It's never too early to start planning for the busiest time of the year. These quick tips will help you lay the groundwork for a successful holiday season.
Published: September 25, 2024
The hustle and bustle of the holidays are just around the corner, and for marketers, now is the perfect time to start preparing. These tips will help you lay the groundwork for a successful holiday season, so you won’t miss a beat once things start to get hectic.
Growing your audience is always important, but it becomes even more significant when you’re competing with a bunch of other businesses for holiday shoppers. Those new contacts can have a major impact on your bottom line, too. During the 2023 Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend, 65% of orders that Mailchimp customers with connected stores received were from new customers. By working to build up a larger audience of potential customers now, you’ll have a head start on your competition when the holiday season is in full swing.
Make it easy for new people to subscribe. Design a landing page or add a customizable form to your website so visitors can quickly sign up to receive your emails. Consider the information that might be useful to know about new contacts heading into the holidays—like their address, interests, or how often they want to receive updates from you, for example—and be sure to add those fields to your forms.
Reach new audiences on social media. After you’ve published your forms or landing pages, sharing links or posting ads on your social media channels like Facebook or Instagram can help you drive traffic to them.
Offer incentives. One of the best ways to encourage folks to sign up for your mailing list is by offering them something in return. You could send new subscribers a discount code to use on their next purchase or enter them into a giveaway or content. Or, maybe you’d like to give them a free item or provide a link to a downloadable ebook. Think about the types of offers that would grab the interest of your audience and implement them into your marketing efforts.
Each time someone buys something from your store, subscribes to your newsletter, or clicks on your ads, they’re providing you with valuable data. And when you collect all of that data in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or an email marketing and automations platform like Mailchimp, you can organize (and utilize) it in a way that makes sense for your business as the holiday season approaches.
Look for trends in your data. If your email marketing platform provides you with a holistic view of your contact data—like Mailchimp’s audience dashboard—use it to quickly identify (and act on) patterns or trends. In just a glance at the Mailchimp audience dashboard, for example, you can learn where your contacts live, which signup sources they’ve used, and how they’re interacting with your email. Then, turn those insights into actions by launching new campaigns based on the data or using it to inform your holiday marketing plans. Mailchimp users can even benefit from tools like customer lifetime value and purchase likelihood to identify your most valuable customers—and which people might need extra attention before the holidays.
Create segments and tags. The holidays are a hectic time for all businesses, which means that you’ll have more competition for your audience’s attention. Think about the different ways you could segment your contacts—based on interests, purchase habits, or location, perhaps—and plan to target them with personalized content and seasonal promotions they’re sure to love. Consider adding custom tags to your contacts based on the other stuff you know about them—like if they’re a social media influencer or a client you met at a trade show—and use that info to send targeted content, too.
Automations work around the clock to help you send the right message to the right people at the right time. They’re a valuable marketing tool throughout the year, and if you build and implement them now—with Mailchimp’s Customer Journey Builder, for example—they can be an essential timesaver for you when the holiday season arrives.
The months leading up to the holiday season are a great time to revisit your marketing goals and reflect on your performance throughout the year so far. And, if you’re a Mailchimp user, you can take advantage of reporting tools that will help provide the insights you need to determine what’s working (and what isn’t) so you can make adjustments before the busiest time of the year gets underway.