It’s less than 100 days until Christmas, and that means one thing – the holiday shopping season has begun. And as we get closer to the peak days, e-commerce businesses and their marketing teams will be rolling out their campaigns to maximize sales during this lucrative season.

It’s a festive time not just for sales but also for customers. Online shoppers start to feel merry and want to purchase items for themselves and gifts for their loved ones. This simple user behavior is why e-commerce businesses have to up their marketing game each year to capture as many holiday sales as possible.

So, let’s prepare for a jolly, happy holiday season keeping these marketing tips in mind when scheduling and planning the holiday calendar.

1. Use Holiday Related Keywords

It’s no secret that keywords are an integral part of any SEO marketing strategy, and when your website ranks high on search engines, you get more traffic. More traffic means more potential leads. Therefore, paying attention to the type of keywords that were trending last season will indicate what content and campaigns you must run to capture holiday shoppers and get more traffic to your site. Analyze your digital sales and data during the holiday period from the previous year and make notes of the seasonal keywords that drove your conversions.

2. Check for Trends and Patterns

Knowing and anticipating the next big trend for the holidays will also help your e-commerce marketing strategy. For example, if unicorn paraphernalia is the hottest gifting item for the holiday season – then creating content and offering unicorn-themed items from your e-commerce store will drive more traffic and hopefully more sales. Analyze buying patterns and forecast colors, themes, and trends, so that they can inspire your holiday campaigns. Creating engaging content before the holiday rush will help your brand get a jump on the competition, so focus your efforts on finding the big trends of the holiday season well in advance.

3. Send Holiday Emailers

Reward your existing customers by offering them a coupon code that’s exclusive to subscribers of your newsletter. Emailers are an effective way to reach paying customers who know your brand. Along with coupon codes, use this opportunity to introduce them to the new holiday collections, upcoming holiday sales, or any other marketing campaign that they can look forward to.

Catchy, keyword-dense subject lines can lead to higher open rates, so ensure your marketing and content teams work on the best copy to showcase all the new holiday products your e-commerce site has to offer.

4. Create Buzz

When running your new holiday campaigns and showcasing your products, it’s important to branch out your marketing efforts on all platforms to get maximum exposure. There are many ways you can generate buzz around your campaigns; here are a few ideas:

• Use social media to promote exclusive online deals, such as free shipping or buy-one-get-one offers.
• Refresh your website with festive/holiday images, fonts, headers, etc.
• Create festive branding for the season – for example, incorporating a Christmas tree in your logo or giving your packaging a seasonal change.
• Host holiday-specific contests for your subscribers
• Create more emotionally moving video content for your landing pages and social media

5. Find Gifting Collections

The holiday season is a time of giving and gifting, which means offering your customers gifting solutions that center around product collections from your e-shop. Group your gifting collections by users or by themes, keeping user intent and keyword research in mind. For example, if Thanksgiving gifts for dad is a ranking keyword phrase, then it’s beneficial to have gift hampers or a whole page with curated gifts for fathers. Promote these collections, using high-quality images or videos on landing pages to bring focus to these campaigns.

6. Top Selling Items

Showcase your top-selling items by creating a special campaign around it so that it has a holiday twist – this is essential for e-commerce sites that have few or one main product. For example, if you’re a watch company, consider shooting Christmasy photographs using the watch or, alternatively, ask influencers to create videos that promote the watch as a great Christmas gift option.

Creating a specific campaign that shows your top-selling product in a new holiday light will entice customers and help you create content that can be used for SEO purposes to rank your product during the festive season.

7. Optimize for Mobile

Whether you have an app or not, your brand’s website must be optimized for mobile. Google already announced their mobile-first algorithms favor mobile content and give mobile-optimized sites a ranking boost.

According to Smimicart.com, m-commerce will make up 53.9% of all e-commerce sales. This statistic indicates that smartphones are being used to make online searches and purchases directly from mobile e-commerce sites. Therefore, optimizing your brand and holiday marketing campaigns for mobile will benefit your sales and give your campaigns the chance to reap more mobile-generated rewards.

8. Create Holiday Videos

The rise in popularity of Youtube, TikTok, and Instagram reels indicates that videos are an effective and engaging way users want to receive their content and should not be ignored. Video marketing is the biggest trend in the marketing world currently, and it’s here to stay.

According to Wyzowl.com, after watching a brand’s video, 84% of people say they are convinced to buy a product or avail of a service. This is one of the biggest benefits of video marketing, and it allows users to get a better idea of your brand and your products/services. Create holiday-centric video content such as testimonial videos, influence haul videos, product videos, etc.

9. Get Reviews

Nine out of ten consumers say they read reviews before making their purchasing decisions, and 79% of users say they trust online reviews (Oberlo), which means that getting authentic reviews for your brand is essential.

Use the holiday traffic to gain these reviews by offering them free shipping or a discount in exchange for a review. Creating more reviews for regular and seasonal products will encourage tentative buyers and help conversion rates.

10. Revise Goals

To get the most from your holiday shoppers, it’s wise to revisit your key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics so that you can plan your marketing strategy and track its success. You must monitor new visitor behavior and find out what drives them to make purchases for the future. Keeping your holiday-shopper glasses on, revisit your goals, and adjust them accordingly. Here are some examples of metrics you can monitor:

1. Traffic sources – where are your new users finding you? Is it through emailers, social media, adverts etc.?
2. Total revenue – what are your targets for the season, and find ways to achieve them.
3. Abandonment rates – learn what attracts or distracts your new users.

11. Create Holiday Sales and Deals

Buying gifts for friends and family can be a costly affair, which is why users love a great deal or sale. Entice your cost-conservative customers by offering them flash sales, special holiday discounts, or shopping deals such as Buy 1 Get 1 Free. These budget-friendly shopping ideas can persuade a tentative customers to buy all their gifts from your ecommerce store.

Promote your sales and deals on all channels like social media, print ads, mobile marketing, push notifications, emailers, etc. Sales and deals are great marketing elements that should be included in your holiday calendar.

12. Monitor and Save

The holiday season brings with it an inflow of revenue, web traffic, conversions, and opportunities to interact with your clients through your marketing efforts. Therefore, every action should be monitored and saved for future reference.

Replicating this system for the next holiday sales period will save you time on doing the leg work or research when you know the successful marketing strategy elements. Additionally, campaigns, videos, sales deals, prints ads, etc., that did not do well should be marked and reviewed to be improved or eliminated from your marketing calendar for the next year.

13. Prepare Holiday Budget

When allocating the yearly budget for your marketing department, it’s advisable to dedicate a part of the budget specifically for the most profitable season, in this case, the holiday months between September to December.

Additionally, identify where to spend the money – Which elements from the previous year’s marketing strategy were most fruitful?

Spend the budget on those. For example, if Christmas videos were a huge sales draw, then put more money into that this year. Allocating the budget to the key players within your marketing strategy will ensure that your money is well spent.

14. Give Peak Promotions

It’s essential to target the holidays or sales days that bring the most revenue for your particular product and company – laser focus on the one or two that resonate with your brand and are most profitable.

Once identified, create promotions around a peak day/events, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Boxing Day. Don’t regret missing out on these peak days; mark them in advance and roll out targeted promotions to let your clients and customers know that you’ve got something special planned for those days/holidays.

15. Site Maintenance

There is nothing worse than having a phenomenal marketing strategy that generates excellent traffic, and your site goes down, or the loading speed is too slow, or your users get the dreaded ‘page not found error. Technical aspects like these can sink a marketing ship and lose out on potential sales and clients.

Once your campaigns start to bring in the visitors, ensure that your e-commerce site is running at optimal. Prepare in advance for the higher numbers by doing site maintenance and upgrade or fine-tune and roadblocks that could arise. Have your developers ready for any issues so that your site is running well and can meet all the demands of the holiday shopper crowd.

16. Holiday SEO

During the holiday season, it’s easy to be caught up in marketing campaigns and forget about SEO. However, re-aligning your SEO goals to fit with the holiday shopper crowd is a good idea because you want your website to turn up as a result of any holiday searches.

SEO results don’t happen overnight, so preparing for them months in advance will give you a better chance of ending up on SERPs during the festive season. Create a holiday-specific keyword list, curate holiday content and grab link-building opportunities – these are some ways in which you can start preparing your SEO for the holiday rush.

And finally, learn as you go!

Whether you’re an established business with years of experience under your belt or a small business that’s just getting started – each holiday season is a period of learning. Client behaviors can change, trends are flaky, and world events can put a spanner in even the most well-oiled marketing strategy. That’s why it’s crucial to learn and adjust as you go.

Having a holiday marketing strategy will give you the best opportunity to capture the sales and clients you seek; however, if something isn’t working, then find ways to pivot problem solve. Hiring a dedicated team or marketing agency is also a great way to achieve all your holiday sales targets. Either way, we hope the tips in this article gave you insight into some key pointers for the holiday season. Good luck grabbing all those happy shoppers!

Author Bio:-Brice Decker Is a Growth marketer and SEO Consultant for Haitna, a leading SEO agency based in Austin, TX. He has helped companies to increase their organic SEO traffic by 10X and cut their lead acquisition rate in half.