A Christmas campaign is one of those essential elements of your eCommerce strategy that shouldn’t be left until the last minute.

Your competitors will have been working on their Christmas campaigns from the end of last year. Yes, that’s right – many eCommerce businesses start planning for next year as soon as Christmas is over.

However, starting earlier isn’t a guarantee for success. There are a number of specific steps required in order to boost your chances.

Discount Strategy

Online or offline, Christmas is all about shopping (religion and good will to all men aside) and the one thing shoppers have their eyes out for more than anything at Christmas is a bargain.

No doubt you will have a carefully planned out calendar of special offers and discounts aimed at select groups of shoppers, but your strategy is only as good as the marketing of that strategy. There’s no point having amazing discounts if no one knows about them.

Your discount checklist should read as follows;

  • Are all discounts/current offers displayed clearly on your website pages?
  • Are you pushing offers across your social channels such as Facebook and Twitter?
  • Are you going to pay for sponsored ads to increase your visibility?

The key is to promote your offers at regular intervals. The online market will be flooded with discounts at this time of year and if you don’t promote them hard enough, yours will be lost in the rush. 

Seasonal Designs

Customers expect to see Christmas designs both offline and online when they shop. Ensuring your design is the best comes down to two things; functionality and style.

The functionality of a Christmas design refers to how the customer uses the website. Creating a Christmas category with its own specific design is a great idea, but if you differ too much from your standard layout, you risk confusing your customers.

The style must allow for optimum functionality, as well as stand out from the everyday style of your pages. Bearing in mind the rule of not confusing the customer and this is a trickier task than it immediately appears.

You don’t have to redesign the entire style of page to create an eye-catching seasonal shop front. Depending on the style of your shopping basket, checkout process and how it has been built, adding a little festive touch is a simple change that works.

Christmas Marketing

This area takes up a huge chunk of the seasonal task list and, when executed correctly and with good preparation, can be one of the most effective.

Christmas Marketing obviously covers a wide spectrum of areas so let’s break them down;

Social

Social Media has a huge impact during Christmas. With more people taking time off work over the holidays, you’ll find a higher number of interactions than you may have seen previously.

Within each of your social communities, you can ask your followers to share, like or comment on images, posts and competitions throughout the festive period and it will be considered more acceptable.

Don’t worry if some of your followers are on multiple channels. You’re not spamming them if the content is relevant and interesting.

On Twitter you can search for people who are talking about your particular products or services and reach out to them. Keep it light and casual, don’t push. Something along the lines of “Hey, not sure if this is of interest to you, but we currently have XX% off what you’re looking for.”

Advertising

With paid promotion you can target new audiences based on interests and demographics via paid tweets on Twitter and boosted posts on Facebook.

These allow you to narrow down the field of your audience engagement and ensure that you are only targeting your ads at people who are likely to engage with them.

Content

Create a comprehensive content calendar for the last 6 months of the year and ensure you are posting out high quality content on a regular basis. You will want to build up a strong online community in the weeks leading up until Christmas so your business will be forefront in their minds when it comes to shopping.

Website To-Do List

Your eCommerce website must be at its best if you want to make any kind of dent in the Christmas market.

Time is valuable to shoppers and they won’t waste a second of it on a website that doesn’t work as it should.

1) Organise Category Pages

You can create specific category pages which will allow you to group your seasonal products under the right description. Don’t lump them all together, put your New Year products in one category, your Christmas themed ones in another and you can even have a third for Happy Holiday/Festive products if you cater for customers from different backgrounds.

Optimise Product Pages

There are so many ways you can improve your chances of product page conversions but here’s the basic run-down;

2) Out Of Stock Options

Your stock levels will fluctuate a lot during the festive season and occasionally you will run out of certain products. Make sure that you have a backup in place that lets the customer know when they will be back in stock and give them the option to sign up for an email alert when it does.

3) Fix Broken Links 

A broken link is an instant turn off to a customer. It says to them that you don’t really care about getting their business and that you won’t offer a good service even if they do buy from you. Double check every link on your site to ensure it does what it is supposed to.

4) Streamline Your Checkout

Once the customer has decided to buy from you, you need to make sure that the journey from product to purchase is as easy and straightforward as possible.

Looking Ahead

Executing a successful campaign is one thing. Using that success to improve your chances for next year is another.

All of the monitoring and analysis you do has to become more than just a chart showing your success. It should form the blueprints for your campaign the following year.

Once you have all the data collected, ask yourself the following;

  • When did I start my campaign and did I give myself enough time?
  • What were new ideas for this year and what was reused from last year?
  • What worked and why?
  • What didn’t and why?
  • What would I like to try for next year?

Asking yourself these questions will give you the basic outline of your next Christmas campaign, so you can get the ball rolling as soon as 2015 has ended.

 

By Charlotte Barnes, Digital Marketing Manager at Spiral Media Ltd.

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