The end of the year is near and with the holiday season coming, it’s high time your business embraces some of its magic. Besides Black Friday, Christmas is the prime opportunity to maximise your sales with the right kind of holiday advertising and proper marketing strategies.
The role of digital marketing is crucial for boosting your sales. Statistics show that 60% of Christmas shoppers in the US prefer to buy Christmas gifts online. Most of the people who shop in a brick and mortar store will research the gift online before making a purchase.
According to the MasterCard Spending Pulse 2018 report, consumer spending during the last holiday season hit $850 billion, which is the strongest growth in the past six years.
To get your piece of the Christmas hundred-billion pie, here are a few trends you should leverage this season.
Get personal
Although customers crave personalised offers, using their first name in your campaigns or sending a birthday email is hardly what they have in mind. As a matter of fact, statistics show that only 8% would engage with a brand if addressed by their personal name, so you need to take the personalisation to the next level.
Customer expectations are much higher now, as 62% of consumers expect a personalised discount or an offer based on the product they purchased. Half of them expect this offer to arrive within the same day, while a bit more than a third anticipate it within an hour.
So if the peak of your email personalisation is using the first name in the subject line, it’s time you include personalised recommendations too.
You should also leverage the power of personalised advertising and retargeting, and give special discounts to your customers to encourage immediate conversion.
Apart from personalising your landing pages, newsletter content and discount offers to each one of your individual customers, make the most out of your branding efforts and ensure that your brand has a personality – a face and a voice people can relate to easily.
Join the festive mood
To increase the efficiency of a holiday campaign, a company should share its enthusiasm with its consumers. Well-established SEO agency Four Dots recommends including Christmas-inspired graphics or other specially designed elements to reflect the holiday spirit. This will create an atmosphere that enables users to identify with people in the company.
Make sure to highlight your Christmas promotions and update your site with special holiday categories, adding to the sense of urgency in your consumers and encouraging them to act immediately and not miss the seasonal offer.
Utilise the power of social media channels to promote your holiday-specific content and drive more traffic to your website. Explore the best trending topics and join them. By using contemporary social media hacks, such as influencer marketing, live streaming and stories, you’ll easily increase your sales and at the same time, turn your customers into your brand ambassadors.
Optimise for mobile
Your consumers will spend a lot of time browsing offers on their phones, so you need to ensure that all your content runs smoothly on mobile.
Data shows that 31% of all online sales in the US during the last holiday season came from smartphones and if your site and store and not mobile-friendly, you are missing out on some great opportunities.
Considering the time needed to optimise your content, it may not be possible to finish it all for this season, but you can move a step in that direction, and still get some great results.
Be local
Your content not only needs to be optimised for mobile, but it also needs to be easy to find in search engine result pages, so you’ll need to do some SEO.
And if your business is geo-oriented, you need high rankings in local searches too, which means doing a local SEO too.
Apart from choosing and using the right keywords in your content and your webpage elements, and adding high-quality links that are relevant and credible, you should add an extra touch to boost your local visibility.
Claiming Google My Business Page is essential for local positioning, as well as listing your business in other relevant directories. Local reviews can increase your rankings too.
As statistics show that 46% of all Google searches are local, neglecting this strategy can have negative impacts on your bottom line.
Optimise for speed
No matter what type of industry you’re in, you need to optimise your website and your landing pages for the holiday season.
And by this, we don’t only mean optimising the content for search engines, which is of crucial importance, but also optimising your pages for speed and performance, to boost the experience of your site visitors.
With a one-second increase in loading time, the bounce rate goes sky high – a 1-second delay reduces page views for 11% and decreases the satisfaction of the viewers for whooping 16%. This can lead to enormous losses – if a shop generates $100k, a single second delay can cost $2.5 billion in missed revenue, on an annual basis.
Here are a few easy tips on how to increase the speed of your webpages:
- Use a content delivery network (CDN),
- Use a fast theme,
- Compress your images,
- Switch from slider images to a single hero layout on your pages,
- Cut on pop-ups on your pages,
- Link your videos instead of uploading them to your website.
Remember, more than 53% of your visitors will leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, so try not to tempt them.
This holiday season is your great opportunity, so follow the trends above to make it unforgettable, both for your customers and your business.
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About The Author
Peter Minkoff is a men’s lifestyle writer at The Beard Mag and High Street Gent magazine from UK and AU. Beside writing he worked as a grooming consultant for many fashion events around AU.
Follow Peter on Twitter for more tips.