Holidays, especially the Q4 holidays, are the busiest season of the year for e-commerce and retail. This is the season when people come together with family and friends, and share gifts and special moments.

For the DTC e-commerce brands, it is a chance to strike big, push up sales and wrap up the year on a high note. It may be the merriest time for us all, but it’s the busiest and craziest time for most e-commerce businesses — it’s when most brands focus on executing a stellar holiday marketing campaign.

In fact, the numbers show that Q4 2022 retail sales in the US alone are expected to reach $1.3 trillion, representing about a 3.3% increase from the previous year. With this, brick-and-mortar sales are expected to go up by 0.9% to $1.026 trillion. On the other hand, e-commerce is expected to increase by a whopping 15.5% to $235.86 billion – making an excellent opportunity for retailers and e-commerce players to level up their holiday marketing efforts to boost engagement, cultivate brand loyalty, and most importantly, increase revenue and profits.

But winning in an aggressively evolving market might be more challenging than it sounds, especially during the holidays, when almost all the brands are competiting for customers attention . To keep up, brands need a unique holiday marketing strategy that resonates with potential customers and speaks to their buyers’ aspirations. You need to meet them at the point of need.

In this article, we’ve put together the ultimate guide to planning for the holiday sales season for your business.

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Digital shopping trends

Here are some of the latest trends in the online marketing world that prove that digital shopping isn’t just rapidly growing; it’s here to stay.
 

1. Influencers affect purchasing decisions

Influencers build strong and trusting relationships with their audience, which makes the customers look up to them for opinions on products and services.  Almost taking over the role of brand ambassadors, influencers have the power to affect the purchasing decisions of your customers, and is why many DTC brands are using influencers to promote their brands this holiday season. Here are five ways brands are using influencers to increase their sales:

Limited-edition products

Limited-edition products are meant to create a sense of urgency and encourage buyers to buy before the stock runs out. Marketers use influencers to spread the word about such products by making their audience feel like they might regret it if they miss out on this one-of-a-kind experience. If done correctly, this can be exactly what you need to expand your reach and bring more consumers into your sales funnel.

Mobile-Driven Sales

Holiday shopping can be stressful. So consumers want shopping experiences that are convenient for them. Mobile shopping is one of the most seamless ways to shop. So DTC brands are creating mobile-friendly products and using influencers to share them with their audience.

Affiliate marketing

This is probably the oldest and most effective method of using influencers to market your products and services. Typically, an influencer will promote your product to their audience and earn a commission for every sale using their referral code — more like a performance-based marketing approach.

Live shopping

This method is not mainstream currently but will likely be the future of influencer marketing. Typically, an influencer (or the DTC brand) will stream live on their social media channel to sell a product/s.

 

2. Using AI to collect user data and create customized experiences

Businesses are using these tools to continuously collect data on consumers' shopping habits — what they are shopping, what time they shop, etc.

This data makes it possible for brands to create personalized shopping experiences for the consumer. It makes it possible for a brand to offer personalized recommendations and specialized customer service experiences to its customers.

Offering personalized experiences to customers in your marketing funnel is one of the best ways to grow your sales. And there are numbers to prove it. Recent research shows that 40% of customers are more likely to spend more than anticipated on a brand that offers a personalized experience.

3. Ethical concerns are affecting purchase decisions

People are becoming increasingly sensitive to the ethical impact of their shopping decisions. The phenomenon is popularly referred to as conscious consumerism. This means that customers can decide to buy a product or service if they believe it has a positive social, economic, and environmental impact.

For example, a consumer is more likely to differentiate between two products based on the impact they have on the environment.

A recent study done by First Insight and the Baker Retailing Center at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania found that consumers and retailers are knocking heads when it comes to sustainable shopping.

So, a DTC brand can stand out from the pack by selling with sustainability in mind. More studies also show that consumers, especially Gen Z, are willing to spend more on brands that support their values and causes.

Examples of holiday marketing campaigns

DTC brands deal directly with the end user. Therefore, it’s important to understand their needs and fulfil them to be able to win big this holiday season.

Here are 3 interesting holiday marketing examples in the DTC space:

Preparing for a stellar holiday marketing campaign

A good plan is a roadmap for a successful holiday marketing campaign. It helps you reach your customers before your competitors do. But if you haven’t started planning yet, don’t panic.

Here is a quick guide with everything you need to get your holiday marketing campaign up and running this holiday season.

1. Plan holiday promotions

Creating a good promotional strategy is precisely what motivates customers to start making purchases.

But, the first step is to define your goal. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you looking to strengthen your customer loyalty or acquire new customers? Concentrating on one will help you figure out where to add incentives.
 

For example, if you want to maintain customer loyalty, your campaign should be accompanied by words that show gratitude. On the other hand, if you aim to acquire new customers, your language should be able to introduce the brand clearly.

Then you need to figure out what the offer would look like. Examples include: 

2. Prepare your website for the holidays

Create a stellar landing page

Holiday shoppers are excited to see new ideas contributing to the holiday spirit. They aren’t interested in seeing the same old landing page that has been on the website since its inception. So splash your landing page with the holiday theme and decor.

Optimize for SEO

To ensure that you get as much organic traffic as possible, ensure that all SEO aspects of your website are in tune and ready to go. For example, ensure that your page load times are great, have your meta titles and descriptions tuned for the right seach terms,  and ensure that your on-page SEO is well-optimized for the holidays.

Deck it with holiday festivities

If you have a physical store, ensure it feels like the holidays when customers come in, just like on your website and landing pages.

Showcase testimonials from customers prominently

Social proof is vital in online marketing. Your customers want to see whether you are keeping your end of the bargain per your value proposition. So ensure to have enough social proof prominently displayed on your site this season.

Set up chatbots to engage with your customers

Customer engagement is crucial during this busy season. To ensure that you don’t leave customers unattended, incorporate chatbots in your website and engage with customers at the right time. You can use chatbots to nudge customers to check out the different products you offer on your website or even get them to complete their purchase.

Have webforms in place to collect visitor information

Don’t forget to collect your customers’ contact information for future use. Ensure you have web forms in strategic locations to acquire all visitor information.

3. Plan holiday-specific email and SMS campaigns

You must determine your customers’ preferred communication channels to engage with them more effectively. This will ensure that you create the awareness required about your brand, products, and offers and nurture your customers towards checkout.

If done correctly, emails and messages can be great tools for successful holiday marketing campaigns. For instance, these two might be the only way to make a customer’s hand vibrate through their smartwatch (as long as they have an email alert set), creating a much quicker behavior trigger. Planning your campaigns on multiple messaging channels — email, SMS, WhatsApp, social media — means you are much more likely to interact with the customer more quickly.

Also, ensure that the content of the message is contextualized to make it more effective and encourage the customer to check out your holiday offers.

How can you use SMS marketing How can you use SMS marketing


4. Automate communication

Handle the holiday surge on your website by automating personalized communication that drive sales.

You could automate messages on various communication channels for events such as:

  • Welcome messages
  • Cart abandonment reminders
  • Order confirmations and updates
  • Offers, discounts, and deals
  • Subscription information 
  • Restock reminders
  • Special wishes and discount offers on their Birthdays, Anniversaries, etc
Freshmarkketer Chat Campaigns Freshmarkketer Chat Campaigns

5. Holiday buzz on social media

No two holiday marketing campaigns are the same. If you have strategies that have historically performed well, you can recreate these. But be careful to stay unique and not mirror your competitors.

The idea is to create holiday marketing strategies that have your specific target audience’s needs at the core. If your target audience is Millenials and Gen Z, consider focusing more of your marketing effort on social media. For example, you can share holiday-themed offers and promotions on your social media platforms.

Again, what makes the holiday season so unique? The decor. Without the decorations, holidays would be just like any other day.

Decorating your social media encourages your audience to start thinking about what they need to prepare for the holidays. It makes them start looking at the products you’re promoting as gifts, which makes them want to start ordering immediately.

There are two ways to decorate your social media to create the holiday buzz:

1. Decorate your profile
2. Create holiday-centric posts

Also, consider offering holiday-centric social media posts in other languages if a significant part of your customer base comes from other countries.

6. Inventory check

Analyze past data from your previous holiday marketing campaigns. A step back in time will help you understand what type of inventory and quantities are required. Such details are what create a strong foundation for a successful holiday marketing campaign.

7. Payment options

Ensure that you offer various payment options to the customers so you don’t lock anyone out. Alongside, also ensure that you have a good business bank account and multiple others to receive customer payments.

Pro-tip: Look for a business account that offers a minimum of 1.00% APY, which is a good deal for your business.

1. Make the buyer journey as easy as possible

The customer journey is a crucial part of the whole customer experience. Therefore, correctly mapping your marketing funnel this holiday season will facilitate a more effective marketing campaign.

For example, many customers love the convenience and efficiency that comes with self-service channels.
 

To ensure your self-service is as seamless as possible, ensure that:

  • You communicate honestly and transparently with your customers
  • You offer answers to their questions as quickly and efficiently as possible. 
  • Your self-service channel is connected to a chat or guided workflow so customers can get the answers they seek as quickly as possible.
  • Have an added chatbot that transfers customers to live support as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

2. Optimize for mobile experiences

People are always on their mobile devices. As a result, mobile shopping has been growing exponentially in the last couple of years. In the last quarter of 2021 alone, mobile shopping accounted for about 72.9% of total money spent on e-commerce.

This is enough proof that most of your customers will be shopping and spending money on their mobile phones this holiday season. So take advantage of this to grow your sales this season.

To ensure that you maximize mobile sales, make it seamless for customers to find what they are looking for and follow through to checkout. The whole experience should comprise fast-loading pages, visible “Buy” buttons, and an easy checkout process.

You should also consider including tools that offer personalized mobile experiences through push messages or notifications. This is great for notifying customers of promotions, restock notices, delivery confirmations, and more.

3. Use Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Sometimes marketers put all their effort into driving traffic to their website and forget to plan for what happens when the visitors land on the pages. How do you ensure that you get maximum conversions from the achieved traffic?

The best way to push visitors further down your sales funnel is to use Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). This technique helps you modify your website and all its elements to improve your conversion rate.

Typically, CRO is user-centric in the sense that it’s directly linked to the user experience. In other words, your conversions directly correlate to the value your website offers to the customer. Do you have a clear value proposition? How valuable is your content? Are your calls to action strategically placed? All this helps encourage your visitors to go further down the sales funnel.

So you can use CRO to figure out what is working and areas that need improvements quickly. You should also visit your pages often to see how well your visitors are interacting with your content.
 

Use Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Use Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

4. Boost engagement with multichannel marketing

Consumers are now more exposed than they were a couple of years ago. Today, customers are present across channels, including SMS, Email, Social Media, WhatsApp and more. They are consuming content on all these platforms simultaneously. This means that their attention is spread thin, and more than the content they consume from a single platform may be needed to influence their buying decision.

So it’s no longer a secret that a winning marketing strategy must maintain consistent engagement on all platforms where its target audience is. In fact, research shows that brands that use 4 or more channels receive better engagement than those that don’t.

Thankfully, multichannel marketing software like Freshmarketer can quickly and efficiently help you stay on top of all these platforms all at once. Take advantage of this and grow your business this holiday season.

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5. Retain customers using quality customer service

Close your eyes and think back to when you received stellar customer support while shopping online. How did that make you feel? Amazing, right? What happens to your mind when you want to buy the same product or service? The brand is the first thing that comes to mind, right?

You need to level up your customer service to win during this holiday season. Customers prefer to shop in DTC e-commerce stores with reliable customer service. In fact, research shows that satisfied customers are more likely to come back and refer other people to your brand.

6. Create polls and feedback forms to learn about your customers’ experience

What better way to understand your customers than to ask them? Customer feedback refers to the information, insights, input, and issues the customer shares.

Collecting customer feedback often ensures that you never stay too far from their needs, and you are quickly informed as those needs evolve. This is very important if you want to maintain customer satisfaction. It’s like a guiding map for your company's growth.

There are many ways to get customer feedback, but the most popular methods are polls and feedback forms. The feedback you receive can make or break your brand's future. So pay attention to them.

7. Ask customers for reviews on their purchase

Customer reviews can make or break a business in today's business world. Most customers check reviews before they make a purchase decision. They want to know whether your brand is keeping its promise and what other customers have to say about it.

In fact, research shows that a customer is 270% more likely to choose your brand if you have 5 or more reviews listed than if you have no reviews at all.

When we asked Godard Abel, CEO and Co-founder of G2, to choose between quality reviews or quantity of reviews, he said, "Quantity. Because consumers really want recent peer feedback, so the more you have, the more likely they are to find it.” He added, “Even negative reviews build more trust than no reviews.”

Well-balanced reviews help your business build credibility, sway consumer purchase decisions in your favor, and increase sales. But the power of review rests solely in the hands of the customers who care to leave a review.
 

Getting online reviews is not a walk in the park. Here are a few tips that can help you get stellar customer reviews for your brand:

  • Leverage user-generated content: Reach out to customers after they have received their product and ask them to share a photo or a video of the product.
  • Build a loyalty program: Create a program that allows customers to earn points for every review they leave or every dollar they spend.
  • Create an email/message campaign asking for reviews. Some customers would gladly give a review, but they forgot. A quick message or email would be a good reminder.
  • Ask after the purchase: In most cases, timing is everything. Ask a customer to leave a review immediately after they receive their purchase. 

Leverage third-party review sites: Be active on one or more third-party review sites and respond to reviews there. Appreciating positive reviews and commenting kindly on negative reviews shows professionalism and makes your brand sound more human.

How to keep up the momentum after the holiday season

Good holiday sales are great. However, being able to prolong the pattern is far much better.

So use the data customers willingly shared with your brand to engage them after the holiday season is over. This is one of the best ways to prolong your customer interaction and maintain your sales.

For instance, 79% of customer service professionals say that a complete view of customer profiles and interactions helps create satisfactory customer engagement. You could use the data you have to personalize the customer journey to share personalized recommendations about upcoming product updates, sales, events, etc.

But how can you easily harvest and maintain this data to use after the holiday season is done? Freshmarketer helps automate engagement with your customers across SMS, WhatsApp, and chat, and ultimately increase conversions. It maintains a record of every interaction your customers have had with your brand and provides a holistic view in a single screen.

Conclusion

There are endless opportunities to grow your sales and your business this holiday season. However, if you want to stay ahead of the competition, you must be adequately prepared. You must run strategized campaigns, keep your audience in the holiday mood, and, most importantly, deliver on your promise.

If you weren’t sure where to start, I hope this guide has been helpful and a great roadmap to help you get started and keep you on the course.

Also, remember that a successful marketing campaign, holiday or otherwise, builds trust and loyalty and keeps customers talking. That is what brings the business.

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