How to Get Your Online Business Ready for the Holiday Season

The holiday season is coming up quickly with Black Friday less than a month away. It’s that time of the year when shoppers around the world start spending more and more to take advantage of those holiday deals. Just last year, the average Australian shopper planned to spend over $300 during the holidays. Catching the eyes of those spenders should be the top priority for every business during this time.

Millions of Aussies will be looking to spend their money in the next few months, so businesses just need to get their attention. Thankfully, that can be accomplished with just a little know-how and some careful planning. Let’s dive right in and see what can be done to fully capitalise on the upcoming holidays.

Always Plan Ahead

Planning in advance for the holiday season is essential. November and December contain many holidays, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) in November, Christmas and Boxing day in December, and then the New Year. The different holidays need separate marketing materials, which means a lot needs to happen in a short period of time. Preparing for these events earlier means a business will have plenty of content and material they’ll be able to seamlessly roll out when the time comes. We suggest preparing at least three months in advance, but it’s always best to start when you can.

Get Your Website Ready

Potential customers will be doing plenty of online shopping and research, so getting your website ready for that time is critical. Even if your website isn’t set up for online shopping, it should be set up to convey sales and other information to shoppers.

• Prepare creative assets. Design assets on your site, such as hero banners, should be changed or adjusted to reflect the holidays and important sales.
• Pre-build your website pop-ups. Pop-ups are helpful for informing potential customers of the best deals available, providing them with coupon codes, and giving them the opportunity to sign up for newsletters.
• Create an easy shopping experience. When customers are shopping around for the best place to buy what they want, it’s more important than ever to ensure the online shopping experience is fast, simple, and seamless. Navigating your website should be obvious, and it should always be easy for shoppers to find their cart. Adding extra conveniences like free shipping will also make your store more appealing.
• Conduct load testing in advance. It’s possible that there will be more shoppers on your site than it’s used to once the holidays roll around. Whenever possible, test that your site will be able to handle the extra traffic.

Prepare Your Email Marketing Strategy

Your EDM marketing digital strategy is a critical component of the holiday season as it’s the best tool at your disposal to inform your subscribers of your holiday deals. If you don’t let them know you’re doing anything, they may not even think to check out your store. With this in mind, you’ll need to design and prepare an EDM flow for your subscribers, come up with some exclusive EDM offers, and put together all the copy and assets for a successful EDM campaign. As the market is more competitive at this time of the year, it’s important to also include personalisation whenever possible to get spenders to pay attention to you.

Put Together Your Holiday Ads

In such a competitive market, you’ll want to take advantage of every marketing opportunity you can. With the amount that shoppers are spending during the holidays, ads are generally a wise investment. You’ll need to prepare social media ad creatives and copy. Make sure to advertise on social media that will reach your target audience. Targeting previous customers with these ads is a great way to increase your chances of a high ROI on those ads.

If you haven’t already, expanding your marketing to TikTok is also a great way to reach new audiences. Putting together Google ads structure and copy should also be a high priority.

5 Ways to Improve the Holiday Season Experience

Outside the standard digital marketing strategies you’ll want to employ for a successful holiday season, here are some general tips to improve your efforts and your customers’ experiences.

1. Make sure you’re fully stocked so you won’t run out with an influx of customers. Check previous season analytics so you have an idea of how much stock you’ll need.
2. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. If you have a seasonal plan you employed in previous years that worked for your business, don’t completely change that plan. Tweak what could be improved, but don’t add extra work for no reason.
3. Make sure your customers have a good shopping experience. This means having easily accessible information, a seamless online shopping experience, and satisfying customer service interactions.
4. Whenever possible, try to conduct user testing with your holiday materials. This can let you know what works and what doesn’t before the time comes, and you’ll be able to fix any issues in advance.
5. Don’t put everything on sale all at once. Create a schedule of sales over the major holiday weekends and advertise that schedule where you can. This will encourage repeat visitors who will potentially spend money during multiple visits.

Need Help Getting Everything Ready?

Taking advantage of extra spending during the holiday season is always something businesses should strive for. However, properly planning everything can be difficult, especially if this is the first holiday season for a business. There are a lot of important pieces for such a large event, and it’s easy to overlook parts of a marketing strategy that are critical to its success. When a business is low on time, it can outsource some or even all of this work to digital marketing experts.

TheHypeSociety is here to help you build your holiday marketing plan tailored to your business and your customers. If you’re not sure where to get started, let’s have a chat! Our experienced marketing and strategy teams will be happy to help guide you.