The holiday season is a perennial favourite for both consumers and businesses alike. It’s a time for gift-giving, celebrations, and indulging in a little retail therapy. In recent years, eCommerce has become an increasingly popular way for people to shop for the holidays. This trend shows no signs of slowing down, with online sales reaching record highs year after year.
Adobe Analytics reported a 4.9% increase in online sales during the 2023 USA holiday season, totaling a whopping $222.1 billion. This surge in online shopping is due to several factors, including the convenience of shopping from home, the wide variety of online products, and the growing popularity of mobile shopping.
For eCommerce businesses, the holiday season is a golden quarter to maximise sales and reach new customers. This article explores effective eCommerce content strategies to help you leverage this peak shopping season and boost your festive sales. Because it’s the most hectic time of the year, marketers usually don’t pay good attention to the content of campaigns, and it can turn out to be a severe mistake that can cost you significantly.
To make this festive season a little easier for you, we’ll list the most effective eCommerce content strategies in this article that can help increase your festive sales. Subject to the festive season, these content strategies can be a big crowd-puller for you if implemented effectively.
Table of Contents
Customer Online Buying Behaviour During Festive Seasons
Before jumping into eCommerce content strategies, let’s analyse the different aspects of customer behaviour first. Doing thorough research before entering any market is always an ingenious move. It can give you a fundamental advantage and increase your chances of success. Understanding customers’ behavior can provide a marketer with multiple insights, helping with the better planning of campaigns. Though we all know the human mind is quite flickering, it is impossible to comprehend every characteristic. Still, we can gain an advantage by just analysing the standard viewpoint of the masses.
According to a study, 55% of people spend more during festive seasons than on regular days. The main reasons influencing people’s purchasing during the festive season are festival happiness, holiday offers & huge discounts, FOMO of the festive season, festive rituals, and gifting purposes. The festive season brings a desire for people to be happy and joyful, and research suggests that buying new stuff gives them a sense of achievement, which impacts their self-esteem.
When people worldwide are sure of spending on holidays, only 4% know or have decided what they’ll purchase; the rest, 96%, decide on the spot, according to the Roi Revolution. Isn’t that great? If you see it from a seller’s point of view, this is your door to a wonderland.
The other important aspect is that when customers wait all year for festive sales and offers, they don’t want to wait until the very day to purchase gifts. 40% of customers start buying holiday gifts earlier. Hence, marketers have started the trend of launching sales and campaigns weeks before the day of the festival.
Festive seasons are among the mega-opportunities for sellers and marketers. This is the time when you can acquire new customers. The eCommerce channels are bombarded with customer footfalls, and everyone is looking for great deals. Imagine playing the game of Basket Egg Catcher, where you have to catch most of the falling eggs or else you’ll lose. This is a somewhat similar situation for the sellers. The one that catches the most wins.
Effective eCommerce Content Strategies That Can Help Increase Your Sales During Festive Seasons
There’s no specific formula following which anyone will get immediate sales. A marketer knows that it’s a consistent process. You don’t always actually work for sales; instead, you work for visibility and brand recognition, which eventually get you sales. And the most effective aspect of this whole process is the content.
Here are some important and effective ways to make your content more interesting and engaging. However, there’s no exact formula when someone is trying to create exceptional content. It comes out of your creativity to play with the basics. Get your wings out and surprise viewers with something exemplary, but don’t forget to tick off all the basics first.
Seven effective eCommerce content strategies that’ll make your holiday planning a little easier:
1. Decide the theme for your campaign:
Don’t wait for the holiday season to knock on your doors first. Planning the content ahead of time for the upcoming holiday season saves you from the last-minute hassle. The strategy allows you to embrace creativity at its best for themed content.
Imagine every social media post with the same image copy: “Wishing you a Happy Diwali,” with diyas and lightning in the background. Do you think it’ll attract viewers’ attention? Our main idea is obviously to convey wishes, but how creatively we convey them matters.
Let’s take an example: You’re an artificial Christmas tree-making company. For the Christmas campaign, you can lure customers with an eco-friendly theme and an attractive image copy, such as “This Christmas, Save One More Tree” or “A Merry Christmas to you and our planet.”
Another example is a tea manufacturing company looking to enter India’s festive gift market. In India, people don’t consider tea as a gift option. So, they can start campaigning by positioning tea as a luxurious gift or the gift of health for loved ones.
A theme is like the soul of your campaign. Great themes have a lasting impact on viewers and sustain your brand image in their subconscious minds. This wonderful theme-based holiday commercial by Heathrow Airport is the answer to why themes are essential for festival ad campaigns.
2. Storytelling: A secret ingredient.
It is all about the links and connections, not just the copy and theme. Setting up the right theme is important, and so is a personal touch that makes customers feel intimidated to buy your product. Storytelling influences buying behaviour.
Never direct a campaign without the right appeal.
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but about the stories you tell.” By Seth Godin
In the current scenario, marketing without any appeal is like moving forward without any sense of direction. In the end, it leads you nowhere. An appeal helps customers connect with your brand intimately. They help trigger a psychological connection between the brand and customers, persuading customers to choose your brand.
Since not all appeals work for the festive season, the best ones to go for are emotional, humorous, and musical. The most chosen one is the emotional appeal. It helps increase the empathy level of customers towards the brand and helps create a deep connection. Under emotional appeal, marketers can select among different appeal strategies, like personal, social, adventure, status, etc.
JK Cement Ltd. shaped their festive campaign, #Andarsesundar, on the occasion of Diwali, demonstrating their hero product, JK Cement Wall Maxx, with a message to celebrate the ones that celebrate you.
A festive campaign by JKCement WallMaxX to celebrate the ones who make our homes #AndarSeSundar
3. Improve Your Content on eCommerce Platforms:
The keywords are the most important part of your written content on any eCom platform. They help you feature among the relevant searches and decide the rank. As the holiday season approaches, marketers should revise their content and include keywords related to gifts. According to Marketing Words’s data, most people search on eCom platforms with keywords like Christmas gifts, holiday gifts, gifts for friends, etc. Hence, using the right keyword is your first step towards conversion. As a result, such keywords will gain more organic visibility.
Don’t limit yourself to just the keywords. They surely help you get discovered, but they don’t guarantee sales. Improve your online content. Use engaging imagery, and do not deny the power of videos. Wzyowl stated that 82% of people agreed that they’d been convinced to purchase by watching the product’s video, while 91% watched an explainer video about the product and service. In the world of digital marketing, if content is the king, then videos are the ministers; they run the digital world.
The Gift Tree Store has done a great job of creating persuasive content for their Gourmet Gift Baskets.
4. Identify Your Target Audience and Reach Out to Them:
One mantra that every marketer goes by is Know Your Audience. Before the arrival of the holiday season, it was your job to identify the target audience, and during the season, it is your task to keep them engaged. With your target audience identified, you can decide the content in advance and spend your spare time on other tasks. Because during the busiest time of the year, you have not even a second to waste.
When a marketer has known or identified their target audience, the efforts get simplified up to 50%, and the remaining 50% now goes towards capturing the customer’s intention of choosing you. Many customers choose products before arriving at sales so they don’t have to waste much time while purchasing. Marketers can opt for personalized email marketing tactics to inform their audience of upcoming offers and sales. Weekly emails are the best of all, as, at this pace, you’re not irritating customers or providing the information alone.
This email campaign by Casper is absolutely smart, witty, and effective. Isn’t it?
5. Don’t Wait for The Festive Day or Week. Start Working Early:
While decoding customer behaviour, we discussed earlier that customers don’t really wait for the holiday to purchase holiday gifts. They start a week or two earlier. Marketers should start their campaigns on social media and other eCom channels as early as possible. This will give you enough time to persuade customers.
Marketers can opt for other means to engage customers until their sales and campaigns go live. They can run festive season contests, quizzes about brands that can amplify customers’ knowledge of you, personalised messages, and many more. You can go as creative as you want; eventually, it’s only about keeping customers’ attention.
Giva went all out for their “Valentine’s Flash Sale” campaign by offering 40% off on selected designs. The brand used WhatsApp marketing to send creative and personalised texts a week before Valentine’s Day.
There’s one other marketing technique that can help enhance your reach but has been underrated by many marketers. Hashtags work brilliantly during the festive season. Though it’s wise to use already trending hashtags, what’s even smarter is to create your own. We all know what happened when Coca-Cola came up with #ShareACoke. An excellent hashtag campaign that was an overnight hit and kept trending for quite a while. A potential hashtag creates a buzz, eventually leading to audience engagement in the masses.
During Christmas, Coca-Cola created a buzz again recently with its ‘Create Your Magic’ AI platform. It encouraged netizens to create personalised Christmas greetings and showcase their creativity under #SpreadTheMagic.
Meanwhile, Cadbury came up with #TheRealSanta and encouraged people to appreciate the real-life Santa by gifting them a Cadbury.
6. Rewards and Loyal Customers for the win:
Loyal customers are like a treasure trove for marketers. It takes double the time and effort to acquire new customers than to retain loyal ones. And the holiday season is the best time to let them know how valuable they are to you. During this period, people are all happy and joyful, and a little effort that increases their excitement has a generous impact.
One general tactic that most marketers follow is to provide special discount coupons and offers to their loyal customers, and without a doubt, that is the best trick. Like, who doesn’t want to save some bucks or get extra stuff? But this has become very customary. Now is the time when you need to get extra creative.
Remember the thrill of finding a gift with your name on it as a child? In today’s digital age, personalization goes beyond email greetings. This holiday season, delight your loyal customers with a touch of nostalgia.
Imagine their surprise when they receive a beautifully wrapped package bearing their name and a heartfelt message of appreciation. It’s a small gesture that goes a long way in fostering a deeper connection and creating a lasting memory. Personalize your packaging and watch your brand loyalty soar.
Another scheme you can try is to give a small gift. Even if your loyal customers didn’t purchase from you this festival, let them know that you still think they’re valuable with a small gift. This gift will be your long-term investment, which will keep rewarding you with unwavering loyalty.
Linking brand stores with the products or in your social media posts is highly recommended, as they are easy to customise as per the festive themes and increase discoverability and visibility.
Did you know Amazon stated, “Stores with 3+ pages have 83% higher shopper dwell time and 32% higher attributed sales per visitor?”
7. Rewards and Loyal Customers for the win:
Who doesn’t prefer accessibility and convenience? Hence, mobile-friendly websites are a big yes if you want to make your eCommerce journey worthwhile. A mobile-optimised website is handy during rush hour, and consumers won’t have to think twice before purchasing. Due to their celebratory nature, festive seasons are all about “see it, like it, want it, get it”, and people often treat themselves and others. These websites allow you to capitalise on this trend by offering quick and easy checkout processes.
And as a cherry on top, mobile-optimised websites allow businesses to upscale their performance by leveraging the power of social media marketing and SEO. This amalgamation expands the reach and taps a broader audience, more like community engagement, encouraging users to share reviews and experiences in the form of posts and stories across social media channels, leading to more user engagement and user-generated content in the most organic way.
The holiday season comes with a lot of hustle & bustle, and it’s challenging to focus on thinking of something new or creative. But then your content and campaign only give you reach; creativity gets you acknowledgment and attention. Even if it is a little burdensome, let’s create something spectacular this holiday season.
Paxcom has a content team with experience in creating unique content ideas for brands. We can help you create and run campaigns for various e-commerce channels with our expertise in analysing online market trends. Reach out to us at info@paxcom.net for more information.
