A whopping $123 billion. That’s how much US ecommerce businesses made during the 2018 holiday season, according to Statista. To put that into perspective, it’s about 18% higher than Ecuador’s entire GDP. If the US holiday ecommerce market were a country, it would be the 57th largest economy globally.
Via Statistia. Imagine we were casually chatting at a bar or reflecting by the lake, this would be the perfect moment to impress you with my intellect (and newfound love for Sally Rooney novels) by dropping a deep thought about the transactional nature of love today. However, that would be strange and likely deleted by my editor. Plus, we have more pressing matters: the holiday season is almost here, and your ecommerce business needs a solid digital marketing strategy. This guide provides 13 holiday marketing tips, covering Google, Facebook, Instagram, and your website, to help your ecommerce business prepare for and conquer the holiday season. These tips come from Kelly McGee, Sam Drane, and Holly Niemiec – experts from our agency team who consistently deliver results for our ecommerce clients.
Holiday Marketing Tips for Google Ads
When it’s time to buy gifts, many people turn to Google. Honestly, a holiday marketing plan without Google Ads is incomplete. You must be present in search results with both text ads and Shopping ads. Additionally, using display ads to stay top-of-mind is another effective strategy. Let’s dive into some specific tips:
1. Boost Clicks with Merchant Promotions
Merchant Promotions is a free feature that lets Google Shopping advertisers make their ads more appealing by adding special offers like discounts, free gifts, and shipping benefits. Once your product data feed in Google Merchant Center is approved, you can start creating promotions.
You can utilize Merchant Promotions in two ways: through the promotions tool or by uploading a designated promotions feed. The promotions tool, accessible by selecting Merchant Promotions from the left-hand menu and then Promotions, lets you create offers for individual products, while a promotions feed allows bulk uploading of multiple promotions simultaneously. While discounted prices and free shipping are always great, offering gift cards during the holiday season is particularly effective. It allows shoppers to be thoughtful while also giving recipients flexibility. New to Google Shopping? Download our free guide to successful campaigns and start winning customers today!
2. Create Urgency with Text Ad Customizers
For those running standard search campaigns alongside Shopping campaigns, text ad customizers automatically optimize ad copy in real time based on factors like search query, location, device, time of day, or day of the week. After uploading an ad customizer data file to your Google Ads account, you can personalize messaging for the most relevant and engaging holiday PPC ads.
Via Search Engine Land. While ad customizers are generally helpful for various optimizations, in the context of holiday marketing, we focus on using them to create a sense of urgency for your potential customers. For instance, if you’re promoting an extended Black Friday sale with text ads, use an ad customizer to display the remaining time. Someone shopping the day before Thanksgiving might see “Only 48 Hours Left!” in the headline, while someone browsing on Thanksgiving night would see “Only 24 Hours Left!” Essentially, ad customizers create a countdown to the sale’s end.
3. Manage Competitive Keywords with Audience Targeting
Preparing for the holidays as an ecommerce business involves creating lists of relevant seasonal keywords like “black friday deals” or “holiday season sales.” Since these keywords indicate high purchase intent, getting your products and offers in front of these shoppers is crucial. However, remember that competition for these keywords is fierce. Bidding on them without additional filters will deplete your budget quickly. That’s why we recommend using audience targeting with your expensive keywords.
While keywords remain the primary tool for targeting relevant shoppers with search campaigns, Google has developed powerful audience targeting tools over the years. One example is Customer Match, which allows targeting past customers who willingly provided their contact information.
4. Capture Last-Minute Shoppers with Local Inventory Ads
This tip is specifically for retailers with physical stores and an online presence. Many people procrastinate on buying gifts, sometimes even missing shipping deadlines. The good news is you can still capture these last-minute shoppers. With a local inventory ad (LIA), you can advertise your physical store to nearby shoppers searching for products you sell. Clicking on your LIA takes users to your local storefront – a Google-hosted page showing store hours, product availability, prices, and more.
Via Google. Important note: While effective near the holidays, local inventory ads require extra effort. You need to upload local product feeds and local inventory feeds for each physical store you want to promote. Start this process several months before the holiday season. Learn more about it here.
5. Cater to Last-Minute Shoppers with E-Gift Cards
Even without a physical store, you can still cater to procrastinators. Once your shipping deadline passes, promote electronic gift cards more aggressively. While most people prefer physical gifts, a gift card is a welcome alternative when time runs out.
Best of all: Promoting e-gift cards doesn’t mean neglecting your actual products. Remember Merchant Promotions? Offer a gift card for purchases above a certain amount. This entices last-minute shoppers with a convenient solution while still marketing relevant products.
6. Explore Display Advertising to Avoid Expensive Keywords
Our third Google Ads tip addressed managing expensive seasonal keywords through audience targeting. However, you might want (or need) to avoid pricey keywords altogether. This is where display advertising on the Google Display Network comes in. Despite the lower purchase intent on the display network, two key tactics can make your display ads valuable during the holidays. First, use custom intent audiences. Provide Google with keywords and website URLs related to your offer, and they will create an audience of users actively seeking purchases related to them, showing them your ads. This is usually more effective than using Google’s pre-made in-market audiences.
Second, leverage responsive display ads. Google takes your marketing assets (images, videos, logos, headlines, copy, etc.) and dynamically creates display ads that adapt to various websites and devices. Many advertisers don’t realize you can add promotional text to these ads. If you’re using display remarketing for holiday shoppers, sweeten the deal with promotions like free shipping or discounts. Important note: If you’re running holiday display ads, prepare your creative assets early!
Holiday Marketing Tips for Facebook & Instagram Ads
Transitioning from Google Ads tips for the display network, let’s move to Facebook and Instagram Ads. While capitalizing on high-intent holiday search queries is crucial, people don’t abandon social media in November and December. In fact, many shoppers find gift inspiration on Facebook and Instagram. Let’s explore some tips to boost your holiday sales on these platforms:
7. Gradually Increase Your Budget to Appease the Algorithm
Facebook marketers often mention the “learning phase” – the algorithm’s process of experimenting with your ads’ delivery to find the optimal approach based on your objective. Typically, each ad set needs around 50 conversions to complete this phase. According to Facebook, the learning phase restarts with every “significant edit” to your ad set, including budget changes. To stay competitive during the holidays, you’ll likely increase your budgets. However, sudden, large changes will push all your ad sets back into the learning phase, potentially hurting performance when you need it most.
Here’s the solution: gradually increase your ad set budgets over time. Small, incremental changes are less disruptive won’t restart the learning phase. This way, when competition peaks, you’ll be spending the necessary amount without experiencing a temporary performance dip. We predict social shopping will be a huge holiday marketing trend this season. Find out how to capitalize on it here.
8. Build Audience Lists to Fill Your Funnel
The holiday season is about making sales, not building brand awareness. Starting your outreach in November will leave you lagging behind. Use the months leading up to the holidays to build your audience lists. This way, you’ll have pools of interested users ready for your sales push.
Some of the audiences you’ll have as options later. For example, imagine you’re planning a big holiday discount on your custom phone cases. A month or two prior, run a video views campaign showcasing time-lapses of the creation process. Alternatively, run a lead generation campaign targeting users interested in your email newsletter. This provides you with engaged potential customers likely to respond well to your holiday offers.
9. Seal the Deal with Offer Ads
Fast forward to the holiday season: your earlier consideration campaigns were successful, and you have a plethora of prospects. How do you maximize this opportunity? Offer ads, of course!
Via adweek. This mobile-exclusive ad type (for Traffic, Conversion, and Store Traffic campaigns) lets you retarget engaged prospects with discount codes. Offer ads for online sales direct users to your website, while those for offline sales provide a QR code for checkout. Offering easily redeemable discounts is always effective, but its impact lessens when competitors do the same. Therefore, ensure your ad copy stands out. Analyze past successful Facebook and Instagram promotions for common themes in the copy. If something consistently works, stick with it during the holidays.
10. Target Past Customers for Easier Sales
As competition rises during the holidays, so do Facebook and Instagram advertising costs. Achieve some easier wins and maximize your higher budget by targeting customers who made purchases during last year’s holiday season. If this is your first holiday promotion on these platforms, target any past customer. Regardless of your approach (targeting last year’s holiday shoppers is recommended), you’ll use a custom audience. At the ad set level, click “Create New” under the audiences tab and select “Custom Audience.” Choose “Customer List” as the source for your new custom audience.
Bonus tip: Further optimize your holiday budget by creating a lookalike audience based on those who used your promotions last year. Using them as a seed audience, Facebook finds new users with similar behaviors, allowing you to reach new, potentially high-converting shoppers.
Holiday Marketing Tips for Your Website
Our last three tips focus on optimizing your ecommerce website. Building audiences and crafting compelling ads is crucial, but providing a great website experience is equally important. The holiday season is stressful, and people have limited patience for poor user experiences.
11. Build Excitement by Promoting Early
In the weeks leading up to your holiday sales, entice visitors by teasing what’s to come. This doesn’t require significant effort; a simple countdown to your sales launch can generate excitement. While your homepage is a good starting point, don’t stop there. If someone’s browsing a product page or about to complete a purchase, remind them about your upcoming deals. Planting this seed increases your chances of securing their business when they’re looking for deals.
What better place to promote upcoming sales? For an extra push, mention your holiday sales in order confirmation emails: “Thank you for your order! Come back on Nov. 22 for our best deals of the year.” An offer like that is hard to resist!
12. Dominate Organic Search with Gift-Specific Pages
According to Google Trends, searches for “gifts for mom” and “gifts for dad” peak in mid-December. “Gifts for her” and “gifts for him” also rise during this time, though less dramatically than in early February. This shows that holiday shoppers don’t always search for specific products or brands; they often look for gifts for specific people.
Interest in “gifts for mom” throughout the year. This presents a fantastic SEO opportunity, but only well-prepared businesses can capitalize on it. Create dedicated pages optimized for keywords like “gifts for mom” and “gifts for him” to increase your chances of ranking higher in organic search results, putting your products in front of eager shoppers. Why is this crucial? When a search triggers paid and organic results, users are more likely to click on organic listings. For a truly impactful holiday strategy, address both aspects of the search results page. For more guidance, check out our beginner’s guide to SEO.
13. Maximize Cross-Selling with Relevant Pop-Ups
Our final tip for online retailers: leverage pop-ups for cross-selling. Even if you’ve never used them professionally, you’ve encountered pop-ups as a user: those (sometimes annoying) windows appearing while browsing.
There’s a reason I said pop-ups are sometimes annoying: they don’t have to be! When used thoughtfully and with the user in mind, they can be quite effective they can actually be helpful. For ecommerce holiday marketing, use pop-ups to showcase related products. For example, if you’re a cartoonist selling prints and merchandise online, use a pop-up to promote a t-shirt featuring the same design when someone’s viewing a print’s product page. Since the advertised product is relevant, the interruption is minimal. Don’t forget to send a cheerful holiday greeting email to your customers!
Don’t Wait: Start Implementing These Holiday Marketing Tips!
The holiday season is stressful for everyone, especially ecommerce businesses. You have a massive opportunity to convert commercial intent into sales, but also intense competition. While we don’t have all the answers, we hope these tips prove useful. With proper preparation, you can make this holiday season your most successful yet!