17 Holiday Marketing Ideas for eCommerce in 2021

Home eCommerce 17 Holiday Marketing Ideas for eCommerce in 2021

September 25, 2021 September 25, 2021 / By Maria Ilyas

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner – the time of year when people are running high on dopamine and are in the mood to shell out their money and buy stuff. If you’re an eCommerce business, it’s high time to whip up some holiday marketing ideas and roll out a killer campaign that gets your sales through the roof.

Are You Prepared for the Holiday Rush?

While your audience is getting ready to spend copious amounts of money on holiday shopping, how well prepared are you to get their attention and get a good piece of the trillion-dollar holiday pie?

Yes, holiday sales actually surpassed the trillion-dollar mark last year!

And what’s more interesting is that 22% of Americans believe that holiday shopping will leave them in debt.

This means you need to go all out with your holiday marketing ideas and techniques and make sure you bring the right offer in front of the right people at the right time.

In this post, we’ll give you some valuable holiday marketing ideas that will help you capture your prospects’ attention and sell like crazy in 2020.

17 Holiday Marketing Ideas that Will Boost Your Sales

Think outside the box this holiday season and do something different – something that instantly gets people’s attention and makes them remember you.

#1 Offer Them a Mystery Box

When it comes to creating the right offer, slashing your prices down isn’t the only option. Many businesses can’t afford to reduce their prices if they are already offering good value.

In addition to that, shoppers aren’t just looking for discounts during the holiday season but they’re also looking for good value.

People love getting surprises in their mail. Offer them a mystery box as a free gift if they purchase some products from you or as a giveaway for some other campaign like a social media contest.

Mystery boxes are also a great way to clear out store inventory.

#2 Create A Bundle

Bundle different products together to create a gift set that people can get for themselves and gift to others. With a bundle, you can clear out store inventory, sell more stuff, and offer greater value to customers.

#3 Give Discounts on Prepaid or Subscription Plans

Black Friday and Cyber Monday is an excellent time to introduce prepaid plans like monthly subscriptions if you haven’t done so already. This works best for products that run out after some time like ingestible products or cosmetics.

Use a plugin like Subscription Add-on for WooCommerce that adds an optional subscription checkbox and also lets you offer discounts on subscriptions.

Check out this post on how to make your products subscribable.

#4 Offer a Free Gift

Free gifts are always exciting for customers. Make sure the perceived value of the gift is higher than the item purchased so the customer feels like they are getting a good value. It’s also a great way to clear out inventory.

#5 Instill FOMO and Scarcity with An End Date

Make sure you instill scarcity and FOMO with an end date for your promotion.

Display a counter on your site and on all landing pages to really get the customer to buy from you before the sale ends.

#6 Send More Text Emails as Opposed to Picture Emails

To make sure your emails get in your customers’ inboxes and avoid landing in the spam folder, send them text emails as opposed to picture emails.

They’re easy to send too!

#7 Test Your Email Subject Lines One Month Before the Holiday

Subject lines are really huge when it comes to your email open rate. While you should start sending emails at least a week before the holiday, you should start testing your subject lines one month before the holiday so you know what works and what doesn’t.

A lot of the advice you’ll hear about subject lines is that you shouldn’t include specifics related to your offer in the subject line. While that is true in most cases, it really depends.

For example, if you’re offering 90% off, it should be in your subject line because it alone is enough to make people buy. But if you’re offering 10% off, you’ll probably do better by not putting it in the subject line so that people open the email and read what’s in it.

Think through the process and keep testing to find what works and what doesn’t.

#8 Warm Up Your Audience on Facebook

Roll out videos, blogs, and other meaningful content to build an audience on Facebook. Focus on customer engagement and branding before the holiday season begins.

And when it’s time for you to roll out your promotions and run ads on Facebook, target the audience you’ve created already instead of targeting people who may have never heard of you. This way, you’ll greatly increase your ROI.

Connect with experts at CODUP for top-notch eCommerce website development services.

#9 The Leaked Email Technique

Polysleep, a mattress brand in Canada, played a trick a week before their actual holiday promotion started and purposefully leaked an email about their upcoming promotion and the voucher code.

Their viral email made people feel ‘exclusive’ thinking they had found something they shouldn’t have.

As a result of this clever marketing tactic, Polysleep was selling a phenomenal amount of products even before their promotion started.

#10 Hammer Away with Emails

The number of emails you should send = the number of excuses you can come up with to send emails to your customers.

So, you should basically start sending emails before the promotion, telling your customers in advance about your upcoming offers. And then there should be one in the end.

But then you need to fill in the gaps in the middle by finding as many excuses as you can to send an email and remind them about the offer.

#11 Upsell and Cross-Sell Post Purchase

The perfect time to upsell and cross-sell to increase the average order value is right after the customer has placed an order. Give them an offer to buy a related product or get more of what they have purchased at a discounted price..

Make it easy for customers to get those upsell offers by allowing them to place the order with one click without the need to enter any information. The quicker it is, the higher the conversion.

Also, add a timer on the post-purchase upsell offer page so customers know that they’re only getting the offer for a limited time.

#12 Follow Up with Your Customers with Meaningful Content

A lot of people will tell you that the customers who buy from them on Black Friday aren’t their long-term or high-value customers who keep returning afterward.

That’s because people forget those customers after they have availed the offer.

To increase customer retention and get long-term benefits from your Black Friday sale, keep in touch with those customers and follow up with them with meaningful content.

Create videos and blogs and send them emails periodically to share value with them.

#13 Do Different Campaigns for Prospects and Returning Customers

The kind of audience you target determines how successful your marketing campaigns will be. You should run different campaigns and give different offers to prospects who have never purchased from you before or return customers who have already gained your trust.

You can also do a referral program with your existing customers to cut down on customer acquisition costs and grow your customer base.

Use a referral plugin like Referral System for WooCommerce to create a referral program.

#14 Offer an Exclusive Discount to Existing Customers to Make Them Feel Special

Make your existing customers feel special by offering them an exclusive discount.

People like to be part of clubs and groups and so, if you tell them the discount is exclusive to them because they’re an existing customer, they’ll feel special and will want to buy from you.

#15 Target the Right Customers on Facebook

When running ads on Facebook, target the people who have already engaged with your posts. These people will be more likely to buy – increasing your add-to-carts and conversion rates.

#16 Include a Gift List Option on Your Site

The Holiday season is basically a gift-buying season. When everyone is buying gifts for others, having a gift list option on your store will help increase your traffic for little cost.

With a gift list option, customers can save their favorite products in their gift list and share it with friends and family to make their job of buying gifts easier.

#17 Optimize Your Buying Experience on Desktop and Mobile

Statistics show that more and more people have started buying on mobile devices, which means you need to optimize the buying experience for both desktop and mobile.

While reviewing the design, think through the buying process and make sure it’s easy, intuitive, and optimized. Use a mobile-first strategy when creating your store design.

These holiday marketing ideas will hopefully help you sell like hotcakes this year too.

Remember it’s all about bringing the right offer to the right people at the right time. The techniques above will help you nail that basic strategy of holiday marketing.

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Maria Ilyas

A writer by profession, Maria Ilyas is an eCommerce and digital marketing enthusiast and is always digging into the latest marketing trends, best practices, and growth strategies.

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