The time to start creating promotional strategies for the holiday season is NOW! DO NOT wait until the end of October to start promoting as it will be too late!
You SHOULD NOT wait until November to start promoting! The earlier you get started, the better it is for your customer base. Your store could have a major competitive advantage over others if you start promoting certain products or specials before your competitors do.
This is the time to start offering the best deals! Let’s look at some promotional strategies that will help you get ready!
Engaging Customers with Promotional Strategies
Every promotion should be something enticing!
Any promotional material that you use will be useless if you do not give your customers a way for them to partake of what you are offering to them! Whether you are promoting something using a graphical post on social media or a popup within your website, make sure there is a nice large button visible for the user to click on!
One way to encourage people to click is to offer something that they cannot refuse. During the holidays, can you offer free shipping on certain products or if a customer makes a purchase over a certain amount? The words FREE are irresistible to customers and anything you can offer to them to help them save on their purchases will help you make sales conversions easier!
For the holiday season, consider offering free shipping, gift-wrapping, or some sort of limited time offer. When you create a sense of urgency, you can expect more customers to act quickly!
Besides offering free incentives, do not forget to offer discounts as well. You can offer discounts on certain products if customers buy a certain quantity, pay a certain amount in their carts, or by encouraging them to sign up for your email blasts and newsletters.
The best way to come up with promotional ideas is to study your direct competitors and see what they are doing. Is there something they are doing that you can do better? For example, if one of your competitors is offering a 10% discount on the same product you are selling then can you offer your customers a 15% discount?
Hold a contest or giveaway
Out of all the different promotional strategies out there, this is one that never gets old! Contests and giveaways are great ways of generating a buzz around your brand. Examples of things you can give away can cash, coupons, gift cards, or products you are selling.
The first place to get started with any contest or giveaway is on social media. Remember, social media is your second biggest marketing tool, and you will have customers who follow your pages as if their lives depend on them.
The rules of your contest can be very simple. Take a look at this example from Siggi’s yogurt.
Siggi’s wanted to give away a free month of their yogurt to a random follower of their Facebook page; all the user had to do is like the post and leave a comment.
Other methods of running contests include: asking your followers to caption a photo, take a poll, or simply asking users to follow your page to enter a drawing.
Please check out this useful article from Unbounce with more ideas and tips on running a social media contest.
Rewards & Loyalty Programs
With so many different promotional strategies to choose from, this one was designed specifically to create repeat customers for businesses. Rewards and loyalty programs are great to offer incentives to your customers that will keep them coming back for more.
First, make sure that your online store has an easy to use customer portal where they can manage their rewards without hassle.
Check out CVS’s website as an example. The CVS ExtraCare rewards program offers a dashboard that gives the customer an overview of how much they have saved, how much money they can redeem their rewards points for as well as the option to shop to earn more points.
Additionally, the customer has the option to browse deals that they can apply to their accounts by simply clicking a button. In the list of coupons, the customer simply has to click the “Send to card” button next to the deal they want and they can get the discount either on the website or in person at the store (when the cashier scans their loyalty card).
A good loyalty program includes perks exclusive to members such as special discounts or the options to get certain products for free. For example, take look at Pizza Hut’s Hut Rewards program:
Customers earn reward points based on how much they have spent on past orders. These points are redeemable towards free items such as breadsticks or chicken wings as examples.
Do you use WooCommerce as your eCommerce platform? Plugins such as Smile.io or WooRewards can give your store the ability to set up rewards programs with no expert knowledge required!
Integrating Your Promotional Strategies with Digital Marketing
Now that you are aware of a few different promotional strategies you can use to help with holiday sales, it is time to tell the world about them!
What types of digital marketing methods are useful for promoting what your store has to offer? Let’s take a look!
Social Media (one of your most important tools for all promotional strategies!)
First, think about which social media networks your audience uses. You will want to create social media accounts for your store on any networks that you know your audience will find you.
Once you have created profiles for your brand on each network, now you need to start thinking about what to post. As we mentioned earlier, use should ALWAYS post something that encourages user engagement. Remember the examples we gave you earlier for social media contests? Even when you are not running a contest, ALWAYS post something that encourages a user to do something. Ask users to caption photos, create posts that ask for responses or share links to products that include discounts.
(If you are using Instagram, please check out this guide for some helpful tips on user engagement.).
ALWAYS ensure that your posts are eye-catching; plain text posts are easy for users to skip right over because they are not noticeable. Besides encouraging engagement, make sure each post has something visually appealing about it like a photo, infographic, video, etc.
And of course, promote your specials or new products on your pages too! You could offer a special discount only available to your followers on social media to encourage them to buy right away. Make it even easier for your customers to buy your products by taking advantage of in-app checkout such as Instagram Checkout, where users can buy from within your post!
While you want to use social media to promote your products, at the same time you do not want your pages to look too “salesy.” Do other things to pique your audience’s interest and let them know you are not simply just trying to push products onto them. Throw some non-promotional material into your mix as well, such as talking about your star employees or showing photos of your employees hard at work.
Last but certainly not least, do not forget to showcase testimonials of your products! If you have photos or videos of your customers talking about how awesome your products are, make sure you post these on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube!
E-mail & Text Messaging Marketing
Services such as MailChimp or Constant Contact allow you to set up a form within your website that allows your visitors to subscribe to a mailing list that you put together. With e-mail marketing, you can send out eye-catching emails to your subscribers informing them about the latest specials, new products, and more! Consider taking the promotions you are running on social media and also running them on an e-mail marketing campaign; these platforms allow you to track how many people have opened your emails, clicked on links, and also (sadly) unsubscribe from them.
And lastly, do not forget about text message (or SMS) marketing! SMS marketing allows customers to sign up their mobile phone numbers to receive automated messages (written by you) to keep them in the loop on any specials you are running.
SMS messages can be simply text, text with photos, and even include links to pages you want your customers to visit. When running a promotion, consider pushing it out using all these digital marketing methods to ensure they are received by many different people.
Conclusion
By now, you should have a good idea of what these different promotional strategies can do for your business and how you can tie them in using a variety of digital marketing methods. Write down a list of possible promotions you would like to run and then decide on how you want to inform the public about them. Also, be sure to check out last week’s article on how to offer your users a stellar experience on your eCommerce site (it is a must-read if you are serious about increasing your sales this season).
Need help getting started your business started with these promotional strategies?
We would love to help you get started with social media marketing to start the holidays off on the right foot! Call us today for a FREE consultation with no obligation required!