Your Ultimate Christmas Marketing Musts
Christmas is the golden time of the year for digital marketers, without a doubt. Knowing how to rival all your competitors over the Christmas period is difficult, as everyone is bringing out the big guns.
So, to help your business not only survive but thrive in the festive minefield, here are our Christmas marketing musts. Think of them as the egg to your nog.
Make Your Website Christmassy!
Okay, this may sound a bit obvious. But, it’s something that needs to be done. If your site looks the part and fits in with all the festivities, then your visitors are a lot more likely to stay for longer. Especially if each individual page has an essence of Christmas spirit. It makes your site seem more fun and up-to-date, which is crucial for marketing.
Seasonal Site Features
When you’re sprucing up your site to make it fit in with the Christmas period, don’t just add in the odd picture here and there. Remember all the different components that your website has, and utilise them! What I’m talking about is having festive twists on things like your headers, your footers and buttons. You should even apply these changes to your CTA’s (Call to Actions) and have a Christmas theme running through those too. For example, a cheesy festive pun like;
Having a Christmassy website helps to build a bond between you and your visitors. It gives them the feeling that you’re celebrating the festive period together, sharing the Christmas spirit!
Just, don’t go overboard. You don’t want your visitors to feel as if they’ve just stepped into a very extravagant Santa’s Grotto. Trust me.
Special Offers
It’s a great move to have some special offers or discounts running on your site throughout the Christmas period. That’s what your customers will be looking for, as chances are they’re going to be a little tight on money after buying their entire family a Christmas present. So, if they’re looking for special offers and discounts, why hide it?
Make sure that any special festive promotion you’ve got on your site is the very first thing a visitor will see. That way, you’ll grab their attention instantly, and they’ll know your products/services are a lot more affordable. Therefore, they’re less likely to leave your site after a few seconds.
After all, who doesn’t love a Christmas discount?
Festive Email Campaigns
An absolute must for the email campaign you’ll be sending out over Christmas is to make it festive. This time of year, your recipients are going to be wanting to see emails with discounts and offers to give them a helping hand over Christmas. So, if your email campaign has nothing to do with yule-tide promotions, it will probably have a lower open and conversion rate. What a waste.
When designing your email campaign, be sure to use a lot of colourful designs and bright Christmas themed graphics to give your campaign a bit of life and sparkle. A more attractive and seasonal email is much more likely to be opened and interacted with. An email made up of a large block of text with no festivity isn’t going to engage a lot of people. And it’s a bit well, bah-humbug…
And, of course, we can’t forget to include the all-important ‘% off!’ phrase. That phrase is easily the most eye-catching phrase that you should use when trying to tempt your recipients into reading and interacting.
Don’t Be Too Pushy
Although you want your recipients to see all of your lovely Christmas marketing and promotions, you shouldn’t be too pushy with it. Pretty much every other business is going to have some sort of Christmas promotion, and a percentage of those will be reminding their recipients of it almost every day. I’m sure we all have experience of email campaigns constantly being sent to our inbox, and it getting pretty annoying. The last thing you want to do is annoy those potential customers.
If you’ve planned your Christmas marketing campaign well enough, and have some great content, you don’t need to push it onto people all the time. Reminding your recipients of your products and deals once or twice a week is enough.
This way, you’re at that happy medium between being forgotten about and annoying people to the point of them opting-out of your mailing list.
Your Loyal Customers
As I said before, the Christmas period is an absolute minefield for marketers. Everyone is working their hardest, and the public is bombarded with constant campaigns from different businesses.
So, with that being said, you need to remind your loyal customers why they’ve continued to use your service or products other others. Create some more personal emails to send to your current customers that could explain your Christmas offers in more detail or even advertise a better offer just for them. They’ll feel special and valued as a customer, and will be more likely to re-visit your site and pick your offers over all the others.
Our Email Tips
Just before we finish on your emails, here are our three quick tips to help your business survive Christmas;
- Early Discount – Although sending out festive email campaigns is a must for Christmas marketing, it’s good to send some out before the season actually starts. What you should do is send out some emails before Christmas advertising an early bird discount. Doing this means you can try and get some customers before the festive madness starts.
- FOMO – Create a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) feeling for your customers by telling them the last date they can receive your product by before Christmas Day. Telling recipients they only have a limited time to buy your products creates a sense of urgency and that they need to buy quickly!
- Christmas Day – Just out of courtesy, send all the people on your mailing list a cheery ‘Merry Christmas’ email on Christmas Day. This is simple but really effective as it helps to build a better relationship between you and your audience. Plus, it puts your business in a good light and helps you to be a part of their celebrations!
And really, why not? It’s Christmas!
Social Media
Obviously, social media is one of the main places to be for a marketer over the festive period. Everyone is in good spirits, and wants to see Christmassy posts that will get them excited for the coming weeks! And, help them out with their Christmas shopping.
Here are some of my best advice for Christmas time social media, that you can apply to your own pages.
Pinterest and Instagram
Over the Christmas period, Pinterest and Instagram get a lot of attention. People are scrolling through these platforms looking for inspiration for presents, festive food ideas etc because they are the platforms that rely on visuals the most. Rather than reading blogs and articles for inspiration, people want to see physical pictures to give them ideas.
Make some friendly, lighthearted Christmas themed images of your products and promotions to grab people’s attention and appeal to this audience without being too ‘salesy’.
Here is a perfect example, from the Instagram masters – Starbucks;
Competitions
Everyone would love to win an extra Christmas gift for someone, or just something to use for themselves now they’ve spent all their money on food and presents!
Use competitions on your social media pages to spark engagement on your page. For example, if you were a bakery, you could do something like ‘send us a picture of your best Christmas themed cakes for a chance to win a £100 voucher to help out with Christmas dinner!’.
That way, you’ll not only gain interactions but, you could use all the photo entries to create a blog post showing your favourites! That’s another great marketing technique to please your audience, and gain awareness.
Get creative with your competitions, and have fun with them! There are so many different styles you could use. For example, you could do a competition like ‘like this picture for a chance to win!’. Doing this should help you to gain more traffic and interactions.
Just, be careful with this and don’t make your competition look like click bait or spam. A subtle ‘like’ or ‘comment’ competition should be okay, as long as it’s not too in-your-face and is a one-off.
Last Minute Gifts
My final piece of advice for Christmas marketing on social media is to advertise your products using the ‘last minute gift’ idea. Get some great shots of your products, then post them on your social media pages with captions like ‘Perfect for a last minute gift’, or ‘Looking for last minute gifts? We’ve got you covered’.
Doing this reaches out to those users who aren’t as prepared and have left their Christmas shopping to the last minute. I’m sure this is something we’ve all been guilty of in the past…They’ll see your post showing them your last minute gift as they’re scrolling frantically looking for ideas, and might consider buying it!
With all this in mind, you’re ready to tackle Christmas marketing and bring in those customers.
