6 ways to reach out to shoppers during the holiday season

Q4 is always the busiest period of the year for the entire e-commerce sector. The holiday season is approaching quickly, and online store owners now start to think about ways to reach out to shoppers and attract more traffic to their websites. And since this shopping spree has not started yet, we wanted to share a list of interesting options with you.

The last quarter is filled with holidays and special occasions to buy more products, especially as gifts for friends and family. During this short period, we have Christmas, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and even Free Shipping Day (December 14). It’s obvious that you want to make the most of Q4, right? And that’s why you need a well-thought-out marketing strategy. What should you consider?

Master omnichannel

This trend has been around for several years now, but it’s particularly important to adopt this approach during the holiday season. The idea behind omnichannel is quite simple–since customers can find out about your store from different sources and through various channels, you have to be present in them all. This includes:

• Social media

• Email marketing

• Ads

• Price comparison engines

• Affiliate marketing

Some customers will find out about you via Facebook or Instagram. Some will see your offer in Google Shopping, and some will hear about you from their friends. That’s why it’s so important to be everywhere. Everything we will talk about in this article revolves around making the most of the omnichannel model. Let’s cut right to the chase.

How to reach potential customers during Q4

There are several ways and techniques that will allow you to attract more customers, not just during the holiday season but all year round. And it all starts with Amazon.

AMAZON IS A PLACE TO BE

In 2020, Tinuiti conducted Holiday Shopping Trends Report. One of many questions they wanted to discover answers to was this: “If you are shopping for online gifts, what websites do you plan to use?” The vast majority of answers was Amazon (almost 80% of respondents said so):

This means that if you want to benefit from the holiday season, you simply have to showcase your offer on the world’s largest marketplace. It will give you access to a whole new target audience (and quite numerous one, too!). For three years in a row, Amazon has been outranking all other gift sources. That really says a lot.

PERSONALIZATION

Granted, personalization itself won’t get you many more customers. But this strategy will help you retain your customers and encourage them to buy more products. And in the holiday season, that’s particularly important. Just think about personalized product recommendations and gift ideas. There’s no better time of the year for them! Many people don’t know what to buy for their families and friends. Provide them with some fantastic ideas, and you can be sure they will not hesitate to place an order.

You can also use personalization to analyze your customers’ past purchases and offer them products they should be interested in. Remember that not every occasion during Q4 is about family and friends. Free Shipping Day or Black Friday are perfect occasions to buy something for ourselves, too. That’s why you should make sure your personalization feature/app is ready to work at full speed during this year’s holidays!

Moreover, as Google confirms, personalization directly influences how much money people spend on online shopping. This strategy can even encourage them to start shopping!

PERFORMANCE MARKETING

If you want to attract new customers in a short period, there’s no better strategy. Performance marketing is all about driving measurable results. You pay only for specific actions potential customers take, e.g.:

• Signing up for the newsletter

• Placing an order

• Leaving email address

• Downloading an ebook, etc.

Performance marketing campaigns are usually settled in the CPA (cost per action) or CPC (cost per click) model, meaning you maintain full control over your marketing budget and can accurately calculate ROI (return on investment). Today, there are two most popular performance marketing channels:

• Google Ads: These are text ads displayed in the SERP. According to PowerTraffick, over 65% of the clicked ads have buyer-intent keywords such as ‘buy,’ ‘shop,’ ‘purchase’. And since Google is the number one place when people look for products and services, it’s your obvious choice.

• Facebook Ads: Here, everything works a bit differently. For starters, you target users meeting specific criteria, e.g., regarding their location, interests, profession, and activity. There are over 1,300 targeting options within Facebook Ads, which means you can reach precisely the customers you want with your messages. Furthermore, recently Facebook started their new service – Facebook Shops. It allows customers to place an order directly via this social media platform. Combine your fanpage with FB Ads and Facebook Shop, and you’re good to go!

In fact, with properly designed and optimized Google Ads and Facebook Ads campaigns, you can reach almost every internet user in your country and beyond. Isn’t that fantastic?

PRESENCE IN GOOGLE

You have to know that Google’s offer for online merchants is far broader than just Google Ads. So, what other tools are there for you?

For starters, think about Google Shopping. It’s an online price comparison engine allowing you to display your products and offers to people looking for similar products. In order to show your offer in Google Shopping, you’ll need a Merchant Center account. Merchant Center is a central place for your e-commerce business in Google. You can manage your offer and your store’s presence in this search engine from there. Moreover, you can use Google Shopping Ads (formerly known as Google PLAs) to showcase products to potentially interested customers. They can be displayed even in the main SERP (without the need to go to the Shopping tab).

Interestingly, presence in Google will allow you to reach people looking for holiday-related offers even after Christmas!

CONTENT MARKETING

Content marketing is a perfect way to share gift ideas with your customers. For instance, you could make a list of the top 10 gift ideas in your store for this year’s Christmas. Such a list could be compiled and published on your blog, in the news section, or even via social media. It’s all about creativity and compelling photos.

If you sell products with many parameters, e.g., electronics, you could do comparisons and rankings. A few ideas:

• Top 5 gaming laptops for teenagers

• X or Y, which snowboard deck for a beginner

• How to choose a new smartphone

• Ebook reader: A perfect gift idea for Christmas?

Creating and promoting content on your website is always a good idea, no matter what time of the year you have in mind. Write engaging and unique product descriptions (remember, sell benefits, not features!) and create interesting newsletters and compelling blog posts. That is and always will be a beneficial strategy for your e-commerce business. Later, you can think about cross-promotion with other websites and platforms. This way, you will reach even more customers.

WEB PUSH

Lastly, don’t forget about push notifications! Our tool provides you with everything you need to stay in constant contact with your customers. You can use push notifications to promote special offers, build loyalty, increase average order value, number of repeat purchases, grow number of followers in social media profiles, etc.

One of the most exciting advantages of web push notifications is that they are not blocked by ad blockers and can be displayed directly in the given user’s web browser (both desktop and mobile ones). Push notifications constitute a great way to stand out from your competition and other offers. And because our system gathers and analyzes information concerning your customers and their activity, they can be easily personalized, too.

During the holiday season especially useful will be web push automation module - notification is sent on the response of users behaviour on your site. Such messages usually have higher results than mass campaigns and are more likely to be clicked by users. In effect, the average CTR (click-through rate) in the e-commerce sector for automation scenarios is 7,6%!

If you want to find out more, see our e-commerce use cases. You will discover how web push can be used to:

• Conduct surveys

• Save abandoned carts

• Distribute back-in-stock alerts

• Implement upselling and cross-selling

• Adopt retargeting