Stress Free Holiday Marketing

Sep 04

Craft some text for your holiday specials. Take your time doing this. Have the gals over, drink some wine, and work on some cute and witty titles for your specials. Guys: Do some guy things – beer, hockey, barbecue? (I’m reaching, I have no idea what guy things are.) Come up with three options and ask everyone you know which one they would buy. Once you’re happy with the offerings and your text, get it to your Webmaster.
Make sure your supply chain can accommodate your specials. There’s nothing worse than having time sensitive orders you can’t fulfill.

Put the specials up on your Web site, make them pretty and appealing – link from your homepage or feature specials on the homepage. Make sure you have great optimization on these pages. Page titles, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc., are important here. Get your keywords naturally into your text, of course.
Design an email marketing blast to go out to everyone in your database. If you’re really prepared, you’ve collected these from every online buyer you’ve had over the last year (or five), and you have a wide base of possible customers that want to be exposed to your holiday specials.
Put the email blasts on your Web site. (Yes, before you send them out to your email list – it’s okay, I promise.) Email blasts are news, so put them on your Web site or blog, go visit some other blogs or forums, and talk about what you’re offering, then add the link to your email signature. Optimize this new content and get the search engines looking into what’s going on ahead of time. If you’re putting this up in early October, those pages should be indexed and ranking by Christmas.
Send out the first blast – you probably won’t get many buyers yet, you’re just planting the seed with this email campaign.
Write three more email marketing blasts to capitalize on shoppers in early November, Thanksgiving week, and the week before the last possible day you can ship your product to reach customers prior to the holiday.

This is when your hard work in September and October will pay off. Send out the emails you prepared for early November and Thanksgiving week. If you have a great email marketing team, send copy to them in October with instructions on when to send. You’re going to be busy and won’t have time to think about it then, so have it done and ready to go.
Visit (or have friends visit) some social networking sites. Find out where people are talking about holiday shopping and online shopping, letting them know you’ve got specials and packages. A link from these sites will always help.

Home stretch time: Send out your last email blast and then take advantage of last-minute shoppers by offering them “one click” buying from the homepage. Feature a description of your special, a “buy it now” link straight to the credit card form, and it’s done. Don’t worry about shipping; procrastinators know last minute shipping is expensive, and they’ve learned to deal with it.
Tip: One thing I look for when I’ve procrastinated is the lovely phrase, “free shipping.” I’m just dumb enough to pay a bit more for a product if the shipping is free. Wrap some shipping cost into the product price, and give the impression of a discount along with the “package deal” you’re already offering.

Have a Stress-Free Holiday Season

SERP Experts