Mastering Holiday Marketing: Your Ecommerce Holiday Readiness Guide

The holiday retail season is the crescendo of the retail symphony, a time when meticulous preparation meets opportunity. As the anticipation builds towards the holiday shopping season, your ecommerce holiday readiness can mean the difference between capturing online shoppers and having a successful season versus a challenging one. Our expertly crafted guide is the companion you need, offering a wealth of essential tips that will navigate you through the festive hustle and bustle.

And the best part? These tips are great all year round!

From establishing a robust digital foundation to leveraging post-purchase momentum, we provide you with the tools to set up, launch, and manage your holiday campaigns with finesse. You’ll learn how to connect with your audience on a deeper level, create compelling offers that resonate, and use data-driven insights to power this season’s success and lay the groundwork for future triumphs.

As the holiday decorations go up, let’s ensure your sales do, too. It's time to unwrap the strategies that will place your business at the top of every shopper’s list.

It's important to have foundations in place and get the most out of your email marketing platform. Tip 1 is all about optimizing your online presence by connecting your store and setting up site tracking.

• Sync your store and customer shopping data with your marketing platform to improve your conversion rate. Make it easy to send abandoned cart messaging, product recommendations, and more.
• Last year, ActiveCampaign customers boosted their online sales by recovering 128% more orders from abandoned carts during Black Friday! This wouldn't be possible without connecting their stores.
• Site tracking allows you to create different audiences or segments and trigger email campaigns based on website visits and actions. View and track individual contact website interactions within our platform.

Now that you’ve synced your store and set up site tracking, the next step is to drop some forms on your site. How else will you email your current and potential new customers? ActiveCampaign’s form builder makes collecting the data you need easy and customizing the forms to match your brand. Then, embed the forms to your site.

• Forms allow you to gather valuable contact information and build relationships with potential customers even before the big sale begins.
• Use that contact information to personalize messaging and segment audiences. (We’ll get into segmentation in Tip 4)
• Hipcooks​, an ActiveCampaign customer with a 70% retention rate, informed their customers they'd be sharing holiday deals in their newsletter. This is a great way to grow your list and build hype around upcoming promotions.

Whether you’re planning a flash sale or a month-long celebration, creating irresistible special offers is the heart of a successful holiday sales campaign. This may be promotional discounts, new product launches, or something else suitable to your business. The key is ensuring your offer aligns with your customer’s needs and preferences. Take time to analyze your sales data and identify popular products or categories.

Once you’ve planned your offer or promotion, don’t let the other details get lost in the shuffle. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

• Plan how you want to market your promotion. Get creative with your offering and stand out in the inbox and online. It takes people less than 3 seconds to decide if they'll open your email and only 11 seconds to keep their attention.
• Create a sense of urgency with your promotions. Over half of social media users regularly experience FOMO. Whether it's limited time windows, special edition products, or once-a-year pricing, the fear of missing out is especially effective with holiday marketing strategies.

Need some inspiration to get started? Here’s a round-up of our 10 all-time best Black Friday emails, or check out our library of 250+ email templates​.

Segmentation and personalization are key to creating customer loyalty. Tailoring your holiday promotions to specific customer segments, including loyal customers, can significantly boost your sales and engagement. You have a ton of data at your disposal now that you’ve connected your store, set up site tracking, and added forms to your site. Let’s dive into how to segment your audience and personalize your marketing.

• Create a variety of segments in ActiveCampaign using fields, tags, site tracking, email engagement, contact scores, purchase data, and so much more.
• Check out our guide to segmentation that dives deeper into why segmentation matters and how to build segments.

Take those segments and build deeply personalized customer experiences within your marketing efforts. ActiveCampaign customers have doubled their click-through rates using personalization.

Get ready to captivate your audience across multiple sales channels by ensuring your marketing campaigns and marketing materials are ready to go during the busy holiday season. There’s a lot that will go into this tip. We cover emails, SMS, automations, social media, and paid advertising.

Before you get into your platforms, make sure you’ve crafted compelling and visually appealing content that highlights your offers and conveys a sense of urgency. You’ll want to maintain consistent communication with your audience leading up to, during, and after the holiday weekend. So, let’s dive right into it!

• Our drag-and-drop email designer allows you to elevate your emails this holiday. Showcase your featured products, add coupons directly in the emails, and use our AI tool to bring fresh ideas to your copy. Once your emails are ready to go, schedule them out instead of waiting to manually send them the day of.

• Here’s a list of the top revenue-generating and other must-have automations to build out ahead of time:

  • Engagement tagging: Add tags to your contact’s profile based on site visits or marketing engagement
  • Abandoned cart: The holiday season is a critical time for most ecommerce businesses. Refresh your existing one or create a new abandoned cart automation. Reduce wait time between emails sent for this shortened holiday period. On average, ActiveCampaign customers see 8% of abandoned carts recovered—think of what that additional revenue can do for your business.
  • Order status: Send emails triggered by order status like failed payments or refund notifications.
  • Post-purchase follow-ups: Follow up with your customers post-purchase; it’s the perfect time to ask them to review their purchase or share on social channels like TikTok and LinkedIn.

  Paid ads are a powerful marketing tool for businesses. During the holiday season, it’s a great way to build brand awareness or retarget those who have previously shown interest. Our integrations with Facebook and Google ads allow you to generate awareness and get qualified leads with automated lead generation, set up custom audiences based on prospect's interactions, and track success rates from ad campaigns to customer conversions, all in one place.

Focus on customer satisfaction by learning what to do after your customer’s purchase. The journey doesn't end after the sale; it's essential to maintain a positive relationship with your new (and existing) customers.

• Send a personalized thank you email to show your appreciation.
• Follow up post-purchase with cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Encourage them to come back for more.
• Encourage customer reviews by asking them to review their purchase and share it on social media.
• Offer loyalty program discounts to drive repeat purchases and foster brand loyalty.

The holiday season doesn’t end when your promotion does. You’ve got to collect data, understand performance, know what worked, what you can improve upon, and (gasp!) even start thinking about your next holiday season.

• Analyze customer behavior and the performance of your promotions, emails, social media, and paid efforts.
• Really dive into what products (or services) drove your sales. Was there something that didn’t work at all? Dig into why and how you can improve on that. You can gain a lot of insights from this peak season to use for your business every day.
• Keep all of your reporting in one place to refer back to. Make sure you have screenshots, records, or you can easily refer back to your creative assets.
• This data will be valuable for refining your future marketing strategies and preparing for peak ecommerce sales during other holidays.

As the festive lights dim and the last of the holiday decorations are packed away, the strategies and insights you've gathered here will continue to illuminate your path to e-commerce success. The journey through this peak shopping season of the year might be challenging, but with the right preparation and tools, your holiday retail sales can also be incredibly rewarding.

For those looking to enhance their holiday marketing, our e-commerce marketing calendar is an invaluable resource. It’s not just a list of dates; it's a repository of creative ideas to help you engage with customers, showcase your brand’s unique value, and gradually warm up your email list in anticipation of major holidays.

In addition, staying abreast of current consumer shopping trends is crucial for any e-commerce business aiming to remain relevant and competitive. Insights into consumer behavior can help tailor your campaigns to meet your customers' evolving needs and preferences, ensuring your marketing efforts resonate and result in conversions.

ActiveCampaign is more than just a platform; it's a partner in your e-commerce journey. With comprehensive tools to craft compelling email campaigns and automations, you can transform holiday planning into a seamless, stress-free process. Harness the power of our platform to not only navigate the holiday rush but also to pave the way for continued growth and success.

Let these tips be your guide, not just for this holiday season but for all the bustling peaks that lie ahead. And remember, while the holidays may be temporary, the relationships you build with your customers are lasting. Use every interaction as an opportunity to deepen those connections and keep your brand at the forefront of their minds—all year round.