It’s no secret that we think about the holiday spirit ahead of time. It’s not just about cooking delicious food, baking cookies, or wearing fancy clothes – spending time with family and friends is what makes the holiday season special.
Most of us work tirelessly for months and anxiously wait for the holiday season to kick in because we need a reset after working day in day out.
On the flip side, businesses set their marketing budgets and plan marketing strategies for the holiday season. New Year and Christmas are the most popular holidays hands down.
If you’re wondering how to make the most of this time of year or how you can boost sales during the holiday season, you’re at the right place.
It’s a bit difficult to cherry-pick the best marketing strategies for the holidays that bring a ton of sales.
Therefore, I want to share a handful of strategies with you that will help you boost your sales during the holiday season.
Since you’re reading this article on the official Replug blog, it shows that you’re well aware of social media marketing techniques.
It seems like all you need is a sense of direction to milk the sales opportunities coming your way.
But before we dig deeper into those tactics to drive more attention to our products or services for getting more sales, let’s put some light on some prerequisites that make all the difference.
3 Essentials for Boosting Sales in the Holiday Season
Before hand-picking several strategies to boost sales during the holidays, it’s necessary to get prepared beforehand.
Here are the things brands need to do for boosting sales during the holiday season:
I. Limited-time discount offer
Who doesn’t want to save money when buying new stuff? Preparing a noticeable limited-time discount offer gives you an edge over the competition.
Discounts provide prospective customers with a reason to pay attention to the offers. So try to leverage the holiday season by offering limited-time discounts on your products or services.
You can do this through the use of countdown pop-ups on your website that has a clock counting down until the offer is no longer valid to create a sense of urgency.
II. Promotional strategy
A promotion strategy is a must when it comes to boosting your sales. Otherwise, nobody is going to notice your discounts no matter how amazing your (discount) offers are.
Use content as a pedestal to showcase your offers. All you need is to come up with a content strategy that inducts your promotional offer into the content, and this marketing tactic is known as content marketing. It is one of the most common promotional strategies to attract, engage, and convert the audience into paying customers.
You can test out different types of content such as articles, videos, podcasts, pictures, and infographics across social media.
III. Social media automation
One of the rookie mistakes newbie marketers make is that they only focus on creating good quality content, but they never pay attention to the distribution. The point is that most beginners only share their content once or twice before they go on the holidays.
What these newbie marketers need is to have a social media automation plan to run their social media marketing on autopilot even when they’re on the holidays. You can read more on social media automation by clicking here.
So these were three essentials of boosting your sales during the holidays.
Let’s head over to the cream of this article.
10 Strategies to Boost Your Sales in the Holiday Season
Without any further ado, now take a look at the strategies you need to make the most of your holiday season from the sales standpoint:
1. Get festive with your social media appearance
You might be thinking that I’m going to mention the discount offer strategy straight away – not so fast. I’ll get there but first, hear me out on this one.
It’s important to start on the right foot if you want to crush it with your holiday season marketing strategy.
Before you start brainstorming about social media publishing, content creation, and discount offers, you must change your social media accounts’ appearance.
It won’t hurt to get a little bit festive during the holiday season. So here’s what you can do with your social media accounts appearance during the holidays:
- Add holiday season profile covers across all social media platforms
- Change your display picture with a festive one
- Use holiday emojis across social media
- Share festive group photos of colleagues or family
So these were a few things you can try out to be a little bit more festive on social media.
Screaming Frog is SEO software. Their team knows what it means to be festive on social media.
Check out their tweet during Christmas time:
One of the popular business practices on social media during the holiday season is that celebs and influencers share their pictures of enjoying the holiday festivities.
Here’s the tweet from Harry Maguire:
If you aren’t comfortable with sharing your photos, then it’s totally normal. You can write text posts, design image posts, or make a Slideshare – there are so many content formats you can try out to put out holiday season content.
2. Create a content calendar for holidays
I don’t want to bombard you with all these holiday sales strategies because it could get overwhelming. But if you look around, these are quite common tactics that most brands follow to get during the holiday season.
One of the strategies to boost sales during the holiday season is creating a content calendar for the holiday season.
A content calendar is a content plan that maps out the whole publishing schedule for a specific period across multiple platforms.
Hubspot published an article on popular social media content calendars. Plus, they were offering a social media content templates pack through a lead magnet.
It doesn’t have to be a fancy social media management tool, but instead, you can use any free or paid content planner template or spreadsheet.
As far as the effectiveness of the content calendar is concerned, it allows brands to post more often on social media, and thus it brings more eyeballs around.
ContentStudio has a content planner that enables you to plan your social media content ahead of time.
3. Make a social media marketing strategy for the holiday season
Holidays are about spending time with family, and no one wants to do the tedious work chores when they’re at home during the off days. Therefore, social media publishing could easily be ignored during this time of the year.
So pre-planning your social media marketing strategy for the holiday season is the best way to have fun while your social media marketing stays on the course.
If you already have a content plan ready, then a social media marketing strategy would essentially become a whole lot easier to create. The reason is that you would have a handful of content to play around with.
However, it doesn’t end here because you may have to go the extra mile. So try to compile ideas, thoughts, and inspiration for creating several social media posts for at least a week or so.
Nobody can tell you what you should create for your social media campaign for holidays except for you. If you’re having a hard time figuring out what to create for your increased social media engagement, then don’t panic.
Here’s what to do: you can either take inspiration from a competitor or take a look at your top previous social media posts.
Here are the key ingredients of a social media marketing campaign:
- A handful of content ideas for tweets, posts, images, and videos. Use Airtable or Google Docs to gather the ideas for the content.
- An online graphics tool for designing social media images, infographics, and thumbnails. Check out Canva or Desygner for creating social media content.
- A social media automation tool for streamlining social media posts for the holidays. Use ContentStudio for social media management.
- A URL shortener like Replug to keep your links short and sweet.
- A collaboration tool that provides a seamless communication channel for exchanging ideas and suggestions. If you have not been using any collaboration tool such as Asana or Trello, then you should give it a try.
Once you have a social media strategy for the holidays in place, you won’t have to worry about what goes on your social media channels anymore.
4. Offer discounts on products or services
One of the most popular sales strategies during the holiday season is discount offers. Most of the retail and B2C businesses try to cash in on the holiday season by offering discounts on the products or services.
The discounts may vary from industry to industry, but it’s undoubtedly an attention-grabbing strategy for the brands.
SAAS businesses, website services, and e-commerce companies use social media, email newsletters, and SMS marketing to engage the audience about the discounts.
It’s a tried-and-test strategy to boost sales for the brands. Plus, a vast majority of customers also wait for the holiday season to buy the products or services at lower prices.
Here’s an example of a discount offer via email newsletter:
I won’t be surprised if your inbox gets flooded with discount offers during Christmas and New Year time.
However, the takeaway is that maybe you should also try to capitalize on the holiday season by offering discounts on your products or services.
5. Increase affiliate commissions
Affiliate marketers love when companies increase affiliate commissions even for a limited time. It’s a sales-boosting strategy that companies adopt to spice up their sales, especially during the holiday season.
It’s a shame if you haven’t launched an affiliate program for your business because you’re missing out on a lot of extra sales that affiliates could bring in every month.
Relative: Affiliate Marketing Guide for Beginners
Anyway, it’s not rocket science that you can increase sales just by bumping up the affiliate commissions a little bit.
When you offer more commissions to the affiliates, they’re likely to pay close attention to your offer and push your product or service more than ever.
For example, I received this email from Amalinks Pro:
They increased their affiliate commission from 30% to 50% during the Black Friday season.
It’s a no-brainer that when you offer more money, you’re likely to get more attention, and eventually, you’ll earn more money.
6. Place a topbar on the website header
Grabbing a discount coupon code and emailing it to the subscribers isn’t going to cut it. Instead, you may have to be on your toes to get the desired results.
Have you ever noticed that companies send out discount emails at least three times during the holidays? The reason is that they want to make sure that you check it out, just in case.
One of the tactics you should try out to boost sales during the holidays is to place a top bar on the website header. A topbar usually consists of a text line with a CTA button that sends the visitors to a specific offer page. Plus, sometimes, companies use the top bar to share the discount coupon code directly.
Either way, it’s an essential strategy to attract websites visitors to your offer. If you regularly visit websites, then you must have a bunch of websites using this strategy.
I came across Corel’s website; they’re using this tactic:
Here’s another example from Wondershare:
Placing a topbar with a coupon code or a CTA on the website header is quite popular among software companies and sales prospecting tools to drive traffic to their sales pages.
It does boost their sales, especially during the holiday season when prospective customers are hungry for the discount offer.
7. Run social media ad campaigns to promote discounted products
Paid ads are a vital part of digital marketing, and it’s nearly impossible to simply rely on the organic reach on social media and content marketing no matter how good you’re at these tactics.
The idea behind paid advertising on social media is that it elevates the attention on social media channels and puts the limited-time offer in front of a larger audience.
It isn’t a made-up thing, but instead, I have seen brands trying this strategy for the past few years, and it seems like it has been working for most of them.
Curiosity Stream is a popular OTP platform for documentaries. The team at Curiosity Stream knows how promoting discounted offers through paid ads works.
Take a look at their Facebook ads:
Here’s a search ad in Google:
I came across both their ad campaigns while searching about them. It validates my point of running social media ad campaigns to promote discount offers.
In the bid to boost sales during the holiday season, it won’t be ideal to skip social media advertising. So it’s safe to say that your social media ad-running especially google ads retargeting strategy skills would come in handy here.
8. Setup an email automation campaign for the holidays
Email automation is a set of email newsletters that are scheduled for a specific time or event. The series of emails trigger once a certain action takes place.
Often it’s the sign-up process that sends out a list of emails to the subscriber over the next few days. Whereas, sometimes, it could also be a scheduled email to the entire email subscriber base.
When it comes to setting up an email automation campaign for the holidays, it’s most likely to be around discount offers.
The discounts are a massive attention-seeker that almost every social media ad and email marketing campaign for the holiday season revolves around this.
Take a look at an email from MailMunch:
My inbox is full of Christmas and New Year discount offers at the moment.
Plus, most brands know how this works, so they send discount emails multiple times throughout the holiday season, especially if you don’t open the email.
9. Collaborate with influencers to promote your products
Influencer marketing is a rapidly growing monetization method for social media gurus, content creators, and industry experts.
On the other hand, brands find influencer marketing quite affordable as compared to other types of paid marketing. Plus, several platforms help you make a ton of money just by collaborating with brands.
Most businesses try out various sales and marketing channels to sell more during the holiday season. Therefore, business owners try to milk every opportunity they could get their hands on.
There is no harm in collaborating with influencers across different social media platforms. You may not have heard about it, but you could get paid for Instagram posts.
Monthly is a popular online courses platform that teaches you to skill in under 30 days or so. The course platform collaborated with Casey Neistat, who is a famous filmmaker and YouTuber from New York. Casey has over 12 million YouTube subscribers.
Check out the collaboration video Casey posted on YouTube:
I’m sure thousands of die-hard Casey fans would have signed up for his $249 film-making course. The reason I’m confident that it would have been worked out pretty well because I have been following this YouTube influencer for a long time.
Once Casey did some crowdfunding for a UPS guy and it went very well. Every time he pushes something to the audience, people go out of their way to support his cause.
Anyway, it solidifies that influencer marketing could turn things around for any business or brand that wants to crank up sales during the holidays.
10. Send multiple push notifications to the subscribers
If you haven’t had a chance to try out the push notifications, then you might be missing out on a lot of website traffic opportunities.
Companies send out push notifications to the subscribers which opt for receiving those notifications. These are mobile and web alerts that notify you about the new content or the latest product.
You could use this engagement strategy to increase your holiday season sales by sending the latest discount offers to push notification subscribers.
AliExpress is a widely popular e-commerce company that works with both B2B and B2C consumers. Besides using several digital marketing and advertising channels, they also use push notifications to re-engage their subscribers and bring them back to their platform.
Take a look at the screenshot below:
Here are a few of the popular push notification services to use:
- com
- One Signal
- Braze
- MoEngage
- CleverTap
So don’t shy away from trying out the push notification strategy to boost your holiday season sales.
This is it.
I’m sure you’re going to try at least a couple of holiday season sales strategies in the years to come.
The Final Words on Boosting Sales in the Holiday Season
You have just read the top-notch strategies to bump up your holiday sales. However, every strategy doesn’t work for every brand, which is why I highlighted several of them.
Plus, all the strategies I mentioned are backed by the examples, which tells us that successful companies are already applying these sales tactics to ramp up their sales during the holiday season.
I don’t want you to get overwhelmed by a bunch of sales strategies for the holiday season. Rather, you must know a handful of holiday sales-boosting strategies to try out.
It rarely works when you focus on several sales and marketing tactics at once – it’s hard to give your 100% to multiple sales strategies.
Therefore, hand-pick two or three during the holiday season and keep the rest for the next holidays.
Sometimes, you would have to invest in a tool or service to grasp the attention, especially when competitors are also trying to reach out to the same audience and you need a competitive advantage over them.
Which one of these holiday sales strategies for the holiday season you’re likely to try out?
Let us know in the comments below.
