Unlike like Black Friday which is pure promotion, Christmas is much more meaningful. It is all about sharing, caring and giving. A successful Christmas marketing campaign for eCommerce store should focus on that meaning, not just promotion but more than that - emotion, or help the customer to express their love and caring toward the people they really love. In this article, we will discuss how to have a successful Christmas marketing campaign for any Shopify store. 

1. Come up with creative Christmas marketing idea

When talking about sales promotion event, most of the idea would be percentage discount. In fact, percentage discount is the core of every promotion, which actually is that you cut a part of your profit and transfer it to customer’s value. As I have said above, Christmas event is meaningful, which is about sharing, caring and giving, we need more creative ideas to express the Christmas promotion. There are a lot of outstanding Christmas promotion idea that you can take into consideration.

On the other hand, running a campaign to Naturally encourage customers to send your products as gifts is also an awesome Christmas marketing idea. The Gift Wizard is a Shopify app designed to help your Shopify customers to request a gift card and send that branded gift cards and gift vouchers directly to their friend using a “Send as a gift” button. It also can establish automated gift card and gift voucher campaigns based on behavioral triggers like birthdays and holidays to maximize purchase potential.

Not just sending the gift, Gift Wizard help buyer send a well-designed e-postcard with a meaningful message to their beloved one

The message will be sent to the recipient’s email address, in each they can easily access the gift by clicking a single button.

This is a brilliant and meaningful Christmas marketing idea for the small business and also retailers.

 

2. Create holiday themed landing pages for your eCommerce shop

The most important thing to make Christmas marketing campaign really outstanding for any online retailer is the so-call holiday or Christmas spirit, which can be express in the design, color, pattern, and images or even holiday-themed logo that you use to build up your Christmas landing page. Let’s have a look at some Christmas themed landing pages, which may give you some idea for your Christmas marketing campaign.

Advertising and pulling traffic to a sale landing page bring higher conversion rate and helps you to sell more than to a website. A landing page is much more focused than a website and you can add high converting elements such as customer review, trust badge, product hero banner... You can easily create a Christmas landing page with all of these elements with PageFly Page Builder. Besides, it supports powerful mobile editing and analytics function. If you want to build a Christmas landing pages quicker with powerful tracking to get higher conversion rate, PageFly can be a good choice.

 

3. Write a catchy Christmas slogan and tagline

Images and color will catch the attention, but it is the slogan that makes customers remember about your brand and your Christmas marketing campaign. I suggest that you spend your time thinking about a Christmas slogan and tagline. Take a look at Slogan hub to have ideas about your own slogan.

A Christmas slogan should be simple, easy to remember and also relevant to your campaign meaning, as well as consistent with all advertising and landing page. The “Tell Me” campaign from Hallmark explores the variety of complicated and meaningful relationships that we all have in our lives, and through a simple, easy-to-remember holiday marketing slogan brings the core business model of the greeting card company to the forefront.

 

4. Focus on Christmas email marketing

According to 80/20 rules, 80% of your profit comes from 20% of the most potential customers, who are actually your existing customers, who have known you for such a time and also bought from you. They deserve to be treated especially this Christmas. Email marketing is one of the best ways to communicate and even upsell to your existing customer. You can engage your customers through email in much deeper ways and use it to drive traffic to your eCommerce website. Shopify's email buy button also makes it simple for your email recipients to go straight to checkout with the product they love.

However, there are a few points that you should keep in mind.

First, set a S.M.A.R.T goal, which should be:

• Specific: Be clear about what you should achieve after the Christmas email marketing campaign
• Measurable: Which metric you will utilize to track your email promotion
• Attainable: Yes! It must be achievable and realistic
• Relevant: Does your goal seem worth the effort; does it bring benefit to the business?
• Time-based: Set a deadline for the goal to be achieved

For each Christmas email marketing, there should be 2 goals, which are primary goal - For example, grow 25% of total Christmas sales through email marketing, and the secondary goal - grow open and click-through rates by 15% within Christmas.

The emails that you send out also should bring Christmas spirit, which makes them distinct from the emails that you have sent out throughout the year. Don’t forget to prepare a good and Christmas themed abandoned cart email, as sales increase, the abandoned cart also increase.

 

5. Don't forget remarketing

People don’t always buy from your site at the first time they visit, especially for Christmas event, every Shopify store launch the promotion, people have so many choices. The principle of human is to discover. When looking for a product, they are likely to go to multiple sites to look for information, reviews… So it is a waste of potentiality if you let them go. I suggest that you retarget the people who have spent about 30 - 60 second or over on your site. Also, you should remove all user who spends under 10 second, they may miss-click one of your ads and are not likely to buy.

From Google Analytics, you can create an audience of people who spend about 30 seconds or more on your site. Just go to Admin > User definition > Audiences definition > Audiences > Click Create new audience.

And from Facebook. Go to Facebook ad manager > Create Custom Audience > Website

However, it is important to remember that, people who drop out of the home page is very different from people who drop out of product page or check-out page so that you need to divide your users into different lists and show them different messages. Please have a further look at the Facebook remarketing guide.

 

6. Partner up with other brands

I really love the idea of co-operating with other eCommerce stores whose share the same targeted audience but not compete in the product, in term of the partnership. You can send your customer a gift card that helps them exchange to receive a gift from your partner or buy them with a lower price. On the other hand, you can offer a discount or promotion to the customers of your partner to take advantages of that traffic source. There are a few thing that you should keep in mind before carrying a partner program.

First, let’s imagine you are selling women's clothing and have a constant amount of blog traffic, you can share these traffic with another eCommerce store that sells women's shoes, and vice versa, take advantages of the other's traffic source that you don't have. You two have the same audience but not compete with each other.

Secondly, you two should define the strategy together and the task for each other, as well as the benefit from both side. It is a win-win situation, you should bring some benefit to your partner, not just sit back and wait for the traffic from your partner to come in.

Thirdly, I always recommend you to track the performance of the Christmas campaign. If it is good, you can continue and expand the campaign by coordinating with the second and third partner. If not, try to find the problem, you may choose a wrong partner, which lead to low-quality traffic.

 

7. Better start your Christmas marketing campaign early

Via Google trend, we could easily see that people are starting to look for Christmas sale from the beginning of December, and bump to the peak at the middle, but then reduce dramatically at the end of December.

Therefore, I think everything should start right after Cyber Monday ends because there is a lot of preparation work to do in a short time. In order to win this Christmas promotion event, it is not a good idea for any eCommerce store in the world, to just lower the price, add more product and wait for the sales to come in. It is important that we get well prepared for it.

 

8. Create urgency

People like the idea of buying things that are rare or hard to come by. If something is marketed as a “limited time offer” people will rush to buy it as they will feel a sense of urgency and fear of loss. Scarcity all boils down to- “get something before you lose it forever”. Here is some idea for you to optimize your Shopify conversion rate.

Countdown clock

When there is a present of a countdown clock or a message saying that “For Christmas only” on the discount items, we feel that the time pass and we are going to lose this discount in a couple of minutes or when Christmas is over. A countdown clock or message like that for discount items may push people to buy as it is running out of time, they really feel the need to hurry up.

 

Impending Out-Of-Stock Announcements

You are planning a honeymoon trip and find a really lovely hotel room on Booking.com. Great! You add it to wishlist and come back later. But wait, only 4 rooms left! People are fearful of what they lose more than love what they are given. Especially lose for other people. Impending Out-Of-Stock Announcement makes people feel the rush and can be a way to optimize your Christmas marketing campaign.

Conclusion

As we agree on above, the Christmas is not purely a sales promotion event, it is a holiday event, when the purchasing demand is really high, which can bring so high profit for your eCommerce store. Therefore, it is really to create a holiday spirit to make your Shopify customer engage more. Create a holiday-themed landing page is now much easier with PageFly Page Builder, while you can still add several sale boost element on your eCommerce pages to get higher profit.

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