How To Setup A Profitable E-Commerce Digital Marketing Campaign For The Holiday Season?

Trust us when we tell you that e-commerce has become more competitive than it was at any other time before. The good news is that the market has also grown exponentially despite the growing competition. So, while we know that e-commerce was growing for a while, it blew up, growing exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Many analysts believe that the industry grew more in 18 months than it was expected to grow in 5 years! Not to mention that leading online retail stores like Amazon, Asos, reported staggering growth, and less well know online stores also benefited during the covid pandemic, including  Au Vodka, Powerhoop and Jericho Coffee Traders.

While many people were not sure if the online shopping boom was temporary, industry experts believed it would have a long-lasting net positive effect on the ecosystem. The shift to e-commerce, according to many, is permanent, and things will only improve from here. Walmart’s Dough McMillion was quoted as saying that the company believes that customers are making the shift to essentially buying online.

Today, this is excellent news for anyone running an e-commerce store. More customers in growing markets can’t be a bad thing. But with more retailers now opening up their online counterparts, your marketing campaign this holiday season needs to be better than it ever was before!

In this article, we’ll examine what steps you can take to further improve and make your e-commerce marketing campaign more profitable this Xmas and holiday season.

Make Sure That Your Paid and Organic Strategies Complement Each Other

One of the things you need to do is clearly define goals for your online holiday marketing campaign. Sure, everyone wants to increase sales, but the answer may not be that obvious. For the most part, the goal should be to raise brand awareness and boost website traffic.

Your organic and paid search engine marketing should complement each other. Search engine optimisation, aka SEO, will help grow your organic traffic. However, you will not see results from your effort in a month. Sure, you can add terms that are highly relevant to holiday shopping which may help your business rank, but it isn’t going to be fast enough.

Your e-commerce marketing campaigns are going to work best when each aspect of the campaign aligns. So, you’ll want to align all the content marketing with SEO so that they both work for your business. For instance, make sure to add relevant seasonal blog posts, starting a couple of weeks leading up to the holiday season. Thought leadership pieces and a round-up of the best items in specific niches tend to do well depending on your niche.

You can then supercharge the results with pay-per-click advertising, which supports your SEO rankings while putting the hottest products in front of customers. However, this aspect needs to be well-planned and handled way before the holiday season approaches. But with the right approach, you can pull off big wins on a shoestring budget.

Invest In Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has come a very long way, with billions of people online at any given time and almost 80% checking their feed multiple times a day. It comes as no surprise that your online marketing campaign for the holiday season will be incomplete without rolling out a social media campaign.

Social media marketing and advertising put a business’s products right in front of those who are most likely to buy. It is a slightly different approach compared to indiscriminate advertising in magazines; for instance, social media advertising is a laser-focused marketing tool for any business. Businesses can target people in the most cost-effective way.

Before you start spending money on social media advertising, you need to know where most people who enjoy using your products or buying them socialise. Facebook and Instagram are the two big ones, owned by the same company but have two distinct audiences. Then there is YouTube, which can have a major impact with video ads or Twitter, where the audience has a slightly different inclination.

You can also leverage the power of influencer marketing. Social media is built upon a foundation of connections, with influencers having the most connections. Also, people pretty much follow and enjoy doing what influencers are doing. So, if an influencer is wearing your latest £450 leather jacket, a large section of their (influencer’s) audience will want to buy it from you. But influencer marketing is a more long-term strategy as opposed to running a campaign just a week before Christmas.

Invest In Email Marketing

While social media and influencer marketing coupled with PPC is highly effective, email marketing continues to be effective in reaching people. It is the best way to get existing clients and subscribers to take advantage of a special flash sale or deal during the holidays. It is also, for the most part, cheap.

Think about what you will offer, and make sure that your subscribers know about it before anyone else. After all, that will give other people an incentive to subscribe, making growing your email list easier.

Optimise The Checkout Process

Finally, the e-commerce sales process is just as necessary as marketing and advertising to your target customer. You will want to pay attention to every detail of the process closely. The most important part of the online sales process is checkout because it is when the deal is sealed.

Ideally, you will want to remove as much friction as possible from the process, making it quick and easy. Plus, you can throw in extras like gift wrapping for an additional fee or deliver with a blank invoice. These little touches can make a big difference to how much you sell during the holiday season.

The best way to eliminate friction from the checkout process is to not ask buyers for information you don’t need. People don’t want to give out more data than they should, and they hate filling out forms. So, you can lose a sale by asking for too much information. Think about the experience your business offers buyers and look at ways to optimise it further