2. Use social proof to build trust
Holiday shoppers often find themselves browsing niche products that they know very little about. That can be overwhelming. Make it easy on them and prove that your products are high-quality by using social proof in your emails, on social media, in ads, and on your website.
The holidays are the ideal time to create engaging articles surrounding the season. User-generated content solves a number of problems for B2Cs. Not only does it provide you with more content, but user-generated content is typically considered more trustworthy and less biased than what you might generate yourself.
– Maggie Simmons, Digital Marketing Manager at Max Effect Marketing
And it’s not just UGC! Put product reviews, customer testimonials, and validation from media front-and-center to give shoppers confidence in your products.
Because people are buying gifts for others and not themselves, they want to be extra sure that what they’re purchasing is a good gift. Make sure to showcase social proof, like reviews, testimonials, and user-generated content.
You don’t need to be a digital marketing expert to take advantage of the benefits that emailing your customers has to offer, but you do need to spend some time clarifying what you want to achieve from this channel.
– Jonathan Chan, Head of Marketing at Insane Growth
3. Use your blog to grow your email list
Content marketing is important year-round for ecommerce businesses, but it’s especially critical during the holiday season. Not only can content ads bring people to your site at a 90% lower cost than product ads, but your blog can also help you grow your email subscriber list.
For content marketing, I think of problems that my ideal customer has this time of year. Maybe they need to plan a huge meal all by themselves and need assistance? I will then write a blog post about how to meal plan and then provide a link to purchase my Christmas Meal Planner at the middle and the end of the post.
– Becky Beach, Owner of Mom Beach
Mom Beach uses their blog to drive people to make a purchase, but you can also use this tactic to get shoppers to “pay” for content with their email addresses. If you provide enough value, you can easily use content to build your email list. Then, you can continue marketing to those subscribers for free throughout the holiday season and beyond.
4. Segment your email list to triple your email revenue
Email segmentation has the potential to double your clicks and triple your email revenue, Klaviyo reports. Those lifts are especially impactful during the holidays.
The best way to utilize email marketing during the holiday season is to segment or tag your email list. Sending a full blast to the email list rarely works and generates a very poor ROI, so making sure that you personalize your email marketing as much as possible is the key.
How I’ve done this in the past is to create three different online catalogs — one for each type of customer — and send an initial email out a week or two before the holiday season starts. The initial email gives people a choice to choose between the three different catalogs, and depending on what they choose, they’ll be tagged to be sent a specific email sequence.
This tactic saw one of my clients greatly increase their conversion rates by 400%!
– Jonathan Chan, Head of Marketing at Insane Growth
The more segmented your email list is, the more personalized your emails, content, and offers can be. And because everyone and their grandma are blasting shoppers’ inboxes during the holiday season, you’ve got to be extremely relevant to cut through the noise.
Today’s customers expect to receive emails that feel curated, relevant, and personal. It is important to maintain a high level of personalization, even through Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Christmas holidays, to increase brand loyalty and customer lifetime value.
– James Glover, President & Cofounder of Coherent Path
5. Build anticipation with subscriber-only offers
Speaking of emails…why not give your subscribers a little something for their loyalty? This rewards people for being part of your community, and by announcing that deals are coming soon, you can create a sense of anticipation and nudge people to consistently open your emails.
We use email marketing for creating a buzz to promote holiday deals. To do that, we send a teaser email to our subscribers (mostly buyers) and mention cool surprises and deals are on the way.
– Ali Hasan, Marketer at FJackets
Here’s how beauty retailer Ulta did this during the 2018 holiday season with their 25 Days of Surprise Deals promotion. Each deal was available for one day only, giving subscribers the incentive to open every email so they wouldn’t miss out.
6. Be human
Increasingly, people want brands to go beyond transactions and build relationships with them. Don’t underestimate the power of simple, personal marketing outreach.
Consider sending videos, emails, and holiday cards from the heart. They can be funny, casual, or poignant, depending on your brand voice. Whatever you choose to do, letting your humanity shine through is a high-impact way to make your customers feel appreciated and more connected with your brand.
Something that I’ve found to be particularly effective is to create very personal branded content. By this, I mean videos or email messages directly from the founder or creator. We make sure that it’s relevant to the holiday theme and then include a strong message of welcoming people into the brand’s family.
– Jonathan Chan, Head of Marketing at Insane Growth
For example, Lisa Price, the founder of hair and beauty brand Carol’s Daughter, made this short and sweet video to wish customers a happy holiday season.
7. Go analog with direct mail
Snail mail is old school, but it works! Three out of four people sort through their mail as soon as they get it — so your chances of catching shoppers’ eyes are high.
Send out postcards in the mail. Postcards with discount codes are proven to be extremely successful, even in this day and age.
– Joseph Braha, CEO at Pet Life
Other types of direct mail to consider include:
- Catalogs
- Custom scratch-offs
- Branded calendars that people will leave up all year ’round
- Holiday cards (see #6 above!)
Remember: your goal is to drive shoppers to your online store, so your direct mail campaign should incentivize them to visit your website.
8. Don’t overcomplicate your offer
It can be tempting to engineer complex discount strategies for different products, audience segments, and campaigns. But this can get messy fast for small online stores. Typically, it’s best to keep it simple and limit the number of sales and discounts you run during the holiday season.
Generally, clients want to have intricate sales and include specific discount codes. We always tell them to make it foolproof. Have the same offer from ad to landing page to checkout. Mark it down sitewide, and you’ll have your store moving as fast as possible!
– Nick Shackelford, Cofounder of Structured Social
9. Remember: Your job isn’t done come December 26th
The benefits of your holiday marketing can last long past December. In fact, you should start preparing for next year’s holiday season as soon as possible.
Now, I’m not saying you need to create Christmas campaigns in January. But remember how I mentioned that nearly 50% of Black Friday sales come from previously engaged shoppers? If you focus on building an engaged audience year-round, you’ll have a stronger base to market to next year.
Here’s how marketers at two very different online stores are doing it.
Invest in SEO
Publish strategic content that aids your specific SEO strategies leading up to the holiday season. SEO is a long-term game, so publishing content right before the holidays isn’t always your best bet for visibility.
You may need to build credibility within the keyword you’re trying to target, which is why we start our marketing early with preliminary searches and really ramp up with long-tail keyword targets well into the holidays.
– Jennifer Moore, Marketing Specialist at Saatva
Saatva sells luxury, affordable, and eco-friendly mattresses on their online store. It’s no surprise that they publish comparisons between their products and other mattress brands, but they take it a step further by publishing useful, educational content, too.
Here’s a sampling of the content they published during the 2018 holiday season.
Identify New Marketing Channels
Some businesses face unique marketing challenges because they sell regulated items, like firearms, alcohol, or cannabis products. They have to be exceptionally creative to build an owned audience — and the tactics they use aren’t exclusive to regulated industries.
One of the biggest challenges we face during the winter holidays is finding ways to reach our customers. As an online store that operates in the cannabis industry, we have a unique set of challenges that most ecommerce companies don’t have to overcome.
For example, there are significant restrictions on advertising cannabis products on Facebook and Google. That means we cannot run online ads or promotions during the peak holiday season.
As a result, we have to find other creative ways to get our brand in front of the right audience. This year we’re investing more in growth marketing initiatives such as SEO, PR, and organic social media. We’re trying to build a strong foundation so that when the holidays arrive, we are prepared and aren’t reliant on one single channel to drive sales.
– Michael Coleman, VP of Marketing at Medical Marijuana Inc.
There you have it: nine free and inexpensive ways to spruce up your holiday marketing strategy without overspending on digital ads.
For more strategic holiday marketing advice, download your 7-step checklist to preparing your online store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Feature image provided by Freestocks.org
