The holiday shopping season is a very important time of year for most retailers and some even solely survive off this time. This year at Pure Adapt we were prepared to take it head on and make the most out of it. Early preparation and research gave us a great start to the holiday shopping season.

With the vast amount information out there on holiday marketing, I was able to gather lots of great information to take into account and implement into our own holiday marketing plan. These are some of the most important things that I’ve learned.

Start Early
Stats from 2007 showed that an estimated 37% of people started their holiday shopping before the end of October. This makes it very important to plan your holiday marketing early and having it ready for implementation. We started our holiday promotions in mid Novemeber to push customers to shop early and save big by giving them 25% off with no minimum.

Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is very important to retailers because for the most part this is the official start to the holiday shopping season. As an online retailer we were able to take advantage of the being open for the holiday so it made sense to start our Thanksgiving and holiday promotions on Thanksgiving. The entire Thanksgiving weekend is also very important because consumers expect great deals that weekend so your holiday marketing should take that in account and have some of your best promotions running. This is a big retail weekend with Thanksgiving, Black Friday through to Cyber Monday.

Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday is known to be the online shopping day to get great deals like the Black Friday for brick and mortar stores. As an online retailer we made sure to differentiate this day and offer additional specials for our customers on top of what we were doing the rest of the weekend. Slowly as online shopping continues to grow more people are also aware of Cyber Monday, making even more important for the upcoming years.

Free Shipping
In tough economic times like we are in this year, free shipping is all the more important. Consumers are doing more and more research online before they buy and if they can get free shipping on the product at a comparable price they’re likely to buy. We prepared early for this through SEO and implemented a full fledge shipping promotion for the entire month of December with free shipping on orders over $150 and $5 flat rate shipping on all other orders of course some restrictions apply.

Email Marketing
Email marketing has become an important part of my job and our marketing strategy. We have been running thorough newsletter campaigns this year and it’s been paying off. Newsletters are very cost effective with your own in house email list and has become a top marketing strategy as businesses try to cut cost.

Mondays
What is so special about Mondays? Well starting with Cyber Monday and the rest of the Mondays until Christmas, it has shown significant growth in revenue for online retailers. Mondays have become the day to shop online so it’s important to take advantage of these days and plan your some of your marketing around Monday. We’ve taken the approach to getting newsletters and announcing promotions on Sundays to push sales on Monday.

Site Reviews
The internet is becoming all the more important to consumers for research before they buy. Reviews are a great way to keep customers active and on your site. We recently added our own review system that’s been working pretty well.

Gift Cards
Gift cards are great gifts but even greater for the last minute shoppers. We offer gift certificates right through email that you can print and this makes it the ultimate last minute gift that you can even buy on Christmas day. For us gift certificates will be the final holiday push before Christmas.

Last Day for Shipping
Being an online retailer it is very important to know when the last day for shipping is and let your customers know that. This year December 17th is probably the last day for standard shipping for most but we’re even going to take it one step further by providing a Fedex map to give customers a better estimate of the last day to ship based on where the package is going. This day is also important take into account because depending what day Thanksgiving lies on, this day will give the time frame which you need to squeeze the bulk of your holiday marketing into. Thanksgiving came late this year and based on the December 17th date, it comes out to 21 days of online shopping compared to 32 in 2007.

That’s a lot information that we were able to take advantage of and hopefully taking all it into account gave us a slight edge but we won’t know till we take a good look at the numbers when the holiday season is over. I’m optimistic that we did a good job on our holiday marketing this year, but we can always do better right. When we analyze the numbers we’re already taking our first steps in preparing for the 2009 holiday season and I already can’t wait. This holiday season is starting to wind down and we’re coming down to our final marketing push before Christmas and I hope to finish strong.

I also want to wish everyone a
safe and happy holiday season!

Sources:
http://www.getelastic.com/free-holiday-email-marketing-resources/

http://www.shop.org/web/guest/industryinfo/shoporgresources

Comments (0)