Until not so long ago, the Holidays rhymed with decorated windows, Coca Cola commercials on TV and letters to Santa Claus. Instead, in the age of e-commerce, it’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Amazon, Zalando, and Shein wishlists that take center stage. What doesn’t change is the substance: the December holidays are one of the most important sales opportunities for any B2C company.
So how do you manage to get into the minds of consumers and be the top brand of mind when it comes to choosing gifts?
In this article you’ll find our 10 tips for planning a strategy that will not only allow you to sell more over the holiday season, but also help you build customer loyalty and strengthen your brand…in the run-up to next Christmas.
Get the reindeer, mistletoe and gingerbread ready, let’s get going!
1: Start at the right time
When it comes to discounts and promotions with the goal of boosting sales, one of the most important factors to consider is timing. Even at Christmas, starting too early brings with it the risk of tiring the user out, and thus not having their attention when they are ready to buy. Starting too late, on the other hand, means missing out on numerous conversion opportunities.
But which time is the right time?
In Italy, people prefer to buy gifts earlier than the week of Christmas. This means that your campaigns should ideally start between November and early December in order to reach your target audience at the right time. Just in the Bel Paese, consumers have been particularly receptive to Black Friday: in recent years, interest in this event has increased by 3000%.
The trend of anticipating the holiday season shopping in late November unites all of Europe, with 30% of consumers intending to shop during Black Friday. So has launching promotional campaigns during this period become an imperative? Not always: we’ve talked about it here on the blog as well.
So the advice is to study your target audience to understand when they are most likely to buy, and define your strategy accordingly. You’ll also need to take into account the duration of the entire customer journey, to coincide the moment of conversion with the period when you have active discounts.
2: Speak to their emotions
It is said that at Christmas we are all better off. ✨
Perhaps this statement is not entirely realistic, but what is certain is that at Christmas we all want to feel better, more generous, and closer to important people. Simply put, during the Holidays people are looking for excitement.
According to research in the United Kingdom, 47 percent of consumers want brands at Christmas to convey happiness, while 44 percent seek warm and friendly communication, and 31 percent a sense of nostalgia. Thus, successful brands are those that can satisfy this need without losing sight of their identity.
According to neuromarketing, receiving an appreciated gift increases levels of oxytocin, the hormone that regulates attachment and bonding. In contrast, the urgency of having to choose gifts leads to forms of anxiety: we do not know what to give, nor whether the person we are giving it to will like it. In your strategy, you need to be able to best dose these two emotions, leveraging the need to choose gifts quickly, but also reassuring the client by emphasizing the best feelings the gift will elicit.
Especially, both written and visual communication will play a key role in conveying the intangible elements of the experience, which go beyond the object itself. The feelings the person will experience, the excitement of the gift delivery, the connections it will create between the giver and the receiver-all of this must be told so that you are no longer selling a simple product, but an unforgettable moment of sharing.
3: Know their wishes
If your goal is to get on your customers’ wishlist, it goes without saying that you will have to ask what their desires actually are.
According to Facebook research, the hardship and distress born of the health emergency has led many more people to pamper themselves with small gratifications. In fact, 74 percent of consumers shopping at Christmas time say they are looking for gifts for themselves, not just for others. Personal care products such as cosmetics and makeup, as well as affordable luxury goods, tech gadgets and tasty foods are some of the things we buy most frequently to stay optimistic and reward ourselves. If you sell such products, therefore, you can use the leverage of “treating yourself to a well-deserved gift” to your advantage.
At Christmas, then, people are more willing to experiment. In fact, 64 percent of consumers say they have tried new products during the holiday season more than during the rest of the year. This means that Christmas is a perfect opportunity to reach a new audience of potential customers, for example by leveraging partnerships with influencers or adv campaigns aimed at targets similar to yours.
Finally, as we mentioned in the previous point, people at Christmas place more importance on emotions, and therefore also on the values of the brands they interact with. 74 percent of users want brands to communicate on social channels during the Christmas season, and most of them are looking for social responsibility and authenticity as well as discounts and information.
READ ALSO: Inclusive marketing: a guide for brands and companies.
4: Study habits
Digitization has changed the way consumers shop for Christmas, and the lockdown period around the world has made e-commerce even more important. That’s why analyzing how your target audience’s shopping habits change is critical at this time in history.
In particular, it is Generation-X and Baby Boomers who are the groups that are most rapidly developing new consumer habits: according to Facebook, 80 percent of people in these age groups say they use mobile devices to give Christmas gifts, and about 40 percent of them reveal that they plan to shop online more frequently after the pandemic.
TikTok also shared statistics on consumer habits at Christmas, obviously focusing on the use of its app for new product discovery. For example, 47 percent of social users believe they are most likely to be inspired by TikTok’s content when choosing gifts, while 84 percent say they will do their shopping online. An interesting finding relates to spending intentions: 2 out of 3 users want to spend more on gifts this year, up 9% from 2020. As many as 57% of users, finally, say they start looking for gifts before October, and some even in June!
5: Plan your communication
This last piece of data presented by TikTok brings with it another piece of advice: carefully plan your communication in advance. Starting to talk about Christmas in August is unnecessary and may in fact prove counterproductive, but already knowing what products you will be pushing during the holidays can be the key to kick-starting an effective customer journey.
Between September and October, in fact, you could begin to intensify communication related to these items to create interest and desire in customers’ minds. A few weeks before Black Friday, then, you can announce the arrival of discounts, to increase attention to the brand.
During the promo period, most of the communication will be aimed at conversion, to activate the interested user through remarketing or capture the interest of particularly money-saving-minded prospects. Between the last week of November and the beginning of December, on the other hand, you can take a more emotional approach, to reach people who are less sensitive to discounts, as well as take advantage of what we said in point 2 of this list.
Finally, in the last weeks of Christmas you can leverage last-minute gifts, but we’ll talk about that in a later point!
6: Create an omnichannel strategy.
Although COVID has resulted in a big boost in sales from e-commerce, don’t overlook customers’ interest in the in-store experience. Especially during the Christmas season, visiting their favorite stores set up for the Holidays is an integral part of the gift-giving experience for many people.
In addition, various research shows that consumers will tend to return more and more to shopping in physical stores than they did in 2020, especially in the case of certain product categories such as beer and wine, personal care items, household goods, and cosmetics.
Consequently, if your business has both online and offline sales channels, you will need to pay special attention to the omnichannel component of the strategy. This means first and foremost that the conversion funnel should be designed with the user in mind that he or she might inquire online and conclude the purchase offline (a mode called webrooming), or conversely visit the store to touch the products and buy online at cheaper prices (showrooming).
On the other hand, there are people who visit stores without a specific purchase intention, but may remain interested in the brand and visit other online touchpoints later. With careful remarketing activities, it is possible to convert these simple visitors into customers.
Where channel integration exists, however, there can be no lack of differentiation. Creating a series of online and offline touchpoints that are copies of each other would waste the potential of each. The best path is to give the user a valid and unique reason to choose that channel: in-store for the experience, website for the assortment, social for inspiration, third-party retailer for convenience, etc.
7: Remember last-minute gifts
Don’t lie: you too have had to think of a last-minute gift at least once so you don’t arrive on December 25 empty-handed!
A few paragraphs ago we anticipated to you that the last weeks before Christmas should be devoted to catching the attention of all the relevant latecomers, leveraging the urgency of finding the perfect gift.
One possible avenue is to offer gift cards for your online or offline store, so as to take the guesswork out of gift-giving, and the anxiety of an unappreciated gift. At Christmas 2020, gift cards depopulated, aided by the reluctance of consumers to visit physical stores at the peak of contagion: in the U.S., sales were up 17.6 percent from the previous year.
This type of gift could prove to be in high demand again this year, and thus be an attractive solution for your business, as it is quite simple and inexpensive to implement both online and offline.
The key, in this case, lies in the way the gift card is proposed to the user: in the communication you will have to emphasize the emotional elements of the gift, turning what might seem like a trivial choice into something desirable.
How? Well, it depends on what you are selling and to whom!
8: Get ready for Christmas 2022. Measure…
If in the first tip of this list we talked about the right time to start your Christmas campaign, now instead we want to tell you when you should start thinking about next Christmas. And that time is NOW!
All jokes aside, Christmas can be a golden opportunity to gather data, insights and information about your customers and the market more generally, which can be leveraged not only for the upcoming holidays, but also for the nearest New Year’s strategy. During this period, in fact, it is very likely that traffic volumes on your social pages, on your website and even in your point of sale is bound to increase.
Our suggestion is to do the best possible set-up of your analytics and marketing automation tools, so that you have everything ready for when your channels are flooded with the throngs of old and new contacts. You can find several insights about this on our blog:
- E-commerce Analytics
- Google Analytics VS Facebook Analytics
- Marketing Automation: perché è importante e come sfruttarla
9: …build loyalty…
The Christmas season is not only important for boosting sales in the short term, but also for laying the groundwork for those in the following months. For example, some people decide to wait until the end-of-year sales for their purchases (estimated at as many as 50 percent of consumers in the U.S.), or they prefer to wait to set aside some extra change. Whatever the reason, you cannot afford to focus all your attention on the holidays, leaving the period ahead uncovered.
Instead, the goal of your Christmas strategy should be to build loyalty with your customers, creating a deep connection that goes beyond just immediate savings. With this in mind, communication should always keep brand values firmly in mind and return an image that is consistent with what is done during the rest of the year.
