Figuring Out Your Holiday Digital Marketing Campaigns
It's approaching one of the most wonderful times of the year. The holiday season is coming back in full swing, and most e-commerce store owners are now preparing for the biggest season of the year. Amidst the jingles and holiday-themed promotions, it's vital for e-commerce store owners to make the most of Christmas and end the year on a strong note.
In our specially crafted holiday e-commerce guide for online store owners, here are some of Traktion's top tips to help you figure out how to make the most of your holiday digital marketing campaigns to boost revenues and sales.
1. Before The Holidays
Before the festive rush begins, it is essential to plan your holiday marketing campaigns in advance and prepare your e-commerce store to make the most of the Christmas shopping traffic. We recommend adopting the following strategies to ensure you are set up in advance to reap the most benefits from the holiday rush. Just like shopping for presents, you don't want to leave your digital marketing campaigns to the last minute!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Prepare your e-commerce store pages for indexing by search engines such as Google and Yahoo by taking the necessary steps to structure, clean, and present the content on your website clearly, so it ranks higher on organic searches by people searching for your products as holiday gifts for inbound marketing. Traktion's digital marketers have vetted and verified experience in helping e-commerce sites rank high and within the top few pages of Google for organic keywords such as "luxury watches", "ethical eyewear" and "artisanal jewellery".
Verified SEO experts will be able to help you figure out the essentials and basics of your e-commerce store, such as optimizing your site titles, descriptions and meta-tags, to setting up your Google Analytics, SSL security settings, and Search Console settings.
For further value-added insights, contact Traktion to learn more and find pre-vetted marketers for your specific e-commerce category by using our Quick Brief.
Integrating Your Analytics
If you haven't done so, be sure to integrate the relevant digital platform pixels to your e-commerce store, such as the Facebook Pixel to measure and optimize delivery of your ads to your customers. This ensures that when a potential customer visits your e-commerce store, and takes a particular action (such as adding an item to the cart), your pixel is activated and records this action. This allows you to set-up and optimize future ads, create Custom Audiences (such as an audience of people who have added items to carts) to run bespoke marketing campaigns to optimize conversions and identify your conversion metrics.
You will also reap additional benefits from installing Google Analytics' Tracking Codes to your e-commerce store, which allows you to collect valuable information about how people visit, interact, and behave on your e-commerce stores. Setting up Google Analytics is one of the most important things you can do for your e-commerce store's growth, by helping you set a baseline for growth and implement tracking indicators to improve it. Use Google's assortment of technologies, such as PageSpeed Insights, WebMaster, and KeyWords Planner to help you configure your website to be optimized for conversions.
Start Planning Your Christmas Digital Ad Strategy
Start preparing a holistic digital ad strategy that spans numerous platforms, channels, and types of content.
A successful e-commerce store will integrate Email Marketing to its newsletters (e.g. MailChimp) alongside Search Engine Marketing campaigns (e.g. Google AdWords), as well as running Paid Social Ads on their Facebook and Instagram accounts to augment a well-crafted creative Christmas marketing campaign that includes festive-themed blogs, Instagram Stories, influencer collaborations and launching new festive products such as giftboxes, festive gift sets, and holiday-themed items.
You can also create special, customized discounts for your most loyal customers through a bespoke digital targeting strategy.
Remember that the holiday season doesn't just comprise of Christmas (December 25th), but also includes the soon-to-come Black Friday (November 29th) and Cyber Monday (December 2nd). Therefore, plan your campaigns, offers, and messaging to be consistent across all channels: from your e-commerce store (Squarespace, Shopify, Wix), social media channels (Instagram, Facebook and Twitter), to bespoke landing pages for specific products.
Traktion has verified experts for e-commerce store owners who have ran successful Black Friday campaigns for watches, winterwear, and luxury goods brands through flash sales and promotions, as well as months-long Christmas campaigns for sustainable fashion and ethical products e-stores through multi-channel marketing.
2. During The Holidays
In the wintry months of November and December, most brands would have their digital marketing campaigns in full-swing. Through Traktion, you can discover, find, and hire vetted digital marketing experts within 4 days to run your digital marketing campaigns ASAP.
Implement Your Digital Ads (Holistically)
It's time to implement your digital ads, featuring your bestsellers, new holiday products, as well as giftcards and special services (such as gift-wrapping, card-writing, and bespoke customisation services).
A good, seasoned digital marketer will run, A/B test, and experiment with at least 50+ different ad-sets within the first week to test which products, product images, messaging and offer converts the fastest, quickly, and with the highest profit margin. This is an iterative process, and your learnings will enable you to decide quickly which ads to stop running, and for which ads to start profitably scaling up your ad-spend.
Re-targeting strategies are also important, and require the essential set-up of Facebook Pixels and Google Analytics in advance in order to reach your high-value customers through Facebook, Instagram and PPC (pay-per-click) search engine ads.
This powerful configuration will then allow you or your marketer to create advanced discount codes for those who have entered the checkout page (but did not complete the purchase), show bespoke offers to customers who have repeatedly visit a particular product on your store, or inform customers of sold-out items that are now once again available, therefore recovering abandoned carts and lost sales.
3. After The Holidays
Once you have recovered from the holiday rush, it's time to take stock and learn from the Christmas successes and failures. You have invested tremendous time, energy, and resources into your festive season marketing campaigns, and it is wise to learn from the traction and see how things could improve for the next year.
Measure, Analyze and Learn
It can be overwhelming for marketers and e-commerce store owners to make sense of the immense volume of metrics, reports and data after a long Christmas season. You can hire a pre-vetted digital marketer to measure, analyze and provide insights from your digital marketing campaign data to find out what went wrong and what went surprisingly great.
A seasoned digital marketer will be able to help you analyze your website and landing pages, paid search, social media statistics, and email marketing data to find out which channels have worked well and deserved further investment and attention. You can hire pre-vetted digital marketers through Traktion, free-of-charge, here.
About Traktion:
We hope you enjoyed Traktion's Christmas E-Commerce Marketing Guide for e-commerce store owners.
If you'd like to run successful ad campaigns for your e-commerce store, you can find pre-vetted and verified digital marketers through Traktion's complimentary service here.
Traktion matches high-impact companies to verified expert digital marketers that they can trust, tailored to the company’s business goals, industry, target audience, and 20+ other factors. Our proprietary approach vets marketers based on past performance and analyses post-campaign data through machine learning to predict the ROI of marketer-to-business matches.
