It’s time to get to work on your ecommerce holiday marketing strategy. With so much competition in the marketplace, it’s important to make sure your campaigns stand out and grab the attention of shoppers. If you didn’t have a chance to review our post last month about Black Friday, now’s your chance to get the leg up on your competition. Here are four tips that can help you build an effective holiday marketing plan that will drive results.

1. Decorate for the Holidays

Let’s face it – humans are visual animals. There’s a reason that as soon as the Turkey is out of the oven, Christmas lights and a tree are already out of the storage bin. It makes people happy to see decorations. So much so that almost 50% of respondents in this study said their lights are going up before December 1. What can that tell us about how we market your business? Don’t be a scrooge, do a little decorating.

Spruce up your product photos with some holiday cheer, change out your slider image on your homepage and incorporate the holiday language in your email campaigns too. You don’t have to go completely off the deep end and sacrifice your entire brand identity, there’s a subtle way to bring holiday cheer into your current design systems.

Check out the holiday images we put together for our client Gravallese Co. We took a bold, Italian- influenced grooming product for men and spruced it up with some props that stuck to the masculine brand.

If you’re not sure how to make it work for yourselves, shoot us an email and we’ll set up a consultation call with you.

2. Cross Pollinate as Much as you can

Don’t take this as advice to plaster the same few sentences across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – that’s not what we’re saying.

What we ARE saying is think about how customers might interact with your brand. Depending on the price of your product, potential customers will need to be reminded of your company a few times before they even register the message that you’re conveying. If you’ve got a high-priced product, chances are customers will need time to mull the idea over before making the final decision. Don’t give up if you aren’t getting traction after one post. Stay steady and utilize all your tools in the tool-belt creating a story that’s woven between social media, email, SMS, website and whatever other channels are available to you.

3. Make Sure Your Website Is Optimized For Mobile

With more shoppers using mobile devices than ever before, it’s essential that your website is optimized for mobile viewing. If it isn’t, you could be missing out on a huge pool of potential customers who won’t take the time to navigate a slow-loading or difficult-to-navigate site on their phone or tablet. Make sure your site works well across all devices by testing it on multiple platforms and even browsers before launching any campaigns. Tools like Page Speed Insights can give you a snapshot of where your website is currently. It even gives you some tips to speed things up. Do what you can now and if you’re looking for assistance – you know who to call.

4. Automation is your best friend

With a tool like Klaviyo, email and SMS are so much easier. Other products like MailChimp and SendInBlue work great for some people but if you’re asking us, an ecommerce focus agency who works with online companies like Death Wish Coffee, She is Cheval and Barnacle Foods, tools like Klaviyo makes life easy.

Most ecommerce companies like to save time. Scratch that, everyone does. Klaviyo is the ultimate time-saver. Built-in automations like “New customer welcome” and “Abandoned cart” are easy to set up and puts time back in your brand’s pocket. Klaviyo gives you templates to start from but as you learn more about your customers the automations and customizations are endless.

Staying connected to customers means more than sending one monthly newsletter. With the tracking set-up inside of your Shopify you can learn more about how your customers shop and tailor messaging from your learnings. Hot leads get one message and cold ones get another.

With these four tips in mind…

You should be well-equipped to craft an effective ecommerce holiday marketing strategy that drives results this season! From creating a sense of urgency with countdown timers and limited time offers, leveraging social media platforms creatively and optimizing your website for mobile viewers – there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able maximize sales this holiday season with thoughtful campaigns crafted specifically for your target audience! Good luck!

BONUS: The Best Website Stack for Holiday Marketing Campaigns

We believe that the answer to this question is Shopify and Klaviyo. As we mentioned above, we love the tools that these platforms offer for ecommerce companies.

Let’s put it this way – we think  the connection between Shopify and Klaviyo is like Milk and Cookies.

Small shops will love Shopify’s standard plan that comes fully loaded with the ability to take payments built in. Plus, their POS system that can be used in-store and is perfect for brick-and-mortar shops.

For bigger stores, Shopify Plus gives you the option to edit code and with the help of a web development team you can pretty much get it to do whatever you want.

And Klaviyo is no slouch. Pricing grows as your company grows and integrates other apps like Facebook and Google to help you with advertising. In a world that’s going cookie-less (uh-oh Santa won’t like that) gathering emails and phone numbers becomes even more valuable. Forms are easy to create and launch on your site so you can gather data with ease. And, like we mentioned before, automating processes is a breeze.

So, if you ask us, running a holiday marketing campaign gets a whole lot easier when you have tools like Shopify and Klaviyo. Want a free Shopify Trial? Contact Us!