In marketing and especially in eCommerce, planning is key to every success. Without careful planning, you’ll likely get a bad ROI, annoy a bunch of customers and be very stressed. When you’re tasked with creating Christmas and festive holiday marketing plans, it’s best to get them planned in early. However, if you’re running a bit behind, then here are some quick campaigns you can implement today.

Festive Holiday Marketing Campaigns

1. Update Your Imagery.

   The brain can process images much faster than text. Updating your imagery on your site, social media and other marketing channels will instantly make your marketing campaign become more Christmas. Here are some images that you could update to create a consistent holiday theme:

   • Hero Images.Your hero images are one the first things people notice when they land on your home page. By updating this to be more holiday-friendly, you’re letting the customer know that your brand celebrates it and it’s relevant.
   • Lifestyle Images.Lifestyle images in eCommerce help portray your products or services in a relatable way to the customer. By updating these images with a more seasonal or holiday themed look, you’ll create more relatable and desirable imagery.
   • Logo.Updating your logo to include a festive motif is a nod towards Christmas branding. Try adding a Santa’s hat or have mounds of snow on some of the lettering. Be careful not to do too much with the logo, as you don’t want it to become unrecognisable.
   • Social BannersYour social banners and profile pictures could be updated to include a bit of Holiday branding. This is especially effective if your customers engage with you mainly on social media.

   It’s important to remember the art of subtlety, especially in imagery. Updating your images doesn’t mean they have to be obviously festive. Making them natural and subtle is more convincing than over-doing the Christmas decorations.

2. Holiday Promotions.

   Creating holiday promotions can help win over potential customers. Especially at the time of year when consumers are trying to save money as much as possible. In our guide to Black Friday & Cyber Monday we discussed other promotions you can run without offering massive discounts.

   A lot of eCommerce businesses are in a race to offer the lowest price possible. However, promotions that aren’t inherently discount based often perform as well as.

   Implementing proposition drivers such as free shipping and extended return periods can often drive conversions better than discount codes. Utilising a social conscious campaign, where the brand gives a donation of their profits over a set period of time to a charity, can work well too. This is especially effective during Christmas when the message of giving back and charity is strong. While this may not inherently boost your conversions, it does promote brand awareness and increase customer loyalty.

3. Optimise Your Content.

   Of course if you’re writing from an SEO perspective, you’ll want to create evergreen content on your key landing pages. However, content marketing isn’t about just using your content for one stream of revenue. It’s about optimising it for SEO, email marketing, social media and any other marketing channels you might be using. By optimising your content for the festive season, you can increase your conversions and help establish your brand in the Christmas market.

   By positioning your product as “the perfect holiday gift” you’re changing the angle at which your product should be viewed. Optimising product descriptions around the festive period to make it more appealing as a gift, will increase your conversions. It will also instil a sense of FOMO for the gift giver.

4. Optimise Your Ads.

   As with any marketing campaign idea, consistency will help improve the ROI. That means if you’re changing the content on your organic channels, then you should be doing the same with your paid channels. By updating your Facebook ads and promoting your business through a festive lens, you’ll increase engagement, loyalty and brand awareness.

   There will be certain items in your inventory that will sell better at Christmas time. Use your Google Analytics to work out the best selling products from previous years and increase the spend on your advertising for these. Promoting gift cards to friends of fans on social media will help engage and promote your brand.

5. Offer and Promote Gift Cards.

   Gift cards are a great gift if you have no idea what to buy someone. Most online stores will offer gift cards, but it’s important that they promote it during the holiday season. Make sure you update the graphic on the gift card product to make it more festive. If your gift cards are digital, update the email too.

   Setting up gift cards in Shopify is relatively easy and if you haven’t done it yet, here’s a handy guide.

6. Update Delivery Options.

   There’s nothing more annoying when you’re doing some last minute shopping, getting to the checkout to find it won’t be delivered until after Christmas. Have a countdown on your site so that users know they will get their delivery before Christmas, before having to reach the checkout. This is called upstream marketing. It allows the users to see the benefits of purchasing with you at the beginning of the buying process.

   You can use the same messaging about your delivery throughout your other engagement channels too. Use a program like Sendtric to generate a real-time countdown gif. This gif can then be embedded into an email marketing flow (such as abandoned cart) to create a sense of urgency. Because it’s a gif, it’s compatible with most email clients.

7. Email Marketing.

   Updating your email marketing flows to be inline with the festive branding will help keep a consistent brand message. Update some of your up-sell email content to be more gift orientated during the festive period. If this is your first time optimising this content then consider A/B split testing the campaigns to see which ones work best.

   Send out an email that has a genuine, heart-felt Christmas message with no sales agenda. It’s doubtful you’ll get any sales directly attributed to it, but it will help build up your brand awareness, loyalty and customer trust.

8. Free Gift.

   Everybody loves a freebie, especially around Christmas. You could offer out a free gift with every purchase on the run up to Christmas. Depending on your brand and your products, the gift will differ, but proposition the marketing around it being a gift for the buyer.

   You could use the free gift as an incentive or you could just include it, with a note, in the delivery package. This is bound to increase the amount of UGC (user generated content) and increase brand awareness and over time, conversion values.

9. Gift Wrapping.

   Gift wrapping makes everyones lives a little bit easier during the Christmas period. If you can, offer gift wrapping as a service but don’t make it too expensive. You could offer free gift wrapping if you spend a certain amount. This should help increase your average order value along with other conversion values.

10. Extra for Loyalty.

    It’s the season of giving, so why not give back to your loyal customers? If you have a loyalty program, then offer extra or double points on purchases on the run up to Christmas. This should increase your conversion values across the board. If you promote this campaign, you may grow some extra subscribers to the loyalty programs.

Hopefully you’ve managed to get some last minute holiday marketing ideas for your eCommerce store. The key to any successful marketing campaign is to plan it properly. If you need help pulling together strategies or want some consultation on a marketing plan, then get in touch.