Holidays present a huge opportunity for businesses to increase sales and maximize profits. But what can your business do to get the most of the upcoming holidays? Here are some great methods you can try to make the next holiday into the gift that keeps on giving.

Email Promotions

Leveraging your email lists is a great way to increase sales and promote customer loyalty. It’s very important to segment your contact lists, especially for holiday promotions. This will help you position your promotions to different audiences, enabling your messaging to be much more personal. The more personal your message is, the more likely your promotions will resonate with your publics.

For example, your contacts that subscribed from your website might be different than the customers that subscribe in-store in many ways. People that visit your brick-and-mortar store are local customers that wouldn’t find as much value in something like free shipping, but might prefer an extra 10% off from all in-store purchases.

Search Engines

Search engines are one of the greatest resources you can have for a holiday promotion. Why is that? Because everyone is always looking for a deal and they won’t have a problem taking an extra couple of steps to find them. The job of the search engine marketer is to make this process as easy as possible.

Focus on ranking for keywords with search terms like “promotion”, “sale”, or “deal” to be better found by people looking for great holiday bargains. You want to work these keywords in with whichever specific holiday you are promoting. For example, promoting personalized family Christmas ornaments“>personalized family Christmas ornaments can vary from season-to-season.

PPC Advertising Campaigns

You can bid on the same keywords you are looking to rank for on Google AdWords. While you may not get quite as much traffic, you can leverage quality traffic in a high-volume search time. These are good alternatives to search engine optimization because these campaigns can be turned around much quicker.

Thinking about a last-minute campaign? Say you’re planning an event for some Halloween fun and you need to get the word out fast to the right people. PPC Advertising is the right avenue for you!

In addition to keyword research, you can target consumers based on their interests to better predict some of their purchasing habits. Ads Manager is a great method for targeting via interests and purchasing habits on Facebook, Instagram and their affiliate sites and apps. You can also take advantage of affinity categories, such as “Engaged Shoppers”, “Luxury Shoppers”, and others.

Looking to target past website visitors? Want to focus on people who have abandoned shopping carts? Remarketing campaigns are for you!

Social Media Campaigns

Holidays are about more than a good sale, it’s also an experience and culture to promote interest in purchasing a new product. Tying in a single hashtag across all social platforms helps perpetuate a cohesive message to amplify reach and remind potential customers of your limited promotions. Social media campaigns also enable people to discuss their holiday plans on an open forum, which lets them share news about your company, whether you’re an e-commerce site or non for profit organization.

Run photo contests to get people engaged with your brand and products. Having them share your products will not only increase the initial reach of your campaign but will promote trust through your consumers. Offering small incentives are great ways to increase participation!

Here are some of the best incentives that you can use for all of your campaigns!

Promote Holiday Coupon Codes

Coupon codes provide a serious incentive for consumers to make a purchase. They also remind customers of the event and encourage them to share the codes with their friends. For example, offering a 20% discount with the coupon code “Freedom” is a great way to position your brand with a fourth of July sale.

Holiday Gift Guide

It’s important to present your merchandise as relevant gifts to the holiday you are leveraging. Gift guides provide an easy way for potential customers to find your products positioned as gifts for specific holidays. This also helps you place many of your products in one convenient place for maximum reach. Do you remember the old toy store catalogs and how much excitement they brought as kids? You can recreate this feeling for new customers!

Here’s what it comes down to – people not only want deals, but they want ideas for gifts! The easier you can make that process for them, the better and more likely they will be to convert into a sale.

Free Shipping

An added incentive can make or break a conversion, and free shipping is one of the best ones! People shopping for either themselves or others can buy more for less when they know they won’t have to deal with shipping. This is actually a method for not just encouraging sales from new customers, but increase revenue per purchase.

Gift Card Deals

Like free shipping, offering a complimentary gift card can really increase impulse purchases. Even better, customers might be inclined to use their gift cards from where they get them. They can simply find a few items they might want at another time and return for more shopping. This is where gift cards can increase repeat sales and maximize revenue.

Mobile Campaigns

This goes along with your search engine promotions, Geotargeting is a great method for raising awareness and driving traffic to your brick-and-mortar store. You can target ads to go off when people come within a certain radius of your store, which can prompt more customer visits.

Wrap Up

How are you going to promote your business for the next big holiday? It’s recommended to use at least 2 of the above strategies to leverage holidays for the best results. Whether you have an e-commerce site or a brick-and-mortar store, try to plan your holiday campaigns in advanced. So what are you waiting for? Let’s get the ball rolling and make your next holiday one to remember for your business!