3 creative holiday promotion ideas for online stores

The holiday season in 2020 saw U.S. consumers spend over $188.2 billion. This year, predictions suggest spending will reach $207 billion

With so many people shopping online over this festive period, you need to do all you can to encourage consumers to buy from you instead of your competitors. 

So what can you do to attract more customers over the holiday season? 

Holiday promotions are a good place to start. 

Promotions can entice consumers and encourage them to buy from you — especially if your promotions are unique and creative. 

In this article, we’ve outlined three creative holiday promotion ideas that will help you stand out from the crowd and pique the interest of your target audience.

1. Offer a time-sensitive discount

A great way to get customers interested and excited about your online store is to offer a time-sensitive discount. 

This can happen in one of two ways:

  1. Offering a limited discount to a capped number of customers on a first-come-first-served basis. 
  2. Offering a time-capped discount to unlimited customers. 

Let’s say you decide to offer a 30% discount across all your products starting at 1pm EST. This discount is only available to the first 50 consumers. Once all the discounts have been used, the promotion ends. 

You create a sense of urgency and interest in your products by doing this. People are eager to buy from you to get a discount, and you raise brand awareness in the process.  

If you’d rather offer something easier to manage, you could opt for a limited offer that’s available to everyone. Here’s an example from Teavana: 

 Image of a promotional email from Teavana with a time-limited sale

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So, how should you spread the word about this discount? 

If you want to create some hype around it, you’ll need to use multiple platforms. You can post on social media, use paid ads, and create an email campaign about the launch.

Create as much hype and buzz around the discount as you can to raise awareness and get consumers to visit your website.

And if you’re wondering how to create the discount, you’ll need to check with your payment handling service. Usually, you can create a discount code that goes live at a certain date and time and can only be redeemed a specific number of times.  

2. Provide unique discounts for existing customers 

Many businesses focus on attracting new customers throughout the holiday season, and there’s nothing wrong with that. 

But what about your existing customers? 

The holiday season is a great time to reignite engagement from existing customers, and we know that retaining customers is 6-7 times cheaper than acquiring new ones. That makes this a win-win. 

To engage with existing customers, consider offering unique discounts, such as a promo code that’s only available for existing customers. You can segment your email list and create a campaign to send this discount code to previous customers. 

And to seal the deal, make sure your promotional emails are personalized. Why? Because we know that online consumers value a personalized experience

Offering discounts shows people that you value them as customers. As a result, you develop your relationship with the customer, encourage repeat purchases, and develop customer loyalty.

3. Create business discounts 

Offering corporate discounts might not seem like the most creative and unique holiday promotion. But with studies showing that the corporate gifting market will reach $242 billion by the end of 2021, it’s something to consider.

 

 Image of a graph from Coresight showing how the corporate gifting market is predicted to grow from 2021 to 2024

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Think about how you can offer a corporate promotion for your product around the holiday season. 

Whether that’s providing a bulk discount on multiple purchases or giving a specific discount code for companies, spend some time reviewing how you can implement a corporate discount as part of your holiday promotions. 

But what about if you’re running a SaaS business

If you’re running a SaaS business, you might think this doesn’t apply to you. Employers buying gifts for their employees doesn’t suit your target audience, right? 

Well, you’re wrong.

With so many businesses working remotely because of the pandemic, many business leaders are turning to virtual gifts as an alternative. 

Take a look at MasterClass as an example. This online course provider offers a business membership that companies can use to subscribe to its online courses.

 

Screenshot of the MasterClass business page

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Companies can access business courses on MasterClass by subscribing to a business membership — and it doesn’t just stop with business courses. Subscribers can access courses across a range of topics. Sounds like a pretty good corporate gift, right? 

So think about how you can promote market business promotions around the holidays. There are a lot of businesses out there that are looking for the perfect professional gift. 

You’ve finalized your holiday promotions. Now what? 

Once you’ve figured out which holiday promotions you’re going to run, the work doesn’t stop there. 

You need to follow some steps before launching your promotions to give your business the best chance for success. Let’s take a look at what these are. 

Create a holiday marketing strategy 

Whether you create a specific content marketing strategy for the holiday season or you have an entire holiday strategy across all areas of your business, you need some kind of plan in place before you roll out your promotions.

Creating this plan will help you figure out the following information: 

  • What your success measures will be: Part of a strategy involves creating goals for your promotions. These goals will show you if your promotions have been successful, which is vital to the growth and development of your business. After all, if you don’t have measures and metrics in place, how will you know if your promotions were successful?
  • How your promotions feed into the overall company goals: Your promotions must contribute toward the company’s overall success. If they don’t, you risk losing alignment and direction when it comes to the growth of your business. By creating a holiday strategy, you can ensure that your promotions are aligned with overall business goals. 

So before you start launching your new deals and offers, have a strategy in place. This should outline how your promotions feed into the overall goals of the business as well as how you plan to track and monitor promotions. 

With this in place, you’ll see how promotions are progressing in real-time and make changes if things aren’t going to plan. 

Use writing apps to proof your copy 

Rolling out promotions can influence your brand perception. 

Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer for a second. What would you think of a business that offered a 90% discount across their product line? You’d probably assume the products aren’t well-made or ethically sourced. 

That’s how simple it is to influence brand perception. One wrong move, and you could put consumers off for good. 

Now, what would a consumer think if the promotion was misspelled or didn’t make grammatical sense? 

Chances are it would negatively impact the way they perceive your brand. Why? Because it shows that you haven’t taken the time and consideration to review the content you’re putting out there. 

This is where writing apps can help. 

You can run all your promotional content through an online writing app to avoid grammatical mishaps. This will flag any areas of concern and ensure that your content is well written and grammatically correct. 

Take a look at Grammarly as an example.

Image of Grammarly rephrasing a sentence

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The online platform offers writing tips, grammar checking, and even gives your content a readability score so you can see how well it’s written. 

Start your holiday promotions today 

By now, you’ve got a few new ideas up your sleeve for upcoming holiday promotions. And with the holidays just upon us, now’s as good a time as any to put these ideas into practice.

Remember to take some time to fully prepare your promotions before they launch. Create a strategy, understand your goals, and put measures in place to track how your promotions are performing. This will give you the chance to put things right if they aren’t going to plan. 

And if you need a hand managing your promotions and nurturing consumers through the sales funnel, take a look at Freshsales Suite. Using our software, you can easily build marketing campaigns that nurture prospects to conversions.