After the year 2020 turned out to be the biggest Holiday Season ever for online sales, sellers have geared up more for the festive season. As per the 2020 Holiday Report by Salesforce, there was a recorded surge of 50% in digital spending during this holiday season over the year 2019. The recorded sales during the same year were $1.1 trillion worldwide.
For a fact, we all know that Covid-19 has dramatically affected this tremendous surge in online purchases. But we also know that this has profoundly impacted the shopping habits of consumers around the world. As per Statista, there are 2.14 billion people expected to buy goods and services online in 2021. The online shopping world is in a boom and is expected only to grow further. Now is the time for sellers to understand this fact and plan accordingly.
For the e-commerce industry, the festive season is like a jamboree, the busiest time of the year. The e-commerce platforms record the highest sales during this time and try their best to lure customers with different marketing strategies. Marketing and campaigning done this time can yield huge profits compared to the whole year. Hence, a savvy marketer knows how important it is to be prepared for the festive season. And one of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy for this time is “Content.”
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 be listing out the most effective eCommerce content strategies in this article that can help increase your festive sales. Subjective to the festive season, these content strategies, if implemented effectively, can be a big crowd-puller for you.
Table of Contents
Customer Online Buying Behavior During Festive Seasons
Before jumping into the eCommerce content strategies, let’s analyze the different aspects of customer behavior first. It is always an ingenious move to do thorough research before entering any market. It can give you a fundamental advantage and increase your chances of success. Understanding customers’ behavior can leverage a marketer with multiple insights, helping with better planning of campaigns. Though we all know the human mind is quite flickering, and it is impossible to comprehend every characteristic of it. Still, we can gain an advantage by just analyzing the standard viewpoint of the mass.
According to a study, 55% of people spend more during festive seasons than on regular days. The main reasons that influence 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 around the world are sure of spending on holidays, only 4% actually know or have decided what they’re going to purchase. The rest, 96%, make the decision on the spot, according to Roirevolution. Isn’t that great? If you see it from a seller’s point of view, this is your door to the wonderland.
The other important aspect to know is that, when customers wait all year long for festive sales and offers, they don’t really want to wait for 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 e-commerce 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 kind of 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, brand recognition, which eventually gets you sales. And the most effective aspect of this whole process is the content.
Here I’m going to list out some important and effective strategies that can make your content more engaging and appealing. 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.
Six effective eCommerce content strategies that’ll make your festive planning a little easier:
1. Decide Theme for Your Campaign:
During the helter-skelter of the festive season, many marketers neglect to pay attention to the theme of their campaigns, which is a great blunder. Your theme is the one thing that sets you aside from other marketers who are campaigning for the same festive season. Imagine every post on social media with the same image copy “Wishing you a Happy Diwali” and some Diyas & 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 “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 into 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. Appeal To the Customers:
Never ever direct a campaign without the right appeal.
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that 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 to connect with your brand in an intimate manner. 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.
Watch this ad by Tata Motors, and it’ll help you understand the magic of emotional appeal in an ad campaign.
3. Improvise Your Content on E-com Platforms:
The most important part of your written content on any e-com platform is the keywords. They help you feature among the relevant searches and decide the rank. As the festive season approaches, marketers should start revising their content and include keywords related to gifts. According to the data by Marketing Words, most people conduct their searches on e-com platforms with keywords like Christmas gifts, holiday gifts, gifts for friends, etc. Hence, putting the right keyword is your one 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. Improvise your online content. Use engaging imagery and do not deny the power of videos. In a research, 84% of people agreed that they’d been convinced to make a purchase by watching the product’s video. In the world of digital marketing, if the content is the king, then videos are the ministers; they run the digital world.
Bonnie & Pop have done a great job of creating persuasive content for their Chocolate Gift Baskets.
4. Identify Your Target Audience and Reach Out to Them:
One mantra with which every marketer goes by is to Know Your Audience. Before the arrival of the holiday season, it was your stint 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 can spend spare time on other tasks. Because during the busiest time of the year, you have got 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 rest 50% now goes towards capturing the customer’s intention of choosing you. Many customers tend to choose products before arriving at sales so that they don’t have to waste much time while making the purchase. Marketers can opt for personalized email marketing tactics to keep their audience informed of upcoming offers and sales. Weekly emails are the best of all, as, at this pace, you’re not irritating customers and providing the information along.
This Email campaign by Casper that 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 behavior, we discussed earlier that customers don’t really wait for the festive day to purchase holiday gifts. They start a week or two earlier. Marketers should start their campaigns on social media and other e-com channels as early as possible. This will give you enough time to persuade customers.
Marketers can opt for other means to engage customers till their sales and campaigns go live. They can run festive season contests, quizzes about brands that can amplify customers’ knowledge of you, personalized messages, and many more. You can go as creative as you want; eventually, it’s only about keeping customers’ attention.
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. We are all aware of their power but still lack the ability to use them to their potential. Though it’s wise to use already trending hashtags, what’s even smarter is to create your own. We all know what happened when Coco-Cola came up with # ShareACoke. An excellent hashtag campaign that was an overnight hit and kept trending for quite a while. With a potential hashtag, you can create a buzz, leading to broader audience engagement. Isn’t that what we are working for?
6. Do Not Forget to Reward Your Loyal Customers:
Loyal customers are like a treasure trove for marketers. It takes double 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, and I can spare some tips for that.
Go Personalized. As time goes by, personalized messages are becoming a trend. Customers love a personalized message from their favorite brands, as it gives them a sense of association. But you can go to the next level with personalized packaging. Remember when we were small, how we used to get gifts with our name tags? Let’s create that nostalgia, and this holiday season, give your loyal customers a special package with their name tags and a small wishful message.
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.
I know the festive season comes with a lot of hustle & bustle, and it’s challenging to focus on thinking something new or creative. But then your content and campaign only give you reach; creativity gets you the attention. Even if it is a little burdensome, let’s create something spectacular this festive 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 analyzing online market trends.
Key Takeaways from The Article
- The festive online market is booming every year, and with 2020 being the biggest holiday season, marketers should gear up now.
- One of the most important aspects of marketing campaigns for the festive season is the content.
- Customers spend more during the holiday season.
- Customers start purchasing holiday gifts a week or two earlier.
- Theme-based campaigns help marketers stand out and increase the chance of getting visibility.
- With the right appeal, marketers can create a psychological connection between customers and brands, influencing customers to choose certain brands.
- During the festive season, marketers can make their way into search results on e-commerce channels with the right choice of keywords.
- Videos influence customer purchase decisions and increase the chances of conversion.
- Marketers should identify their target audience and work to keep them engaged until sales and campaigns go live.
- Marketers should start campaigning early as it’ll give them more time to persuade customers.
- With the power of hashtags, marketers can reach a wider audience.
- Creative content is the mastermind behind getting the customers’ attention.
