What are some strategies for advertising after the holidays?
After the holiday season has come and gone, the e-commerce season has not. A well-devised, post-Christmas marketing strategy can drive customers to your website in larger numbers than you might expect. Even better, costs after the holiday season drop, giving marketers fertile soil to test new strategies and reach new customers.
Discover three marketing tactics you should employ after the holiday season ends:
1. Understand your customer’s shopping season and when to rid yourself of stock. The end of your sale season depends on your industry. For instance, an e-commerce site will want to promote overstocked merchandise after the holiday season ends.
Harbor Freight Tools, an e-commerce site which primarily sells tools, hosts an annual blowout sale every January. During this sale, items on their site are up to 84% off. Although Harbor Freight specializes in low priced tools, their January sale is “The Biggest Sale.”
2. Try something new in the digital realm. Starting a paid campaign post-holiday is a great way to test the waters if you’ve never run one before. For retailers, popular keywords run at high costs during the holiday shopping season, but dip when the season ends.
Below are the cost-per-click rates for one of our clients, an apparel retailer, both during the holiday season and after. Notice the price differential between the two during and after the holiday season. These low costs make the post-holiday months of January and February a prime time to test a paid strategy.
The end of the holiday season generally sees less search volume. Therefore, your budget for an effective PPC campaign can remain relatively low throughout this time period. And since many retailers reign in their spending after the holidays, competition tends to be less, which can lead to cheaper costs per click (CPCs).
Remarketing (or retargeting) ads are another effective way to bring in repeat customers. You went heavy on your ad spending over the holidays; take advantage of the traffic you gained by re-engaging those visitors. If you’re not already building audiences from your website visitors, get the Google Remarketing Tag and the Facebook Pixel on your site now (Go ahead. We’ll wait).
These tracking codes cookie your website visitors, regardless of how they got to your website. You can then follow these users with banners, videos, and other creative to remind them of your brand and encourage them to come back to your website.
Forrester Research and eMarketer produced a report that shows trends in marketing channels online vs. offline over the next five years. One conclusion from the study is that by 2018, the average firm is expected to allocate 41% of their marketing budget to online, and this rate is expected to grow to 45% by 2020.
Marketing is going digital at a rapid pace and the low costs of the holidays make this time of year ideal to test your own campaign if your company has been hesitant to test the digital landscape.
3. Offer post-holiday specific incentives. Typically during the holiday season, consumers are on your site shopping for presents or gift cards for loved ones. Offer them a little something for themselves. Whether that’s a gift card, frequent shopper rewards, or coupons, give your customers a reason to return after the holidays.
To produce a revenue stream after the holiday season, these rewards should involve a post-holiday specific call to action. Offering incentives and rewards can be a powerful motivator in creating return shoppers.
DSW, for example, offers a $20 Bonus Card whenever you purchase $100 in gift cards. However, you can only redeem these rewards during a specific window of time – after the new year.
Notice the gift card does not arrive to the customer until January 4th via email, giving the customer an incentive to buy DSW products for themselves after they give away their purchased gift cards. This also adds another customer name to the all-important email list.
That’s a Wrap
Before the New Year, make a resolution. Invest in your business’ advertising potential by employing these marketing strategies! For more help planning your marketing tactics in the new year, contact SEOM Interactive.
December 19, 2017