Leading up to the busiest and biggest shopping season of the year, we’ve noticed many consumers have been spending their hard-earned cash online. Whether to save time or due to the pandemic, this trend looks like it’s here to stay.
Businesses that engage in smart holiday marketing and think creatively will be able to reap significant rewards. Will you take full advantage of this opportunity to reach the masses of new traffic and capture the interest of next year’s loyal customers?
Get your creative marketing juices flowing with these seasonal inspirational ideas.
Smart Holiday Marketing Tips
People love a freebie or something that offers them more value for their money. Incentives such as these are simple and cost-effective ways to inspire people to shop your brand over your competitors.
- Offer discounts on holiday gift packages – the more they buy, the more they save
- Offer free shipping and guarantee packages will arrive before the 24th of December
- Offer to match your competitors’ prices
- Create a gift-giving guide with products from your website to provide inspiration
- Create easy and flexible returns or exchange policies for the gifts they didn’t love
Get creative with your marketing campaigns. Try to resonate with your customers by showing them you care about them and the things they love the most.
- Create a campaign that is relatable given how difficult the pandemic has made life
- Make your campaign shareable to spread the word further through customer networks
- Get your customers to participate in your campaign
- Apply humour where appropriate
For example, the American based clothing and outdoor recreation company LL Bean runs an annual holiday Instagram marketing campaign called #12DaysofPuppies. They invite their followers to share photos of their dogs for a chance to win a gift card and be featured on their social media. The contest provides the perfect opportunity for the company to show their followers they care and collect a boatload of user-generated content, and still promote their branded hashtag. Now that’s some smart holiday marketing because – who doesn’t love dogs?!
Push Notifications and Smart Holiday Marketing
Push notifications are the most important communication channel used by apps, with nearly every major app using push notifications for transactions and engagement. At their core, they are simply a way of alerting users to the information they have opted-in to from apps and services.
Push notifications are the pop-up banners or messages that pop up on a user’s mobile phone or desktop device. The corresponding app or website opens to make the user aware of something related to the app.
A key element of push notifications is that users must opt-in to receive them. Thus, it’s essential to explain the value of notifications that they will receive from your app before prompting notification permissions. It is possible for users to opt-out of notifications that seem less important to receive if they do not feel that the notifications are of value to them.
There are three types of push notifications
System Notifications can be sent out to a broad audience to let users know about new features or important announcements. This includes breaking news, product launches, product showcases, tailored holiday discounts, or sales. Making creative use of these for your innovative holiday marketing campaign will reap many rewards.
Transactional Notifications allow you to build trust and nudge users to complete actions by setting automated messages triggered by events such as confirming a reservation, notifying a customer of a package in transit or reminding them of something they ordered.
These notifications are beneficial if you run an e-commerce app and often deal with abandoned online shopping carts. If a customer didn’t purchase an item before, re-targeting the customer when there is a sale on a particular item they showed interest in previously is another chance to re-market it to them and hopefully make an offer they can’t refuse.
User Notifications are relevant for social networking apps, dating apps, marketplaces, and any sites that allow comments. They let users know when a seller, reader, or user messages them and are usually sent immediately.
Using and scheduling your push notifications intelligently depending on the kind of notification sent and making it relevant to the subscriber will increase user interaction and be more valuable to them than intrusive.
Automate Your Business Coms during the Seasonal Break
When a customer is considering buying your product or service, keeping the conversation fluent is vital. Most customers want to use messaging to ask common questions, which include operating hours, stock availability, return policies etc. When you automate business communication, not only is the need for manpower reduced, but you can keep some of your business operations running 24/7, 365 days a year, to meet customer demands.
Cellfind understands the difficulty of establishing which channels best appeal to which target demographic and how a multi-level channel approach to integrating communications and messaging is the optimum way to enact effective management and coordination.
Our Flow Builder product could be the solution you’ve been searching for. It forms a holistic blend that effortlessly integrates the separate operations of email, push notifications, SMS and Bulk SMS, WhatsApp API, social chat and other channels into a single hosted web portal. Automating these business operations means that you can free up some time for yourself over the seasonal break while still running your business efficiently in the background.
Contact the Cellfind Business Team for advice and pricing options to engage your customers with smart holiday marketing.
