With December around the corner, the holidays are officially here. This is the busiest shopping season of the year, and it’s a perfect time to run a festive promotion using marketing automation tools.
It’s no fun to work during the holidays, but fortunately marketing automation makes it easy to know your audience, set up goals and KPIs, and then run the campaign on autopilot. Give your business the gift of a holiday sales boost with these 5 Christmas ideas using marketing automation.
1. Use the holiday season to bring back past customers
With Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas coming up in rapid succession we are now well into one of the busiest consumer shopping seasons around the globe. Whilst consumers are rapidly emptying their wallets, many businesses are also looking to get their final spending rounds completed before they lose their budget at the end of the year.
Selling to former customers is easier than turning prospects into first-timers, and this is a perfect time to do so. One ecommerce marketing automation platform found that customer reactivation increased by 106% on Black Friday. So a great way to take advantage of this major sales period is to send past customers early access to seasonal deals. With marketing automation, those contacts who don’t respond on Black Friday can get an even better offer by taking advantage of your offer if they speak with you before the end of the year. This is the ideal time to use your advantage and convert those still on the fence.
2. Help your customers avoid the last-minute shopping rush
The Christmas shopping season means that customers are ready to spend, but a lot of them don’t plan ahead. One of Google’s B2B marketing gurus writes that customers spend an average of 13 days shopping for an item, and that there’s typically a mad last-minute scramble to buy gifts less than a week before Christmas. She even pointed out that conversions during the week before Christmas—when there’s still enough time for presents to be delivered by Christmas Eve—rival the number of purchases made the week of Cyber Monday.
You can help out your customers and promote your business by running an email campaign with marketing automation software. You can send out emails reminding them of how many days are left before the holiday, as well as reminding them that there’s still time to get their gifts wrapped in time. You should include links to holiday deals in the email, so you can segment prospects according to engagement, and then market further from there.
3. A 12 Days of Christmas campaign
Marketing automation makes segmenting your customers and leads easier than ever. You’re able to sort your customers according to specific interests, so tie this into the holiday season. You can run a 12-day campaign, each day devoted to a different interest, and target customers based on past buyer behaviour.
If you were HubSpot, for example, the first day of Christmas could be ‘social media day’, and prospects who had earlier checked a box for interest in social media could receive a free white paper. Take advantage of the capabilities that your marketing automation software offers you as far as targeting prospects according to niche interests.
4. Add some personal holiday cheer
Today, customers expect a certain amount of personalisation when doing business. Even in the B2B sphere, prospects and past customers like to know who they’re dealing with.
Since the holidays are a time for being connected, you can send past customers and prospects personalised holiday greetings. Including some holiday-themed pictures of your team can be a good way to personalise your firm and make a lead nurturing form a bit more warm and inviting. Schedule these appeals to go out at appropriate times, and you can increase your click rate while your marketing automation platform takes care of the rest.
5. Remember that shopping continues after Christmas!
According to Google’s blog, 20 percent of all store traffic in December happens in the six days after Christmas. If your marketing efforts slacken after December 25th, you could be sacrificing a major percentage of your holiday revenue. The week between Christmas and New Year is not a great time to be working, but marketing automation makes it easier.
Even B2B customers are still shopping in the last week of December, in fact with business winding-down they may actually have a extra few spare hours in their day to surf around and read your content. So, take advantage of this by keeping a campaign going after Christmas. At this point, people are looking for new ideas to start out the year, so you can use marketing automation to run an end of season promotion. Reach out to past customers to promote related items and services, or nurture leads by sharing plans for 2019.
These are just some of the Christmas campaign ideas marketing automation will make easy. Have you seen any particularly well-executed holiday marketing campaigns? Let us know in the comments below—and happy holidays from Demodia!
