If you have anything to do with retail, you’ll be busy making preparations for the Christmas season – the biggest shopping time of the year. If your social media and digital marketing campaigns haven’t already swung into action, here are 5 tips you may want to act on immediately to help you squeeze everything you can out of the festive period:
- Learn from last year. It’s a great idea to get out last year’s data to see which campaigns, methods and strategies worked, and which didn’t. If something obviously boosted engagement, clicks and spend, try to find out why so that you can repeat your success. If something didn’t work, don’t waste time and resources pursuing it in the unfounded hope that it will prove successful this time.
- Run time-limited deals. Everyone has Christmas shopping to do at this time of year, which means that we’re thinking about shopping a lot of the time. You should capitalise on these opportunities by running time-limited special offers and sales, teamed with urgent calls to action, to make customers feel they will miss out on a great price if they don’t buy now.
- Create content that helps your customers. At this time of year, it’s a good idea to provide your customers with gift ideas and shopping tips, as well as highlighting your best products and how to use them. You can update your blog (great for SEO too) regularly, run email campaigns containing interactive games to help customers find their perfect gifts and create interesting and shareable video content to promote your products. All of this should be seen as offering value to the customer, making their lives easier rather than a big sales push.
- Take a look at what your competitors are doing. While it’s crucial to offer your customers something different in order to stand out from the crowd, this doesn’t mean you can’t learn from the success stories of other brands. What is it about a particular campaign that makes it successful? Why do customers react to, engage with and share a particular message? If you can find the key ingredient to an amazing campaign, you can use this to inform your own strategic and creative work over Christmas.
- Connect with your customers to wish them a Happy Christmas. As much as the festive period is about winning new customers and boosting sales, it’s just as important to make long-standing loyal customers feel valued. Sending a personalised email or an exclusive discount code along with a heartfelt message can help to boost loyalty and stand you in good stead for the new year.
Last of all, don’t forget to align all of your branding with the Christmas season. Even just a slight dusting of snow on your logo will get customers into the festive spirit, and encourage them to think about shopping.
