How much did the company sell last Christmas? Set holiday marketing goals. Given your company’s total opportunity and the specific products you will be promoting, set achievable and measurable goals for your holiday marketing. Any content you create can also be used to attract shoppers. Your ecommerce store is probably going to use SEO and pay-per-click marketing to attract shoppers during the Christmas season. Ahead of all of that traffic, make certain you have prepared the landing pages. So the next items on your 2018 holiday ecommerce marketing checklist focus on the specifics of planning and executing your campaigns. Consider using results from last Christmas to help make these choices. Many email marketing solutions require you to upload images, paste in text, and lay out each email message and campaign. Make certain everything is running as expected.
For many online stores, the Christmas shopping season can represent a significant percentage of total annual sales. Thus it’s important to get holiday ecommerce marketing right.
What follows is a checklist of 12 reminders for your ecommerce company to be successful this holiday season.
Image: Tyler Delgado.
Develop a Marketing Plan
The buyer for a brick-and-click retail chain submitted a sales goal to her manager, the director of purchasing. She wanted to bring in $500,000 worth of new hunting canteens for Christmas. The canteens had about 40 points of margin, so she was estimating around $700,000 in Christmas sales from October through December.
“How do these canteens compare to the Hydro Flasks we sell now?” the director of purchasing asked.
“They are similar in quality, price, and margin,” the buyer said.
“Do you think the market for Hydro Flasks is larger or smaller than the market for these new hunting canteens?”
“The market for Hydro Flasks is much larger. These hunting canteens are a specialty item.”
“Last Christmas we sold $120,000 worth of Hydro Flasks. Do you really believe we are going to be able to sell $700,000 in hunting canteens this year?”
“Well, I thought we could have marketing promote them.”
This story is a fable (although there is more than a grain of truth in it). It is meant to make a point.
Your ecommerce holiday marketing will be an important factor in driving Christmas sales. But it cannot magically create demand where none exists. And promoting a product may not be sufficient for success.
Before your company decides how much to spend on marketing — and where to invest — take a look at your business, the market, and your inventory.
Here are the first three items on our holiday ecommerce marketing checklist.
Understand the opportunity. How much revenue will your ecommerce business be able to produce during the holiday season? How much would the company earn if you sold out of popular products?…
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