10 effective marketing ideas for brands during Christmas holiday shopping seasons

Marketing during Christmas has never been more complicated than it is likely to be in the coming years. With business and customers turning to digital shopping and marketing, there has never been a more accurate time to know how to do marketing right than now. Herein are just some of the many golden nuggets you need to know as your priority strategies for marketing during Christmas holidays.

1. Brand your shop with a Christmas theme

Let’s face it, nobody likes a boring shopping experience, and it can get pretty boring when a customer who has spent their day seeing bright Christmas fixtures enters a store that has none of that. Branding your store, physical and digital, with a Christmas look, feel, smell and music, goes a long way to appealing to cut a client’s emotions, making it easier for them to spend more time at the store and eventually make more purchases.

A brand should at the very least ensure they have some Christmas carols playing, a Christmas tree and lighting, and unattractive aroma. It is important to note the human mind feels more comfortable with environments that are familiar, which is why you want to make your store look familiar with the expectation of your potential customers.

2. Prepare Christmas-themed packaging

Once again, this is all about influencing the emotions of the potential clientele. Make a point of coming up with a creative Christmas-themed packaging that will make customers feel so they’re receiving gifts. It is important to remember that Christmas is a time of gifting, and it is only fair to your brand to appeal to customers by going the extra mile to provide timely packaging.

While at it, you could also attach a relatively inexpensive gift to every purchase, or purchases that meet a certain criteria. For example, we have actively advised our clients to provide free delivery and a gift for all orders placed between selected days and times within those days, in order to appeal better to customers.

3. Seek win-win partnerships with complementary brands

In order to enhance customer experience, it is important for brands to pursue complementary partnerships with other service providers who can make it easier to shop. For example, a number of our clients prefer to provide delivery services to their clients, by partnering with delivery companies, who can be called upon to deliver products ordered by clients. This is an attractive partnership for the parties, and goes a long way to encouraging more purchases.

4. Create a sense of urgency

A common human behavior is that people often react at the last possible opportunity. This means that people often wait until there’s no more time in order to do something. This applies to  the process of buying for many customers.  As a result, it is advisable to have time-bound offers in order to encourage customers to take action within a time frame that is beneficial to the brand. For example, you can choose to give discounted prices or free gifts for all purchases made before the 20th of December.

This way, customers will be subconsciously compelled to purchase products before that time in order to enjoy such benefits. This can be coupled with continuous reminders of the number of days remaining until the end of the offer in order to further solidify the urgency.

5. Have a large enough workforce

One of the worst things that can happen to a brand is to be unable to process large quantities of orders because of a lack of workforce, as this would beat the very sense of holiday shopping. It is important to ensure that a brand has more than enough workforce to handle the likely increase in the number of orders. A company can do this by hiring more employees on a short or part-time contract, or having some people on standby, in case a larger workforce is needed.

This can help to reduce the frustration encountered when there are long shopping queues and few attendance in the store, or few people to answer queries on digital platforms, which is a core strategy for marketing during Christmas holidays .

6. Prepare give-aways and discounts in plenty

Many shoppers love free things, and will go to any height to try and buy from vendors who can give them free gifts. Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter the size of the gift, then the very fact that there is a gift in the first place.  For all the loyalty that your customers have extended for the whole year, it is only fair to appreciate them with a small gift in order to remind them that you value them.

We actively advise our clients to have free gifts for each customer, or for orders that meet certain criteria, in order to appeal better to customers. For example, Nawiri Plant committed free delivery and a surprise gift to all orders placed between Wednesday and Saturday, between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m.

7. Provide a great customer experience

Customer experience is not something to gamble with, and it happens not to be optional for purpose-drive brands. Great customer experience is associated with a higher customer value through more purchases and an increased loyalty. Customers will almost always remember how they were treated while shopping in your shop, and this may likely affect their choice of whether to shop with you again in the future.

You always want to ensure that your customers leave your store feeling excited and having satisfactorily achieved the objective of the very reason they came in.

8. Build relationships for after Christmas

Remember there is a future after Christmas, and you need your clients to be present then. Christmas holidays last at most 31 days, leaving you with another 335 days to sell the same customer. Consequently, even as one comes up with marketing strategies to cash in during the Christmas holidays, you should always ensure that this does not leave the customer unhappy and unwilling to come back in January.

A branch episode Collect data that will be necessary to reach out to such a client post-Christmas. For example, treasure the phone number or email address that customers leave during Christmas, and this will be an important marketing asset for the rest of the year. Ensure to build a relationship that will assist you maintain that client you acquired from marketing during Christmas holidays, even after Christmas.

9. Prepare easy-to-buy packages

Shopping during Christmas can be increasingly overwhelming,  and customers may have a difficult time making decisions on what to buy. When a customer has a difficult time making a decision, they may end up forsaking the purchase altogether.

In order to prevent this from happening, one should make package availability comprehend and purchase now to make it easier for customers to make purchase decisions, or at least have templates against which  to make such decisions. For example, a baby’s gift shop can have a package including a doll, baby blanket, toys and baby clothes, which can then be marketed as one package.

10. Publish helpful content online

In as much as Christmas time is time for relaxing, watching, listening to and reading content is considered a great way of relaxing. Therefore, do not relax and forget to share helpful information online such as how to buy, when to buy, what to buy, how not to buy, when you will be closed, when you will open, what is out of stock, what you are up to and related helpful content. We hope you enjoyed and learned from these strategies for marketing during Christmas holidays.

Want to start preparing your Christmas marketing today? Reach out to us for support.