8 Tips for Your Holiday Season Marketing Campaign

Holiday season marketing campaigns fill inboxes, but here’s how to make yours attract the eyes of the customers you want.

We’ve all been there. The holiday season starts to ramp up and so do our inboxes every morning. You wake up with one eye opened and feel inundated by the number of brands reaching out to capture just a minute or two of your time. So how do you create a holiday campaign that will actually be read?

While there are a number of tips and tricks out there, it’s important to gather all the ways that work for your specific brand and/or campaign and give yourself time to get organized. With organization, comes creativity and with creativity, comes the attention of your target audience.

Here are some tips and tricks to get you started:

It’s never too early to begin thinking about your campaign. Holiday marketing is a priority for brands across the globe. The months leading up to the end of the year are some of the busiest, so plan ahead! Some questions you may want to ask yourself include:

• Do I have all my marketing tools in place?
• Are my integrations sound and robust, ready for the busy period?
• How’s my data looking? Is there any customer information I need to collect for my holiday marketing?

Map out important calendar dates. You don’t want an important date to pass you by because you were focused on other events happening in the future. To keep it simple, ensure you have all national holidays on your calendar. From there, expand to major event days focused on shopping, giving and supporting businesses. Some key holidays to keep in mind include:

• New Year’s Eve + Day
• Valentine’s Day
• Rosh Hashanah
• Yom Kippur
• Halloween
• Veteran’s Day
• Thanksgiving Day
• Black Friday
• Small Business Monday
• Hanukkah
• Christmas Eve + Day

The proof is in the data. To deliver customer converting experiences, you need to be creating personalized micro-moments that resonate with your audience. Modern customers know what brands are capable of and are only willing to part with their data if you’re offering a personal experience in return.

Manifest your target audience. Segmentation is essential for delivering personalized experiences. As you plan your holiday marketing, you need to consider how you’re going to target personas and audience groups. Using customer modeling tools like eRFM and lead scoring allows you to build segments based on engagement levels. Zero-party data collected in preference centers can be used to tailor campaigns based on subscribers’ location.

• You must remember that generic messaging has a minimal impact on readers nowadays. They’re demanding personalized experiences and building segments is just one step you need to take to deliver these. By having these segments built and ready to go, you’ll be able to target key audience groups with ease.

Captured their attention? Now make sure you stand out. Welcome programs are vital for all brands, everywhere. They’re the first impression a new subscriber gets of your business. There are a couple of things you should be doing at this early stage of the customer relationship.

• Introduce your brand—what sets you apart from the crowd?
• Get to know your customers—what do they want out of the relationship?
• Drive action—what actions are you looking for readers to take?

Simple sign-up processes result in a longer term customer. Shoppers will be looking to discover new brands during the holidays, so now is the perfect time to begin optimizing your subscription process.

• What works with your audience?
• Are you incentivizing the process?
• Have you tried gamifying the sign-up?
• Do popovers drive more sign-ups with your audience?

There are a lot of different strategies you can test in the lead-up to the holiday season. By taking the time to try some different tactics, you’ll be able to maximize your list growth during this period of heavy traffic. 

Did you lose someone along the way? Find out why. Abandoned carts and abandoned browsers are guaranteed money-making automations. To ensure these are driving the results you want, you need to be constantly testing and optimizing these programs, especially around the holiday season. 

• Try new design elements and tactics to discover what generated more revenue before your heavy sales period. AI-powered product recommendations are a great tool to increase average order value. Alternatively, you can direct subscribers to FAQ or peer reviews to remove blockers to the path to purchase.

Create commotion in multiple places. Before the holiday season kicks off in earnest, it’s time to think about what marketing channels you have and which you are using. Customers are on the go and demand immediate responses – is email alone enough? Most times, the answer is no.

While the journey might seem long to begin with, the reward of a successful marketing campaign is unmatched. With these tips and tricks along with tools to help ease the process, you’re sure to create a campaign that isn’t simply bypassed in the early morning hours.

Tink Taylor is founder and president of dotdigital Group PLC (founded in 1999). He has 20 years of experience in the field of digital communications and has introduced digital marketing to companies large and small.