How to Nail Your Marketing Strategy: Christmas & New Year Edition

We’ve compiled the most effective marketing techniques for Christmas and New Year, to help you stand out this festive season. 

If you manage or market an enterprise-level brand, it’s likely you’ve experienced the huge rush in sales during the Christmas and New Year season, and understand that it’s the most profitable time of year … but it can also be the most challenging. 

The good news is, the opportunity for a boost in e-commerce sales is increasing: US shoppers are expected to spend an average of around $790 on Christmas gifts in 2019. And adopting the proven strategies we’re sharing in this article will help you prepare for success, without overwhelm or stress.

How can you stand out? 

The answer is to aim for memorable, NOT generic. Engage and excite your customers. Get ahead with e-commerce technologies such as Augmented Reality, encourage UGC, and personalize your on-site search. 

Being forgettable is often the biggest failure for companies. But it’s something we can actively change.

Here’s our rundown of the best approaches for creating your memorable Christmas and New Year 2019 marketing strategy … 

1. Always personalize

Personalization is more important than ever. 76% of consumers expect companies to understand their individual needs, so it’s vital to offer personalized customer experiences at Christmas and New Year. 

Check out our lowdown on the most useful apps and technologies you can use to offer a more personalized customer experience to help boost your sales.

2. Reconsider your audience

You might be missing out on potential revenue by not targeting a broader customer base. Christmas and New Year is a good time to consider who might be looking for certain products around the world, and then offering them your brilliant products.

Targeting other countries in your Christmas marketing campaigns can gain you more customers as the new year approaches. Stay tuned for our upcoming ebook on festive global marketing.

3. Enhance on-site search

It’s critical that your on-site search is operating with flow all year round, but this is even more important as you approach the Christmas holiday season. 

Consider promoting Christmas gift sets directly in the search bar as part of your festive marketing campaigns, and pay attention to what shoppers are searching for. Optimizing your site’s search functionality is a simple process with Klevu’s smart search features.

Narrow products down based on their reviews. Klevu uses a custom keyword list to train our algorithm to learn the unique elements relating to your store and its products. So when a shopper wants to look for a “great Christmas gift for mom”, the results they see will be smart, tailored, and based on the reviews of actual customers.

Optimize your no results. Turn your “no results” pages into something meaningful — you could update content on your “no results” page to feature holiday gift guides.

Get creative with holiday banners. Klevu lets you feature banners right in the search bar, making it easier than ever present your customers with festive promotions, deals and messages that are relevant.

4. Get Speedy

Your platform needs to be able to handle the rush in web traffic during big sale days, with load speed that’s quick enough to keep shoppers engaged. Can you imagine your site crashing and your business losing hundreds of sales? With the help of reliable third party apps, quick-loading and seamless shopping experiences on desktop and mobile can be optimized. We suggest Pingdom’s test for keeping an eye on site speed.

5. Customize your website

Consider changing your site’s design as the countdown to Christmas begins, encouraging customers to visit the site regularly to see the difference. Digital agencies can support you with this, including acidgreen which offers premium graphic design, website development and marketing services. Check out our other partners here and see their high-quality work in action.

6. Create a timeline

No e-commerce store ever suffered from being over prepared. By planning ahead and identifying the best times to send out marketing emails or to promote specific products, your campaigns will remain consistent and your ideal shoppers will find you more easily.

This approach isn’t just for the festive season. Here’s our take on the ideal timelines and dates to remember throughout the year, around the globe. 

7. Identify the focus

As a team, set goals for the holiday period and decide what you’ll be focusing on. Will you be offering discounts, promoting a particular range, or introducing a re-brand? 

You might be tempted to try all of these things at once, and we don’t blame you. But focusing on one or two new things will mean you can dedicate the necessary time and resources to them. This approach will also give you a much clearer line of sight when you go back and analyze what was successful on big sale days. 

8. Learn from others

Every year, the run-up to Christmas sees people discussing their favorite adverts and predicting what the big brands will pull out of the bag. Think of Coca-Cola’s classic Christmas adverts, or the Heathrow Bears campaign in recent years. These are all clever, sentimental and heart-warming. 

Here are a few of the campaigns from last year that we found most impressive.

For the Elton John fans… John Lewis’ The Boy and The Piano.

Apple’s ‘Share Your Gifts’ holiday campaign (which received nearly 24,000,000 views!)

Take on board our advice and learn from expert brands and both your festive marketing strategy — and your sales — will benefit hugely. Get stuck in, and enjoy! 

Still feeling overwhelmed? Book a demo here and we’ll happily talk through how we can help with your on-site search.