COVID-19 had a huge impact on the business prospects of every industry and genre. And its effect on the economy is clear in how businesses are changing their plans to reach their holiday sales goals, hoping that this holiday season will bring a jump in their profits. As the governments of different countries relax the Covid rules, the search for new customers is growing at an exponential rate. We really hope that this article will help you build your holiday marketing campaign despite the Corona effect and that your business will start to grow again. The following numbers show how COVID-19 has affected the sales of eCommerce businesses.   These numbers just show that you need to work harder if you want to stand out from the other marketers and grow your sales in the middle of a corona. Even though the covid-19 pandemic has changed the lives and jobs of many people, it has also brought families closer together. And since the holiday is coming up soon, it's clear that people do think about gifts for their family and close friends. This means that people are willing to enjoy the small things with their families and friends no matter what is going on in the world. It gives marketers a way to reach out to their customers with exciting deals or profitable marketing campaigns to get their attention and, in the end, make their own businesses better. So, if you really don't want to miss this chance to boost your sales and income, start planning your Holiday Season Marketing Campaign together with CanCode.io's Shop Pre Order Manager and Posh Wrap: Gift Option Manager App!!!  

15 Holiday Marketing Campaign Ideas and Plans That Will Help You Exceed Your Sales Goals

Covid-19 and the waves that came after it changed the way people shop in a big way. As the virus spread around the world, people quickly adapted to new rules that kept changing. Most countries put in place strict lockdown rules and curfews for the public. In spite of everything, eCommerce businesses did well. Recent customer behavior showed that people don't think twice about buying things online, even for holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, etc. With their borders closed, governments also encouraged people to be self-sufficient. This made it so that global players had to depend on local vendors. From the seller's and marketer's point of view, it is very important to stand out from the crowd. So, in this blog post, I'll talk about some holiday marketing ideas with CanCode.io that will help your business make more money while people are shopping for the holidays.  

1. Evaluate Your Performance

Performance metrics are numbers in context, results related to the strategic goals of the business. ~Pearl Zhu, The Change Agent CIO

It's okay if your sales from last year weren't that great. It's not strange. Every business has good times and bad times. But it's important to take what you've learned from the past and start planning for the future. Find out how much of the sales and income your company hoped for actually happened. This holiday season, I'm sure you'll find the things you need to pay attention to. Well, once you're done analyzing and reporting, write down the things that are most important to your employee. Your employees are the link between your customers and your brand. Find out what skills and training your employees need to be as productive as possible. Make sure your staff knows how to deal with customers on different platforms, like support chats, social media, and phone calls. If you spend time training your employees, you will be able to bring in more and more customers.  

2. Make Your Website Unique

Personalization — it is not about first/last name. It’s about relevant content. ~Dan Jak

Make landing pages that are both interesting and relaxing for the holidays. The landing pages are the first thing that can easily bring new or existing customers to your website. Make landing pages with a holiday theme for each holiday, like the one shown, whether it's Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, or Cyber Monday with Shop Pre Order Manager App.   Source: CEDCOMMERCE   Focus on your content once you're done with the design. The more personalized content is, the more likely it is that people will convert on their own. If you want more people to visit your site, you should start writing content 45 days before the holiday sales season. It will help you get 50% of the search engine traffic to do something. Make personalized content, which means that the user should feel like your content was made just for him. The next thing on the list is "make sure your site is mobile-friendly." Based on facts,   Source: Statista   Keep in mind that 61 percent of customers who visit a site that isn't mobile-friendly are more likely to buy from a competitor. Things to remember to increase mobile holiday sales

• Speed up pages and the site.
•  If you want to spend money on content marketing, all the images on your blog posts should be less than 70 kb.
• The content needs to be AMP-friendly.
• If your website isn't set up for mobile use, it won't do well in SEO.

 

What is AMP Optimized?

Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, is an open-source standard that Google supports. The goal of making this standard was to speed up how quickly web pages load on mobile devices. The goal of the AMP framework is “to provide a user first-format for web content”.  

3. Look at your Shopify site's holiday campaigns from previous years

For every operation audited, know the mission, the purpose, and the reason for being. ~Larry Sawyer

Aside from looking at your sales and income from the past year, it is very important to think about your customers. You need to do a thorough review of your holiday campaign from last year to find out how your customers' buying habits have changed. Now, this might not just mean the most popular products and trends on the market. It will also depend on the customer's age, where they live, what they like, what channels they use, and a lot of other things. So, it's important to look back at the holiday marketing campaign from the previous year. This audit will let you hear what your customers have to say.  

4. Use personalized gifts to keep customers coming back

Customer satisfaction is worthless; Customer loyalty is priceless. ~Jeffery Gitomer

Customers are more likely to stick with you if you give them gifts and other rewards for coming to your store often. Customer loyalty is the most important thing for a business to do if they want to connect with their customers on a more personal level and make them feel like they are important. Customers will come back to your store and shop again if you give them points, extra discounts, gift cards, and coupons. So, increasing the number of customers who stay with you. Top brands in many different industries have added loyalty systems to their regular marketing campaigns and have seen their results grow in a way that is encouraging. One example is, Juneberry Boutique, a popular store for clothes and accessories, has kept its customers' interest by starting a points and rewards program. Every time a customer shops, they earn points, which they can then use to get discounts and special deals.  

5. Respond quickly to changes in the market!

It’s not only in the fashion industry where trends change in a flicker of an eye.

Almost every business has to deal with a change in the way things are done. This could be in the products they sell or in the way they market themselves. When running a holiday marketing campaign or coming up with marketing ideas for this holiday season, it's important to look at the market trends. For instance, QueensGreenCanopy has taken the initiative to give trees to people who want to plant them but can't.  

6. Work with local vendors and stores

Fusion is about finding human-centric solutions beyond company walls. ~Deloitte

As the market changes, so do the way this business works. Creating fusions and coming up with something new gets more attention than doing the same things over and over again. So, teaming up with local vendors and/or working with other businesses in cross-industry partnerships can help you reach more customers and give them better service. So, it makes an ecosystem of new experiences, information about customers, and the whole digital platform, including marketing tools and social handles. Also, this ecosystem meets the needs of your customers as a whole. In fact, if you want to do well in the market in the fastest-growing economies in the world, you have to work with the local vendors.  

7. Email marketing is for life!

The email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches—at scale. ~David Newman

During the holiday season, email marketing is still the most important part of marketing. No matter what you're selling, an email is a useful tool that can help you make a lot of sales to the right people. Shop Pre Order Manager App offers email marketing. Marketing surveys have shown that people are more likely to keep offers and deals that come in the mail during holiday sales. So, during the holiday sales season, don't be afraid to share your branded content and ideas. Email campaigns are also useful for eCommerce site owners because they give them a great chance to get back sales that were lost or left in shopping carts.  

8. Give yourself time to plan your resources

Resources are hired to give results, not reasons. ~ Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

We all know how powerful content can be when it's done right to bring in and keep people's attention. As a matter of fact, different kinds of content draw in different kinds of people. So, plan a variety of content for your holiday marketing campaigns this season. Plan how you will use things like photos and videos to build your portfolio and show off the look of your business. If you sell products, you could plan a photoshoot campaign to collect photos and make your Pinterest storyboards. Or, you can make different videos about your products, customers, and their experiences and post them on video platforms like YouTube or other social handles like IGTV, Pinterest, etc.  

9. Make a plan for your social marketing and ads

Personalized marketing and advertising are not about sales. It’s about building a relationship with the customer. ~Julian Hillebrand

During the holidays, there are great deals and offers all over the streets and on social media sites. Online business ideas are also growing. So, planning your social media calendar and ad structure before the holiday season starts will not only keep you on track and help you reach your sales goals. Instead, it will help you connect with your influencers and colleagues, making sure that everyone working on holiday sales campaigns works at the same pace. Holiday and holiday season sales are also a great time to plan campaigns for launching new products with the help of CanCode.io. It's easy to get people excited about the surprise launch of your product among your best customers and people who have a lot of influence.  

10. Make up your own hashtags

You don’t need any special software, coding experience, or a college degree to create a hashtag. ~Sue B. Zimmerman Enterprise, LLC

Digital marketers use hashtags as a tried-and-true way to reach more people on social media sites. Using the right hashtags keeps you on-trend, whether you want to raise awareness or get people talking. So, while you're coming up with ideas for your social marketing plan, take the same amount of time to come up with your own hashtags as you do for the ones that are already popular. Using a recent event as an example, Mr. Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, started a campaign called "Vocal for Local" to get more people in India to buy from local businesses. Soon, everyone in the area used this slogan as a Hashtag to promote their products and the campaign. Soon, #VocalForLocal became popular on social media sites like Instagram and Twitter, which made people more aware and helped the local market grow. In the same way, many successful brands are also making and using hashtags to draw attention to their cause and campaign in a unique way. The #CostaFromHome hashtag campaign from Costa Coffee is also a good example of an inspiring hashtag campaign. We all know that most companies have switched to Work-From-Home trends since the pandemic hit the world. But professionals who were told to have their "before work coffee" felt a bit more relaxed. Costa decided to run a delivery campaign because they knew what their customers wanted. They used a hashtag to draw their customers' attention to the campaign.  

11. Know your customers and your possible audience

Awareness is the greatest agent for change and growth. ~Eckhart Tolle

The most important thing is to be aware. Tell your customers about your products, deals, contests, and other things. The most popular ways to talk to customers are through email marketing and social media channels. With email marketing, you can reach out to both new and current customers with your products and services. It's easy to make an email list of users who have become "At Risk" customers or to whom you want to send offers. You can try the Shop Pre Order Manager App by CanCode.io Getting the word out about your strategies is another important part of making people aware. Promotional activities aim for both the audience's awareness and their interest. So, you can use Social Media Promotions, and PPC Campaigns to show paid ads, and buzz to get the word out about your offers. Through social ads, you can connect directly with the people you want to reach. If you want to know how it should look, you can use the picture as a guide. With social media and other digital channels, you can make customers feel like they need to act quickly on upcoming deals. Adding videos to Facebook will help you get more traffic from search engines. Use Instagram and Pinterest to share infographics that are interesting and easy to remember. If you use social media platforms to advertise, make sure the ads have content that matches how your customers act or what they are interested in.  

12. Get the most out of your program to keep customers

You know if you start investing only 5% in customer retention programs you will be able to boost your sales by 23-95%.”

A program to keep customers coming back helps to raise the Customer Lifetime Value. You can add deals, loyalty programs, contests, games, and so on. Having contests and fun games will get more people involved. You can give the winners special prizes, like a gift that is just right for him or them. There have always been ways, like Lucky Draws, Spin the Wheel, etc., to get customers. Games and contests can be set up in many different ways. But it's important to keep your customer information up-to-date and base your plans on that. You can also combine your contests and games with your loyalty program. In the end, all customers want is to be able to trust you and get points or discounts for being loyal. Statistics show that before people buy anything online, they first look for coupons and discounts. And if they don't find a coupon or offer that works for them, they might go to one of your competitors.     As the image above shows, 135.9 million US online shoppers used digital coupons in 2018, and that number is expected to rise to 145.3 million in 2021.   Tip: 55.3 percent of the 145.3 million people who use digital coupons in 2021 will be adults. This means that Internet users who are 18 years old or older think that discounts and coupons are a very important part of their digital shopping decisions as a whole. If you give your customers gift ideas as part of your offer, it's like putting a cherry on top of a cake. Coupons and referral programs can also help get the word out about a product or service's brand. You can directly boost sales by giving out coupons and discounts. You might be surprised to learn that there isn't a single industry left that doesn't use coupon marketing to promote its deals and sales. Also, if you have a regular group of customers who only shop during the holidays, you can keep them by looking at how they shop.  

13. Make better suggestions based on what people left in their carts but didn't buy

There are many reasons why people leave their shopping carts. This could be because they want to compare prices or because they think they can get a better deal than you. Customers say that the most common reason they don't check out right away is that they can't find the item they want. You might wonder why they put an item in their cart if they didn't find what they were looking for. But you can't know for sure what your customers were thinking at the time. But when you're planning your holiday marketing campaign, you have a great chance to bring back the carts that were left behind and make up for lost sales by suggesting the best products for your customers. You can figure out what a customer likes by looking at his shopping habits and how he acts. Also, looking at what was in a cart that was left empty will help you tell customers about better products. If you sell things online and people leave their carts before they check out, it's time to make your holiday marketing the best holiday retail campaign. So that every small or medium-sized business wants to copy your holiday marketing ideas.  

14. Your brick-and-mortar store needs to go all out

People will no longer be afraid to go shopping now that Covid restrictions are getting less strict. Now, if you have a store in your town, it's important to build an online presence to let people know you're there and that you have deals for the holidays. You never know when another wave of Covid will hit and put your offline business out of business. So, just start advertising your shop right away on social media. Make sure Google maps knows about you. Last but not least, the best thing you could do would be to turn your physical store into an eCommerce store with the help of  CanCode.io's Shop Pre Order Manager App.  

15. Bring your campaign to a close

If you can tie the above points together, you already have a plan for your holiday marketing campaign. You just have to put everything together. Gather the customer information from last year for the holiday campaign in 2022. Now is the time to figure out what needs to change in your new holiday marketing campaign. Even if you are new to this business, try to keep track of and measure the successful holiday marketing campaign ideas of your competitors. To find a place for yourself in the world of marketers. Don't forget to include content marketing ideas, social media marketing strategies for the promotions, email marketing to directly target the audience, offers like free shipping, fun contests, buy-one-get-one, and to create urgency through landing pages this holiday season. You can even make different holiday marketing plans for each holiday sale day, like a marketing campaign for Thanksgiving. Give your users a complete gift guide, either on landing pages or in the form of an ebook.  

Conclusions

I've talked about 15 ways to help your holiday marketing campaign in this blog. This will help online stores make more money during the holiday season. By using these strategies, you can improve your chances of getting new customers by using CanCode.io's Shop Pre Order Manager App. Read and learn about the above marketing strategies, and then decide which one is best for your business. Lastly, I'd like to share a marketing slogan for the holiday season: “If you don’t believe, you won’t achieve.”