[UPDATED] 9 Clever Holiday Marketing Ideas for Your Ecommerce Biz

The holiday season is just around the corner. There’s no better time than now to start your ecommerce holiday planning. 

From Christmas to New Year, the holidays are lined up, which gives multiple opportunities for ecommerce merchants to attract new customers and reward existing ones. But this could also mean a fiercer competition that could make it difficult for you to create an impact and stand out. 

Developing marketing strategies that connect with shoppers is crucial when it comes to festive seasons. And to help you out, we’ve rounded up some of the best marketing ideas and strategies to help ramp up your sales during the most exciting time of the year. 

9 Creative Holiday Marketing for Ecommerce

Get festive with a holiday-themed website

There’s no better way to connect with customers than bringing in the festive cheer of the holiday season on your website. 

Decorating your online store puts your holiday-loving customers in a festive mood as soon as they visit your website. Whether updating your featured images and headers or changing up your button colours or imagery, creating a holiday-themed website puts your customers in the mood for gift shopping. 

And just a reminder, don’t forget to use the right keywords to bring potential traffic to your website. 

Channel the warm holiday spirit with bundle offers

Creating gift bundles is one of the best holiday ecommerce strategies. By creating a nice combination of four to five products, you can offer the entire package to customers at a promotional rate or discount. 

Gift bundles take out the hassle of them having to curate their own bundles for their loved ones. 

Consider these tips when creating bundle offers: 

• Keep it relevant. It’s important to bundle similar products or have the same functionality or use. For example, you can bundle different bath essentials. 
• Be creative with naming your offers. To get customers talking about your offerings on social media, name your bundles with designated hashtags. 
• Highlight your bestsellers. To delight customers with better deals, identify your best-selling products, and pair them with complementary products. 

Take advantage of flash sales

The sense of urgency is a powerful strategy for ecommerce merchants. It can turn casual and indecisive browsers into instant buyers.  

Flash sales are one of the things that shoppers look forward to during the holiday season. Take advantage of this opportunity by building excitement and seasonal hype through personalised flash sales. 

By offering discounts on your bestsellers for a day or two, this will attract your customers’ attention and help boost your revenue. 

Get seasonal with your email marketing

The holiday season is a busy time for shoppers. And they will likely appreciate any convenience you can offer during these times. One of the best alternative ways to reach out to them is via email. 

Every customer wishes to get the best deals, and sending an email can help grab their attention to your offerings. Having high levels of personalisation and offering instant buying options can help sway customers into purchasing from you.  

Be consistent. Make sure to keep the buzz going by sending out holiday-themed email marketing campaigns that highlight your promotional offerings, sales, or other seasonal deals. 

RECOMMENDED: 6 Mistakes in Email Marketing Campaigns

Create targeted social media campaigns

Social media plays a key role in boosting ecommerce sales during the holiday season. With almost everyone using social media, it allows you to promote your online store to a much wider audience. 

And this holiday season, active social media users are always on the lookout for holiday deals, discounts, and coupons. This makes it simpler to catch their attention and attract them to your website. 

By leveraging the use of social media, you can ensure a higher probability of getting conversions during the festive season. Don’t forget to use trending holiday hashtags to maximise the success of your social media campaign! 

Offer early holiday promos

With the hectic gifting season coming up, shoppers won’t want to wait until the peak of the shopping sprees, even with their online purchases. They are already filling their carts as early as October to avoid the rush and delivery delay hassles, score the best items before they sold out, and avoid the price hikes with increased demands.  

Reward this smart move. Get ahead of everyone else by teasing early holiday posts and offering advance vouchers and discounts. Also give freebies or incentives to a certain number of customers (e.g., first 50, early 20, etc.) who checked out their stuff on a specific date. You’ll surely get the attention of the early birds looking for the best prices.  

Help them choose with a gift guide

Nothing adds stress to a holiday more than not knowing what gift to give. Your customers would appreciate a helping hand when deciding what wrapped gifts to place under the tree.  

Be their trusted resource by creating a gift guide. Make creative content of product recommendations based on what’s hot, highly in-demand, or best-reviewed items featuring your brand.  

Not only can you effectively present your products as a go-to gift shop, you’ll also produce high-converting and engaging content. With the right SEO tools and strategy, you can increase organic traffic to your site, top search results, and turn leads into profit. 

Get in on the reel trend

Short-form videos on social media have taken the main stage in recent years, specifically on Instagram (Reel), YouTube (Shorts), and TikTok. In fact, short-form videos are the most popular and effective format this year. It’s also the top preferred medium for Gen Z and millennials.  

Connect with your younger audiences with a fun and trendy video that showcases your brand. Instead of being outright salesy, incorporate your goods with get ready with me (GRWM) videos, how-to tutorials, and other engaging content that catches their interest.   

Also leverage this format to sell to any interested customers directly. TikTok and Instagram, in particular, have built-in social commerce tools that let you easily tag your products on a video and allow anyone to check out the product from there. 

Show your loyal customers some holiday love

It’s the season of giving. It’s the best opportunity to give back to customers who have shown you love throughout the year.  

These are the best days to activate your rewards or loyalty programs with exclusive discounts, invites, and giveaways via email or a direct message. Customer appreciation translates to better connection and higher customer retention for your brand. These perks also promote positive word-of-mouth for your business.  

3 Top Tips for Launching Successful Holiday Campaigns

The holidays are going to be the busiest time for your brand, especially on the retail side of your business. The rush caneasily overwhelm your campaign and may affect your planning process.  

Don’t fret! Here are tips to help you produce winning campaigns: 

Revisit your previous campaigns

Before launching a new one, take a step back and evaluate the campaigns you’ve done in the past. Pull up the data of your holiday activities’ performance in various channels and how much revenue they generated for your business. 

See what campaign strengths you can replicate this year, and possibly, with a better twist. Relatedly, you might want to skip segments that may not have worked so well before. Or, pinpoint factors that went wrong and re-introduce it with an upgrade.   

The most important part is to see how your audiences have grown in the past year. Are you catering to new demographics now? What changes have you made to your buyer personas? You may need to reangle your messaging to fit your current target groups. 

Learn from the ones that did it best

There’s a reason certain brands dominate the holiday scene — their strategies work! Where else can you find campaign inspiration other than from those that have shown great results?  

There’s a wealth of holiday campaign ideas to learn from. Pampers’ Silent Night campaign made a resounding impact by raising $40 million for children’s vaccines while communicating their brand’s value.  

On the other hand, Coca-Cola, which has built a reputation for producing legendary holiday commercials, delivered a heart-wrenching father-daughter story in its Give Something Only You Can Give (Canada) video. 

The key is to find a campaign that matches your objectives and determine how you can give it your brand’s own flavor.

Always plan ahead

Holiday campaigns are major revenue-generating projects for your brand. You can't launch a half-baked project and expect to reach your objectives. Planning far ahead is essential to streamline the process, respond to opportunities, and remain organised from the concept stage to execution. 

Tread on a generous timeline to make way for revisions, complications, and other issues that might affect your target release date. Decide on your calendar and plot out activities months ahead to provide every stakeholder ample time to work on their parts before their holiday break ensues.

Get your holiday marketing ready!

Today's holiday shoppers and website users are always on the go — and they expect your pages to load fast. That’s why it’s vital to make sure your website loading speed is up to the mark.  

Getting your online store ready during the holidays allows you to boost your brand reputation and online visibility, gain more customers, and strengthen customer loyalty. 

By employing the above-listed strategies and getting a good hosting platform, you’re all set to reap the rewards of the holiday season.