5 holiday marketing tips for retailers

As the season approaches, retailers of all shapes and sizes are in full swing preparations for the holidays. Tis the season to go from red to black!

Top 3 Holiday Offer Campaigns

1. Free express shipping
2. Buy more, save more
3. Post-holiday sale

5 holiday marketing Tips for retailers

This holiday quick guide is a simple checklist for retailers as final preparations for holiday campaigns are made.

• Be prepared for mobilized window-shoppers - Many retailers fear showrooming--a term that describers shoppers who visit brick-and-mortar retailers, while comparative shop online via their mobile devices.  Retailers need to embrace a mobile-digital strategy. Ensure that your site is mobile friendly, and fix any navigation and product search issues for mobile devices. Remember, a poor mobile experience will only drive mobile-empowered visitors away. Additionally consider special mobile coupons, sales, incentives and email captures for holiday loyalty programs. Discounts drive in-store purchases, and mobile shoppers can be targeted with such offers. Awareness is key.
• Link your advertising with your incentive campaigns - If you plan to offer deals or a loyalty program, ensure that your PPC advertising and re-marketing campaigns have been updated to include the offers. Also, ensure you create mobile specific advertisements that drive incentives for in-store or online/in-store purchases. Don't just up budgets on advertising for the holiday season. Ensure that you have specialized holiday offers, content and engagement programs built into your marketing campaigns during the season. For example, if your offer includes free shipping, ensure that your ads are updated to include this. Consider using in-store QR codes to drive special deals for online loyalty buys. This can include Adwords product ads. Engage mobile shoppers with Adwords product listing ads for mobile.
• Prepare viral & engagement content to engage social-connected users - Social media is a powerful engagement tool, but don't make offers through social media. Instead drive brand visibility, interest and engagement with great content. Plan a content strategy that has entertainment value or is generally helpful to shoppers. Consider a series of holiday videos, carefully timed throughout the season. Space sales-y material and offers between more authentic content to ensure that users don't abandon your brand.
• Be proactive with communications - Listen and respond to both positive and negative brand mentions with a proactive social media plan. Prepare your marketing team and customer service team to build engagement through social media. Deal with problems quickly as they arise, and work extra hard to be helpful as customers navigate your online and offline brand touch-points.
• Use marketing automation to nurture buyers - Marketing automation solutions can be powerful tools during the holiday season. Rather than blasting all your existing shoppers with the same, generic message, try customizing your approach based on specific buyer personas, behaviors and interest.  Build out optimized workflows and email offers to correspond to online and in-store campaigns. Create holiday-specific campaigns within your marketing automation system and create tracking URLs to measure the ROI from ads, emails, landing pages, social media posts and other online offers.

Also consider these 5 tips for designing a better eCommerce website.