How to plan a killer Christmas campaign

It’s coming up to that time of year where all eCommerce businesses are planning their Christmas campaigns.

Many small business owners find it difficult to plan a successful Christmas promotion (or any promotion for that matter!).

Whether this is your busiest time of year, or you need to engineer a boost in sales to prevent a big drop in income, if you want to have a successful promotion it’s essential to plan in advance.

So, here are my 5 tips to planning a killer Christmas campaign. Don’t miss my free campaign planner download at the end!

1. What’s the big idea?

Don’t just decide at the last minute to sell off whatever excess stock you have lying around – plan in advance to make sure the stock you have makes sense in the context of the campaign idea.

So first of all, think about what your campaign ‘idea’ is.

Are you doing one offer for the promotion period, such as a ‘buy 1 get 1 free’ or a special Christmas-themed product.

Or are you doing a series of different offers in an ‘Advent Calendar’ or ’12 Days of Christmas’ style?

I’ve done both successfully in the past.

2. Promotion period

Secondly, decide on what are your promotion dates? What is your last possible postage date? What date will you open the Christmas promotion?

Click here to use my free campaign planner to plan out all the promotion activities leading up to and during the promotion period.

3. What’s the offer?

Think about how your customers buy your products – do they buy to use for themselves (even at Christmas time), or do they buy for gifts? Or both?

Your special offer at Christmas time needs to be tailored to your customers’ purchase behaviour.

If it’s a gift – make it just under $50.

If it’s an item they’ll want themselves – put together an enticing bundle so that purchasing for themselves at this time of year is a no-brainer.

In the week or two before Christmas, offer free express post so you can close as many sales prior to Christmas as possible.

4. Make it festive!

I know a lot of small businesses are afraid to spend money on professional photography.

But trust me when I tell you, the fastest way to gain traction with your campaign is to have a gorgeous ‘hero image’ professionally photographed.

Nothing helps your customers to see themselves buying or using your products like a photograph that reflects their reality.

This works both online and in-person.

5. Promote it effectively

Once you have the dates, the big idea, the offer and the images, then you can promote your Christmas special.

I always encourage business owners to send emails more frequently during the festive season – it’s a much ‘noisier’ time, and if you’re not communicating frequently you will easily get lost in people’s inbox.

Never, ever, ever just send a single email to promote your offer! Follow-up is important. During the Christmas period, I would be sending 2-3 emails per week as a bare minimum.

Use Facebook ads to promote to new potential customers as well as to retarget your existing customers. It’s important to reinforce your message by showing the same promotion in emails as well as Facebook ads. To do this, upload your email list to Facebook to create a custom audience so that you can retarget your existing customers.

Pull it all together

Flying by the seat of your pants (that is – trying to plan in your head rather than thinking things through in advance), never generates the best end result.

I’ve already talked about the 5 key steps to plan your Christmas campaign at a high level.

But in order to put this into action, you’ll need to sit down and list all the activities and tasks you’ll need to do to implement your campaign successfully.

Download my free campaign planner

To help you with your implementation, I’ve created a free marketing action plan. Click here to download your copy for free!

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