This week marks the start of the busy holiday season, which is extremely busy for retail stores and small businesses nationwide.
If your business falls into one of those categories, it’s safe to say you’re either executing your holiday shopping season plan or are scrambling around trying to throw together a last-minute strategy. If you are doing the latter option, we at GreenMellen got you covered with our list of last-minute digital marketing tips for the opening holiday weekend.
Email Marketing Tips
If you rely on email marketing to get the word out about your holiday sales and promotions, we applaud you for taking advantage of the most direct digital channel to your customers. Keep these tips in mind with your holiday emails:
- Proofread all of your emails; not just for grammar, but to make sure you’re expressing the correct message. After you reread it, proof it again and even have someone else review it before sending it.
- Test each of the links within your emails so the customer experience is everything you expect it to be.
- Check your emails’ design on multiple devices. People are shopping on their tablet and mobile devices more and more, so it’s imperative to give the same experience across all devices.
Also, since people’s inboxes are getting bombarded with emails for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, your emails could easily get lost in the crowd. For this reason, plan to send multiple emails leading up to the day of the sales. This is how you put your sales on the top of your audience’s mind and capture the last-minute shoppers’ attention.
Digital Campaigns
Nowadays, digital marketing is going to be the best way to get the word out about your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. Whether your strategy includes social media, paid advertising or both, here are the best last-minute practices for your holiday sales:
- Tease your social media followers about an exciting secret promotion for Cyber Monday. Create fun posts to engage your audience and even give away free credit to your business if they are the first person to take advantage of this promotion.
- Host a contest on your social pages. Have your followers be interactive with your brand and post a contest on one or all of your social media accounts. For example, on your Instagram account you could post a photo, have people “regram” the photo and tag your profile in it. Select a winner after the contest closes and give away a free product or credit to your store. The sky is the limit with these contests, so get creative!
- Set up competitive bidding for your paid ads. Since this time of year will be very competitive for your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, it’s best to use either automated business algorithms or manual thresholds. This allows your ads to convert and drive revenue rather than drive awareness (just remember to change this back to “normal” after the shopping season).
Website Tweaks for the Holidays
Now that you’ve spent all of this time driving people to your website to learn more about your business and/or purchase your products/services, you must make sure your website not only matches your message, but can handle your bandwidth of visitors. Some tips to keep in mind:
- To ensure your website speed can accommodate high traffic, compress and resize your images so browsers don’t have to focus on loading an image.
- Tweak your content to be most “seasonal” and holiday-themed.
- Try to display content that gives you credibility and/or proves you’re a safe business to shop with. This may be the first time a customer is hearing about your business, so it helps to build trust with them from the beginning.
- Play around with pop ups on your website. Whether they appear when someone is about to leave your site, scrolling through your pages or when they first enter, a pop up is an awesome way to meet your customers’ expectations and increase conversions.
It’s never too late to get new customers during the first week of the holiday shopping season! Implement some of these strategies into your marketing mix and have the happiest holiday season ever!
To learn more about holiday marketing strategies, contact GreenMellen Media today!
