Tis’ the season to be selling! The holiday season is here again and companies are looking for opportunities to market their products to consumers who are more willing to spend because of the festive mood.
To prepare you for the festive season, our gurus at MarketingGuru will be sharing with you 12 Christmas Marketing Trends and Campaigns that you need to know to greatly boost your holiday season business
1. 80% of Shoppers Stated Internet as the Greatest Influence for Purchase
Based on a survey conducted by WordStream, it was found that 8 in 10 shoppers in the holiday season cited the internet as their greatest influence for making a purchase.
If anything, this statistic proves how pivotal the use of online marketing is for the festive season. If you own a business, it is of paramount importance to optimize your website to gain exposure to the aforementioned 8 in 10 customers.
Find out more about how you can optimize your website to capture their attention from this article or get a FREE SEO audit courtesy of the gurus at MarketingGuru (Yes, we are playing Santa Claus right now!).
2. The Usage of Facebook/Instagram Stories for Holiday Marketing
Another important trend that should be remembered by marketers for holiday season marketing is the use of Facebook or Instagram stories as a tool for marketing their products.
Facebook’s 2019 Holiday Marketing Guide, highlighted how window shopping for products has seen a shift to shopping through stories. Based on Facebook’s survey on consumers, 69% of people surveyed expressed that stories are a favorable way of helping them become familiar with new brands or services and 62% become more interested in brands or products after seeing them in stories. With these statistics, it has become very evident that the importance of marketing through Facebook or Instagram stories is high and that if your brand hasn’t already started utilizing these means of marketing, you’re missing out.
In case you’ve missed it, we have an article that helps guide you if you’re unaware of the potential mistakes that you may make when using Facebook for advertising. Hopefully this helps as you venture into Facebook and Instagram stories marketing.
3. Effectiveness of Email Marketing
As old-school as the notion of using emails to get to your customer may sound, the figures have shown that email marketing is still king during the holiday sales period. Klayvio’s research has shown that 27% of holiday spending during promotions like Black Friday and Cyber Monday comes as a result of email marketing. This is also further backed by how email has seen a higher conversion rate as opposed to organic searches and social media marketing. This just goes to show that as a smart marketer, you MUST capitalize on email marketing now to capture more of your audience. Time to start sending out these promotional emails to your customers!
4. Mobile: The go-to consumer purchase channel
The smart phone is a very convenient way for consumers to access and shop on the internet. The World Advertising and Research Centre (WARC) has predicted that 72% of internet users will access the web solely via their smartphones by 2025. Hence, it is no surprise that mobile shopping dominates the holiday season as the preferred consumer purchase channel for online shopping.
Mobile purchases accounted for 54.3% of all visits to retail stores for Cyber Monday in 2018 and this amounted to $2.2 billion in sales. 66% of consumers also used their mobile devices to make purchase decisions during the holiday season.
What this means for marketers is that they must be able to ensure that their websites are mobile device friendly. This could be achieved by ensuring that your website has a responsive web design, which allows your website to fit a variety of screens of different sizes. It is important to invest in making your website mobile friendly, not just for the holiday seasons, as Google’s mobile-first index allows websites with a mobile version to be shown first. By making your site mobile friendly would help to optimize it for Google’s search engine.
5. Mobile Page Load Speed KILLS Conversion
Statistics have shown that during the holiday season, a slow mobile page load speed could cause a drop of up to 20% conversion for every second of delay. Losing sales of such volume due to an unoptimized mobile site is costly to businesses looking to thrive in the holiday season. As such, marketers cannot just solely focus on promotions and forget about the basics of site performance!
One tip we could give for marketers looking to optimize their website for the holiday season is to run their domain URL through Google’s PageSpeed insights. This allows for them to receive a rating on a scale of 1 to 100 from Google of their website’s performance. An analysis of the causes and opportunities for increasing load speed of the mobile page will also be given when the website’s URL is tested. This should help in solving load speed issues and help to reduce such unnecessary losses.
6. Cyber Monday II: The Hidden Gem
If you somehow have not prepared your business for Christmas season, fret not because there is a great opportunity that can still be tapped on for increased online sales. Introducing, Cyber Week II, the week where consumers flock online to treat themselves after the tens to hundreds of gift cards they received as Christmas gifts.
Cyber Week II starts on Christmas Day, with Cyber Monday being the Monday that follows it. During the 2017 holiday season, it was discovered that in the week after Christmas, consumers have an Average Order Value increase of 28% from Christmas week and the weeks before that.
With this, we hope that you are able to use this information to sustain and planning out your marketing campaigns for the holiday season, making it stretch past Christmas or if you have missed out on it, take advantage of the post holiday period!
7. The Impact of Personalization
In an Evergage report on personalization, 70% of surveyed marketers have said that personalization has a “strong” or “very strong” impact on their company advancing customer relationships. This trend is especially important in the holiday season when there will be a barrage of email or mobile marketing deals coming from different companies
To stand out from this barrage of holiday deals bombarded at consumers, marketers need to know how to personalize. An example of this could be to use the information on your customer’s browsing history on your site to send them appropriate deals regarding the products they have been looking for. This helps to capture their attention as your company provides them with what they need conveniently, making you stand out from the pack.
8. Retarget Your Customers
Retargeting of customers is to target your customers who might have products from your site on your cart or browsed your website for a significant amount of time only to have bounced in the end. It is especially important to retarget your customers during the holiday seasons as certain products that may be of interest to these customers may be on sales during the holiday period.
SoftwareAdvice’s statistics on retargeting has shown that customers are 70% more likely to convert when retargeted with display ads. This statistic is further backed by how click-through rates of retargeted ads are 10x higher than the click-through rate of the initial display ad.
With so many customers being more receptive and impulsive to buying products during the holiday season, retargeting them would be appropriate, especially since there is a chance that the products they were interested in previously may be on sales.
9. Guide Your Consumers
Research from SearchEngineLand has shown that consumers want direction when shopping for gifts in the holiday season. Shoppers were 1.98 times more likely to be browsing a gift guide to find compelling ideas for gifts to their loved ones. This should not come as a surprise to anyone as it is a very common scenario to be out of ideas for gifting!
Marketers should come up with content like gift catalogues or ideas for their business’s products in the holiday season in order to give guidance and direction for these lost consumers, in turn creating higher conversion for their companies.
10. Secret Santa!
Christmas season means a whole lot of Secret Santa and Gift Exchanges from consumers, be it within their family or the companies they work at. Usually these events have a specified budget such that the participants would know how much they would have to spend minimally.
What this means for marketers is that when optimizing your companies website to prepare for Christmas sales, you should focus on using meta tags, descriptions and alternate image texts that involve price points. Content like Secret Santa gift ideas and catalogues could also be created in order to drive higher traffic to your website during the period. This is affirmed by SearchEngineLand’s keyword research on Secret Santa during the holiday period, which shows that multiple of the top searched queries involved a price point.
11. Free over Fast
While there may be an urgency for getting gifts in this holiday season, consumers still have a preference for free shipping over fast shipping during this period. In a survey by Etsy conducted for consumers for 6 major countries (China, France, Germany, Japan, UK and USA), at least 52% of the surveyed from each of these countries have expressed that they’d prefer free over fast shipping. This is further backed by how Comscore found that about 80% of the transactions made on desktop during the holiday season, included free shipping.
The implication of this for marketers in the holiday season is that they have to be able to set a threshold price for free shipping that is reasonable enough for consumers to want to spend that amount and for their company to not be losing money from providing the free shipping. Free shipping seems to be a qualifying factor for consumers to consider shopping from a company nowadays during the holiday season.
12. Local Search Presence
Having your business listed in the Google local listing directory by using Google My Business is critical in the holiday period. Statistics have shown that 50% of users on mobile platforms have visited a store within one day of doing the local search during the holiday period.
Marketers must know to take advantage of this statistic by optimizing their websites such that shoppers looking for a local store via Google can easily find their website. This in turn will help in boosting the website’s SEO performance as well as increase traffic from people around the shops area.
Conclusion
And on the 12th day of Christmas, MarketingGuru gave to you, 12 top trends that you should know as a marketer. Now that you are equipped with this information, go out there and get those customers for your company this festive season!
