The holiday season is nearly here, and with an ever-increasing number of New Zealanders shopping online, is your digital storefront in order? With less than two months to the kick-off of the biggest four days of shopping of the year (Black Friday through to Cyber Monday), there is still time to get your marketing ducks in a row to carry out a wow-worthy holiday campaign.
Not sure investing in a solid marketing strategy for the holidays is worth your time? Paymark figures show Black Friday spending in 2020 exceeded Boxing Day spending by $100 million. Boxing Day was traditionally New Zealand’s largest day of spending, but in recent years Kiwis have embraced the shopping holiday that originally started in the US. And in 2021, the numbers continued to increase:
“Looking across the pre- and post-Christmas period, annual spending growth for [our] core group of merchants for the five weeks ending Sunday 27 December was up 5 per cent on last year, which included a strong start over the Black Friday four days of sales,” Paymark said.
Want to Kickstart your holiday marketing campaign but short on time?
As the conventional New Zealand shopping season has expanded, it is unwise for businesses not to take advantage of the buying frenzy in the last quarter of the calendar year. Competition online is fierce, but a well-crafted marketing campaign can help you reach your goals. If you’re reading this, you may have been a little slow off the mark getting your holiday campaign started this year. Here are the foundation pieces for pulling together a successful holiday campaign when you’re short on time.Perform a Marketing Audit of What Has Worked in the Past
If you haven’t yet come up with a marketing idea for the holidays, leverage the data from past campaigns so you can understand what drove sales last year and the year before. If you want to grab a share of the million-dollar pie, this is the one time of year that it is crucial to understand what makes your customers tick, and what drives them to buy from you during the holidays. Assess your past holiday social media marketing, email blasts, and website landing pages – identify what worked. You might see a trend toward humorous copy, nostalgic video content or maybe a quirky user-generated campaign – what you discover will, of course, be different for every brand. This retrospective should help you craft this year’s campaign.Drive Sales with a Strong Email Sequence
Use email to get in front of your most loyal customers early and start a new relationship with potential customers. Commerce Media Platform Criteo has found that consumers who buy from your website for the first time over the Black Friday to Cyber Monday 4 day weekend take on average 41 days beforehand to investigate what they want to purchase. Brands need to promote their big sales with that window of consideration in mind, so that consumers have a copious amount of time to prepare to shop. Make sure your email marketing strategy is fine-tuned for collecting new emails, and drop your new subscribers into the sequence so that they are made aware of your upcoming sales. A few other tips for emails:- Irresistible subject lines help with stellar open rates
- Alleviate online gift-giving fears with clear order deadlines and delivery timelines so that your customers know your products will arrive in time for the holidays
- Tweak your landing pages so that links in your emails arrive at a dedicated page to buy exactly what your email is promoting
- Once the holidays are over, don’t forget to continue to nurture your customers through email so that they are loyal buyers all year long