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Online Marketing

Is Your Holiday Marketing Strategy Set Up For Success?

By November 25, 2014October 22nd, 2020No Comments

It may be too early for Christmas carols, but the holiday marketing season is upon us. Are your online platforms ready for holiday marketing?Are you ready for holiday marketing?

When the holidays come around, all best practices go out the window. Holiday shoppers are thinking and acting differently. Many online marketers are thinking alike. Set yourself apart while catering to holiday shoppers? needs.

Site Performance

This is hopefully an obvious one, but the holidays are the last time you’d want to come up against website failures or slow loading time. Monitor network performance throughout the season, and optimize your pages to load quickly – under two seconds is ideal. Use the Pingdom Website Speed Test to examine your loading time.

Have your site ready for optimal user experience through every step of the conversion process as the holidays draw near.

Pause A/B Testing

Unless it is specific to the holidays, this is the time to put your A/B tests on hold. For one thing, the high-traffic period will skew your results. Your results will appear inconsistent, as holiday traffic patterns are often not representative of year-round traffic.

More importantly, holiday shoppers have different intentions than your customers the rest of the year. A/B testing is meant to evaluate your customers’ preferences and patterns. During the holidays, you likely will have a different clientele who are shopping for a wide variety of people. They are drawn to creativity, what they think their gift recipients will like, and what suits their own budget – quite different than what they are searching for throughout the rest of the year.

A/B testing, therefore, is not particularly helpful during the holiday season. Put the testing aside for now while the holiday frenzy kicks off, and wait until later for a more accurate read on customer behavior.

Create a Unique Purpose

What can you offer holiday shoppers that your competitors can’t? Capitalize on that! Include it in all of your advertising, put it in the subject lines of your email newsletters, and put it on all of your landing pages.

Sure, everyone loves to see discounts and special offers during the holidays – don’t leave that out. But make sure you give your customers a reason to choose your brand over a competitor who might be giving similar discounts or offers.

And forget about optimum timeframes for sending out newsletters the rest of the year send an email when your competitors aren’t sending them! Last Friday a cold front came in, and I woke up to the following banner on an email from AirBnB with the simple subject line, “Jack is back”:

This AirBnB email is a great example of unique email marketing tactics.

It wasn’t sent between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. like the rest of the newsletters I receive. It was sent at 5 a.m. It was the first thing on my mind when I woke up, and stayed with me all day, unlike the other newsletters that I deleted in a haste during my lunch break.

How can your marketing campaign stand out from all the other eager holiday marketers? Create a campaign outside of the norm that capitalizes on its differences.

Are you looking to boost your holiday marketing strategy? Contact Sweet Rose Studios for assistance!