10 Holiday Season Online Marketing Tips

Below are some great marketing ideas for eCommerce sites during the holiday season.

• Offer Bounce Back Discounts: Capitalize on the huge amount of traffic you’ll be receiving by offering an incentive for the next purchase. You really want consistent customers who will order all year long, even when there are no special offers. Try sending out a follow up email with a gift certificate or coupon code to everyone who makes a purchase.
• Make It Viral: Take the opportunity to capitalize on this huge traffic surge to encourage customer viral marketing. On your emails and landing pages for whatever promotion you run, include a link to tell a friend form where shoppers can email your special to friends and family.
• Clearance Loss Leaders: A classic strategy (and one of my favorites!). It works well online. Most of the time customers will buy additional full-price merchandise, especially when they realize they have to pay shipping anyway. This is where the ShopFactory cross promotion tool comes in VERY handy.
• Free Gift at an order threshold: Give away some sort of gift item once customers reach a certain order threshold. In order to determine the threshold, take a look at your average order and increase it bit. However, make sure the gift warrants spending that much.
• Offer Deal: If you’re doing something really noteworthy, you may want to highlight it on a deal website to further promote your website. Many prominent brands feature promotion there all year round, not just during the holiday season.
• Random “Blue Light” Specials: Randomly highlight items throughout the day on your site. Better yet, highlight different items every day through the holiday season to keep people coming back. With ShopFactory you can quickly add a Blue Light Special and link/change the link in seconds to different products. The “randomness” is an interest gathering marketing tool by itself.
• Send 2 Reminder Emails for whatever promotion you run: Make sure you keep your company at the top of your customer’s minds. There will be a ton of marketing emails floating around, so you may want to send an initial email right before or right after Thanksgiving. Then follow up with another right as the sale begins.
• Give Store Credit, Not Discounts: Don’t give away the farm by offering an outrageous discounts on your products if you don’t have to. Consider offering store credit in the form of an online gift certificate that can be used towards a future purchase. For example, rather than offering a $25 discount, offer a $50 store credit. Incentives like these tend to cost less, and they may actually be more attractive to your repeat buyers.
• Spread it Out: 1 day sales are great for everyone, except your fulfillment staff. In order to prevent hysteria for your warehouse and customer service staff, run the sale over a few days rather than 1 day only. This also will allow time for customer viral marketing to kick in.
• Create Product Bundles: The value of a product bundle can be perceived as greater than the sum of its part because you are conveniently creating a one stop gift. The customer doesn’t have to search, view cross promoted items - you just create a “Bundle Product” in ShopFactory and promote it!

 An important thing to remember - promote what ever action you do on every page - create a banner graphic and use the "Add HTML" function inside ShopFactory Central to add the banner across your entire site. The more you promote it - the more you will gain from it.

For more ideas, you might consider using the Wayback machine to view your competitors sites from last year (or further back for more ideas). Happy holiday selling!