Top 7 Christmas promotional ideas for your eCommerce business

Ding ding dong, the most exciting holiday - Christmas is coming to town!

The Christmas season is always a massive hit on the market. In 2018, the Christmas sale reached over $1 trillion in the US.

Every company prepares the most effective and unique promotional campaigns to hit maximum sales as possible. 

With the hope to bring you the best of 2019 last holiday season, we'll show you how to get a clear goal for the year-end campaigns! Read the articles to find out 7 tips to hit your sales target!

Define your goals & plan toward them

Many people prefer to rush all efforts trying to get more done, but actually, it leads to little results. Because they don’t represent a clear goal.

The goal is the desire that makes us keeping forward - so setting practical goals will help you maximize your sales on not only the Christmas season but also the whole year.

Notice: Don’t make your goal too curt like Goal: Boost sale.

You need to set a more-details and realistic one, so we recommend you use the SMART goal. 

The SMART means specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Your goals need to include all these elements to ensure a straightforward path. 

With this application, you can set a new SMART Goal: To boost over 20% cross-sale in the 2019 Chrismas season compared to the same statistic in 2018.

When you have your own SMART goal, it’s time to figure out how to achieve that. 

Your recent goal simply is more sales, great, but how will you make it come true? Don’t worry, there are plenty of ways to maximize revenue in this Christmas season. 

Here are the 7 essential tips to boost your sales.

Top 7 Christmas marketing ideas for your business

Even the giants in eCommerce can no longer rely on only their basic products/ services, they are always spending much effort to improve sale performance. We provide several tips that may help you gain more competitive ability in your market.

1. Pick the right marketing channels for your Christmas campaign

As the Christmas season is quite specific and not an ongoing effort, there are three main marketing channels that should be essential for your year-end campaign.

Social Media Marketing: Yes, we can’t refuse the enormous impact of social media. There are over 3.48 billion users and 94% of which surfs there platforms via mobile devices.

Marketing via social networks will concentrate on the affiliate and interest of the customer base. These platforms offer users a whole range of stylistic opportunities to create your ads.

Make sure that you use concordant contents for each platform and the contents are prepared for all available networks, for example, it is a huge waste to spend all marketing budget for a single beautiful Youtube video ad while forgetting other platforms. 

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC): is the method to boost your brand on the top of the searching engines (like Google Ads), networks or websites: Your business pays the publisher when someone clicks the ads.

You need to discover your customers’ demands and create ads that are both attractive and reasonable to hit the pain points directly. 

You need to ensure your ads are displayed in the peak time of sale season and closely tied with your budget. To get a start of the PPC advertising, you can try Google Keyword Planner or other reputation paid sites such as Keyword Tool with more advanced functions (related keywords, questions, long-tail keywords, etc).

Email Marketing: focus on established audiences whose information you collect from subscriptions of your website. Email marketing helps you keep in touch with your customers through the notification system of news and promotions. 

Recent research proves that the average expected ROI is $32 for every $1 business spends for email marketing. One of the most famous tools for Email Marketing is Mailchimp, which you can give it a try.

2. Customize the holiday theme for your products

Theming your products with the Christmas flair is a clever way to improve your customer experiences. It will bring joy and excite your clients when the Christmas vibe is all over your store. 

You may put your products into boxes with Christmas patterns like the snowflake, Santa Claus, or his reindeers. 

Here is how Starbucks themes their coffee with the Christmas theme over the years. They started to design the red cup from 1997. For Starbuck fans, it doesn’t feel like the Holiday season without these Red Cup series.

Plus: You can write a meaningful quote in a card for your customers to thank their purchase.

3. Bring the holidays atmosphere to your online stores

In the holiday season, total eCommerce growth is up to 16.7% (increasing $123.90 Billion). If you have a business website, don’t abandon it. 

Obviously, website traffic will increase fastly, so redesigning your online site and adding several essential extensions will contribute greatly to your success. Here are the 7 best tips for your ideal Christmas website:

• Change the header & footer with warm wishes for the holiday: we have plenty of free sources to beautiful holiday images such as Freepik, Pixabay, Unsplash, etc.
• Add Christmas patterns: to your logo, categories, and buttons
• Personalize shopping experiences with helpful extensions: you can install more tools to personalize customers’ experience (like Gift Registry).
• Bring the snowflake online: Yes, nothing conveys better the feeling of Christmas than falling snow effect.
• Change your product’s images with the Christmas theme: you may want to pin the best-seller products onto your first page, giving it the exciting holiday spirit  (You can make your product’s images more attractive by using Instagram Shop).
• Use a Christmas slider: Simply adding a slider showcase all your discounted products in this year-end season is a good CTA element for your holiday campaign. You may code your self a beautiful slider or promptly use third-party extensions.

Note: You should not abuse too many Christmas images into the site, this will make the layout too solid, distracting, and complex. Just adding enough effect to your eCommerce store or arrange all content in a clear and attractive menu bar.

4. Create appealing Christmas bundles

Whether merchants sell physical or digital goods, creating a bundle is never out of date. Customers can get a “bundle” with cheaper prices in a time period. 

Normally, the “bundle” campaign will obtain 3 main benefits for certain targets:

• Customers can get the same products at a cheaper price
• Product creator can get a higher affiliate commission for more sale volume
• BDD (Business Development Department) is able to drive more traffics to websites and get various leads for future reference

After you define a niche market for your products, create a bundle including your good products that can satisfy your clients. Well then, your team needs to set a GOOD commission percentage, it means your bundle has an attractive sale percentage but still bring again profits for your business. You can use Promo Bar to make your bundle more attractive.

Note: Choosing products based on your customers. Don’t make the bundle because you want higher revenue at Christmas (or in other holiday seasons). You and your team need to select highly qualified and valuable products for the person who buys it.

5. Don’t forget the gift card

With the gift card, you can create customer loyalty and good visibility. Customers may receive a gift card when they purchase your products at Christmas. With the offer from your gift card, customers will come right back for the benefit.

Gift cards can be delivered through physical carts, email, or even on social media channels. By deploying gift card marketing your business may take advantages in:

• Increase online sales: Approximately 75% of gift card recipients tend to spend $28 more on the value of the gift card.
• Drive more traffic to your website: when using gift card in an effective marketing campaign, you can navigate a huge amount of customers to your site.
• Generate more leads: Obviously, your customers can share the gift card with their friends and families, referring more potential customers.

6. Start a contest or giveaway

As Christmas is the perfect moment to increase referrals and improve brand awareness, running a contest or a give-away before this sale season is more effective than you think.

A giveaway program could either be a free gift, money off purchase, or a percent discount.

You can also celebrate a hashtag-contest which has become more popular in recent years. This method makes customers refer your content to more people. Notice that you should choose the most essential and viral keyword for a success hashtag contest.

Furthermore, you can hold the event/ give away at your physical stores, customers can check-in at your place and post on social networks to increase your brand's awareness.

Using Store Locator will attract your clients to your brick-and-mortars.

7. Don’t miss the After-Christmas sale campaign

From November to December, marketers have been working crazy: We have Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and New Year sale. 

After Christmas day, many companies just use telesales method, but it is really a mistake for the business. 

So how to have an engaging after-Christmas-sale campaign? Here is some advice:

Planing early: Right in the middle of your Christmas campaign, if you consider starting the After-Christmas deal campaign, it is the time to start now.

Create unique and attractive content: The year-end season has too many marketing campaigns that dulled your customers. So make sure that every tactic you deploy is outstanding. 

Use social media channels: Many people are too busy on their vacations or work so they don’t have time to go shopping and social networks keep them in touch with their friends and families. So you can take advantage of these platforms with your marketing campaigns to get potential customer’s attention.

After all

To get a successful Christmas campaign, you and your team need to spend 100% capacity to make the most of the festive season. First of all, define your SMART goal to know what your business exactly wants this Christmas, then pick the suitable advertising channels and applying our tips for the maximum beneficial results. We hope you have a successful year-end campaign!