Here’s an interesting stat: the National Retail Federation came out with a study that shows that 40% of shoppers actually start shopping in October before Halloween. So the key here is if you’re not prepared by October 1st for the holidays and all your marketing campaigns thought through and prepared, you’re going to be missing out on a huge amount of sales. This means you’ve really got to get started in August and September, start thinking about the holidays to build these campaigns.
Of course, the holiday season really goes throughout the entire year. There’s always a holiday, so really every January, you should be thinking about your holiday strategy for the whole year, but you really want to double down when the holiday season gets heavy around October. This article will discuss what that means and how to build a good holiday strategy around that, which also applies if you’re an e-commerce enterprise, ie, aliexpress best sellers store.
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1. Determine Which Holidays You Want To Have Promotions For And What Those Promotions Need To Be
You can just build a spreadsheet for this if you want to, maybe throw it on the calendar. But take a look at all the annual holidays every year and pinpoint the ones that you want to highlight for your business or your brand, and what promotion you want to run for those holidays, and just jot that down.
Whether it’s a 10% off coupon, a buy one get one free, whatever it might be. You may even want a promotion that just says thanks to your customers on particular holidays; that works too. But think about what those holidays are and what that promotion needs to be; it all starts there.
2. Create Leaderboard Banners For Each Of Those Holidays
You want to design those. A leaderboard banner is a banner that shows across the top of your website globally. So you’ve probably seen that on stores when you shop online, where they have this bar across the top that you can x out if you want to, but that bar highlights that promo.
It’ll typically say what the promo is; it’ll give you even a coupon code there if it’s a retail store. Those are nice because those are global across your entire website, and they’re temporary. So you don’t have to edit every page of your site, if you just put it in the header, it’s going to be visible to everybody on desktop and mobile instantly, site-wide, which is going to get eyeballs on that promotion and create more activity and conversion during that time period.
That’s really the best place to start and get that design collateral set up ahead of time. If you also need to create specific landing pages for the holiday, go ahead and get that organized at this time too. But frequently, that’s not necessary; the leaderboard banner actually is all you need.
3. Design Your Ads
Once your leaderboard banners are all designed for all of the holidays, is to take it a step further now and start designing your ads. You’re going to want to write your ad copy and then come up with a design. So if you’re going to be running ads on Google and Facebook, and Instagram, you’re going to want to have all of these designed ahead of time and saved in a folder with that leaderboard banner so they all look the same, they’re cohesive, they leverage the same ad copy and have the same promotion and coupon codes built in it.
You have a whole set of designs basically ready to go up front, and so getting these designs done ahead of time will get you ahead of the curve and also alleviate some of that stress when the holidays roll on up so that you’re not urgently trying to get this stuff done at the last possible minute.
Think it through ahead of time, get these designs done. If you want to do a YouTube campaign and create little ads for that too, make sure to get those short videos done on the promo as well, so the ad sets are all ready to go.
4. Design Your Email Templates
So come up with your email campaign. It should match the branding of your leaderboards and your design collateral that you’re creating for your digital ad campaign. Also, create an email template, and who that’s going to go to.
Make a note of the list of folks that you’re going to send that too. Is it going to be all of your customers or past customers? Is it going to be just customers that purchased certain products? So think about that.
What list are you going to send it to? When are you going to send it? And what does that design look like? Have that design ready to go, so all you have to do is just click send, which works best for aliexpress dropshipping. You can even schedule it in your system, so you don’t even need to do that, and it’s all automated when the holiday rolls around.
5. Work Out The Timing
Once all these things are done, it is to determine when you want the holiday promo to run. So, typically you don’t just run it the day of the holiday; you run it some period leading up to that. So what is that? Are you going to run it a week in advance? Two weeks in advance? What does that look like?
Go ahead and get that organized so that you can schedule everything on your calendar and make sure that you know exactly when the holiday campaign needs to trigger when the ads need to start when the emails need to send, and that sort of thing. When the leaderboard banner needs to be added to your website, that should all be organized in the calendar so that you’re ready to go.
6. Put Somebody In Charge, If It’s Not Yourself
Make sure that somebody is held accountable for the execution of this campaign. If everything is organized, really you just need somebody to make sure it actually activates when it’s supposed to, that the designs are all live, that the leaderboard is added to the website, those sorts of things. And then when the campaign ends, that those things are now de-activated, that they’re taken down. Put somebody in charge of that if it’s not yourself, so you know that it is being taken care of.
7. Record Your Results
Take a look at the results after the campaign and see what that looks like. How did you do? What could have maybe been done better? Save the campaign, save your assets, save your results so you can make adjustments in the future building off of that foundation so that over time as you’re in business longer and longer through the years. This is going to become a smoother and easier process that not only is faster for you but actually drives better results.
So by following this process, this seven tips, really to build out a good holiday campaign in advance, you’re going to be more prepared, you’re going to be ahead of the curve which means you’re ahead of your competitors and that’s just going to equal more sales. Power tip here: put a budget behind each of these.
What do you want to invest in that promotion? In other words, what’s your daily budget going to be during that period that that campaign is running? Whether it’s a Facebook ad or a YouTube ad, or a combination of many, what do you want to invest on a daily basis for that promo, to get in front of the people that you want to get in front of?
And then track the sales that you receive on the back end. What’s that ROI, what’s that return on investment? The goal is to just grow that over time so that you see more sales to your business and grow your business.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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