E-Commerce: 5 Tips to Spruce Up Your Christmas Campaigns

Is it Christmas already?

Not yet. (Thank goodness.) But that time of the year continues to inch ever closer. Yes, Christmas is the time of the year that brings in lots of revenue for e-commerce. It is also the last chance to boost your performance for the year. The question is: How are your Christmas campaigns coming along?

If you’re panicking, don’t worry. We’ve put together a few tips that will help you spruce up your (hopefully already running) Christmas campaigns and boost your returns.

1. Fine-tune your audience

In the heat of this festive season, it is easy to assume that everybody can be your audience for this campaign, because everybody needs Christmas gifts, right?

Wrong. Defining your audience is in fact one of the most important things to do for every campaign, as it steers the direction of your strategy. A generic one-for-all campaign is unlikely to work, because customers react better when campaigns speak to them. Even if groceries are needed by all, supermarkets deliver targeted campaigns to better reach different groups. For instance, male-oriented campaigns usually have more meat, while those for women are more health-oriented.

Whether your target audience refers to your current customers or new customers is also important. This determines the depth of your message and possible loyalty rewards. After all, it isn’t nice to speak to people you know as if they were complete strangers.

2. Enhance your website / store

Every target group has a different set of needs. In identifying your target audience, you can enhance your website or store according to their needs. For instance, are they more desktop-based or mobile-based? Do they make decisions based on one website or do they visit other sites as well?

The answers to any of these questions would determine the direction of how you set up your website or store. For instance, you may need to ensure that the sites are not only responsive; they are specially catered to the device preferred by your target group.

The checkout process should also be checked and optimised, so that it is not too long or complicated for your target group. In other words, make sure that you are not the reason why they’ve decided to turn away from your store.

3. Focus on a few marketing channels

Have you picked out marketing channels for your campaigns? This doesn’t mean you should be on all possible marketing channels for a wild shot. Instead, you should pick the ones that best reach out to your potential customers.

Apart from the usual channels (social media, search engines, etc), there may be partners and affiliates who reach out to your target audience even better. With your marketing technology provider, you should be able to set up your own network with these partners, devise incentives, provide fair commissions, and manage appropriate voucher campaigns easily.

Additionally, depending on whether your target audience tends to make purchases swiftly or not, you may decide on remarketing ads or email campaigns to remind your potential customers to complete the purchase.

4. Automate whatever you can

Marketing automation – this buzzword has been highly discussed. Does it kill the personal touch? Well, it depends. If you use marketing automation to communicate generically with all possible recipients, the answer is yes. But even within your specified target group or your own network of partners, you can communicate differently.

Another time-consuming process lies in finance. Your rating, billing, accounting and payment processes need to be carefully recorded, accurately completed, and yet quick – and possibly for numerous parties, depending on the size of your company. On top of that, there are items that have been cancelled or returned, and your own business could be based in various parts of the world, making payments in various currencies and in accordance to various tax systems!

So don’t make things difficult for yourself. Automate your marketing communications, marketing campaigns, financial report generation, payouts, etc. Save time and resources!

5. Check your tracking and data analysis

While defining and executing a campaign is half the success, the other half lies in analysis. In order to determine what went wrong or right, every campaign needs to be evaluated and optimised. This is why accurate tracking and data aggregation is just as crucial.

Fact is, most customers alternate between the online and offline sphere often. Your chosen technology needs to be able to track cross-device (across multiple devices), multi-channel (across multiple channels) and omni-channel (both online and offline). And it needs to be able to circumvent ad-blocking technologies without infringing on data privacy. In other words, your chosen technology should allow you to make use of white-label 1st-party tracking – which means tracking that actually runs on your very own domain, instead of an external domain that redirects to yours. (Clarify with your technology provider now!)

Based on the analysis of the accurate data you have collected, you should be able to spot trends and better understand your customers’ decision-making process. But don’t stop there – make use of this analysis to improve your campaign and increase sales.

What’s more? The Christmas season has just begun, but that’s not all to it. To the contrary, these analyses help with your business after Christmas as well. Which channels and partners are worth the investment for the next strategy? Does the campaign strategy, channels or partners also work for non-Christmas seasons? Don’t let gut feeling alone guide your business decisions!

With that, we wish you very merry Christmas campaigns this year!