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13 Christmas Marketing Ideas

Christmas is the season where most retailers tend to either make it or break it. Black Friday deals have become the emphasis of the season, but if you’re a small business, it can be difficult to offer a 90% discount on your items, right? How can you stand out from these massive sales that the big competitors are putting out there so you can get your sales goals met this year? Through an effective Christmas marketing campaign.

It all begins with how you decide to embrace the holiday. Some target demographics may not even celebrate Christmas. Others may focus less on the giving side and more on the religious aspects of it. To implement the following marketing ideas in an effective way, you’ve got to know how your population views Christmas so you don’t turn more people away than you bring into your store or website.

Christmas Marketing Ideas for Businesses

1. A New Sale Every Day
Incorporating the 12 days of Christmas into a sale isn’t a new idea, but using each day to encourage the sale of a different product or offering a new discount could help you stand out. The 12 days of Christmas are traditionally after the holiday has concluded, but you could even start this kind of sale the week before Thanksgiving to begin driving attention toward your items.

2. Increase Your Discount Daily
Every day of the month is also a day to increase your discounts. If it is December 15th, then you could over 15% off all products in your store or make the discount be on a specific product or series of products. Once you get to your after Christmas sales, you can continue this campaign to start getting rid of your excess inventory.

3. Make One Really Great Discount
The best time to begin marketing your Christmas sales is in June when you can get great close-out deals on distributor products. Bring them in for the holidays, offer a steep individual product discount, and this kind of promotion will help to bring people into your store – especially if you can offer a new product discount daily.

4. Hold Mystery Sales
Instead of publishing all of your sales, keep the very best hidden until people come into your store and then individually tailor the “mystery” discount to meet their needs more effectively. This will help to keep the mysterious aspect of your sale alive and you’ll build loyalty through this relationship building technique. Use social media to promote it for even more cost-savings.

5. Christmas Trees Hold More Than Ornaments
Christmas trees are a great way to display your unique goods or services as a way to embrace the holiday. For an added boost, use a little of your space to offer people the chance to purchase items you have to donate them to charities in need. Have them pick the needed item off the tree, pay for it at the register, and then wrap the donated gift for free and put it in their name. They’ll get the recognition, you’ll do something good for the community, and maybe you’ll meet your sales goals too.

6. Offer a Gift Voucher
Gift certificates used to seem tacky until gift cards took off and became a way of letting people choose their own gift. Even if you don’t offer certificates or gift cards, a gift voucher can still let people get a gift from your business that someone may need. Calculate the value of the gift, let people pay in advance, and there’s really no limit to what you could do – even service-orientated industries.

7. Pay It Forward
Good karma always pays off in some way. It’s the way the world works, but so often the purpose of creating good karma is to hand out brand recognition. Sometimes a hidden sweet treat at someone’s front door is all it takes to have good stuff coming back around to you.

8. What Is Your Approach?
Guys look at Christmas differently than women. You can’t market Christmas the same way to either gender, nor can you market it the same way to the transgender demographic. Market yourself to the way your chosen demographic shops and you’ll do a better job of getting noticed.

9. Allow For the Emergency Gift
Procrastination hits everyone and this helps you as long as you can make emergency gift giving an easy process. A direct mail campaign with blank vouchers right around the holidays is the perfect way to get noticed. Put instructions on how to activate the voucher with the campaign and then people can quickly give a last second gift that has a lot of value.

10. Accept Digital Currency
Are you really going to be open on Christmas Eve at 10pm? If you accept digital currencies or have a PayPal account linked to your emergency gifts, you’ll allow people to fund your voucher at the very last second and give a legitimate gift the next morning.

11. Prevent Fatigue
The average person makes 20k choices per day and at Christmas, many of these are shopping orientated. This creates a lot of mental fatigue and this tired feeling becomes a barrier that won’t allow people to continue shopping after some time. Take the decision out of your customer’s hands by making everything incredibly easy and affordable for them so they can move onto the next choice.

12. Be Urgent
Scarcity will always work in your favor over the course of the Christmas season as long as it is an authentic scarcity. If you’ve only got a certain amount of products available, broadcast this – especially if it’s a really good deal. This will spur a natural call to action that won’t inspire some buyer’s regret later on because your customer feels like they were duped.

13. Make Sure You’re Mobile
If you’re not mobile during the Christmas season, then your business is going to suffer. With the exception of Cyber Monday, people aren’t going to be at home, in front of their PC, waiting for a good deal from you to just pop up on their screen. Get your campaign tablet friendly, smartphone friendly, and begin texting or emailing people with specific alerts so they’ll know right away when you’ve got a good deal going on.

Holiday Marketing

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