If you live anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, your summer tan should have faded away entirely by now, and warm clothes should have occupied the front and center position in your wardrobe.

We are in the final quarter of the year or Q4, popularly referred to as the holiday season in the retail sector. Which prompted us to discuss the importance of holiday promotion for business looking to maximize their profit at the end of the year.

The spending season is here

Is holiday promotion really that important for the performance of retail companies? YES. People spend 123% of their income in December, which is twice as much as any other month of the year.

WHY? Because there are so many excuses to shop! „It’s not Christmas every day,“ and there’s no season like the winter season when it comes to spending.

This is true for all major holidays in Q4, starting from Halloween, onto Thanksgiving, Black Friday, all the way to Christmas and New Year’s. Any day in the calendar regarded as an everyone-will-shop-today-anyway day is a great time to sprinkle holiday promotions around.

Take a look at some other ones we will be discussing:

• Singles Day (November 11th)
• Cyber Monday (November 27th)
• Free Shipping Day (December 15th)
• Boxing Day (December 26th)

Holiday promotion is the most profitable promotion

What you’re selling is not important. You can succeed in holiday promotion as long as you find a way to bring a product or service into connection with the specified holiday.

During a time when consumers are nearly begging retailers to take their money, any business can improve profit if they have an efficient holiday promotion strategy.

So how to succeed in holiday promotion? We have done the research for you. Read further as we present you various holiday promotion ideas for small businesses, retailers, and affiliates to boost sales this holiday season.

It’s our gift to you. Oh, don’t even mention it. 🎁

Pick your holiday(s)

The first step is determining which holiday promotions to focus on. You might be thinking „why not focus on all of them“, especially if you’re giving out great offers.

But too much of a good thing is not a myth. Eat your favorite food every day and I promise it will stop feeling special. Keep cluttering your customers’ inboxes with promotional newsletters and it will seem like there’s no need to react immediately.

Instead, aim to give the impression of a special opportunity or a limited offer. Provoke them to act before the deal gets away. Moderation is key – exclusive things are rare and anticipated, so choose a couple of holidays to promote your offers and do them properly.

Factors of holiday promotion

In order to be meaningful, your holiday promotion has got to be two things: 1) valuable and 2) relevant.

While value usually means giving your customer a great product at a good price in the most hassle-free way, relevance refers both to the timing of your holiday promotion and to the content you build your campaign with.

These are the factors of running a holiday promotion.

Timing is of the essence

Spread the word about a holiday promotion too early and people will forget. Be too late and lose profit to competitors who started preparing on time. How can you get the timing right?

Although this differs from holiday to holiday, a general formula can be derived which takes into account holiday duration, intensity level, willingness to spend and expectation to save. The higher the numbers, the earlier you should start.

Take Christmas for example. The Christmas week is the longest lasting holiday of the bunch. Celebrated and anticipated by millions of people all around the world, it’s a very intense holiday.

Finally, because consumers get emotional in the jolly season, they are more focused on spending than saving money, so giving even small discounts or coupons might be enough to arouse their interest and fortify their resolution to spend.

Long holiday duration + high-intensity level + consumers’ increased willingness to spend = start Christmas campaign early.

On the other hand, consumers expect to save big on Black Friday and they are super intense about it – but, as it only lasts for two days, promoting offers just a couple of weeks ahead should suffice.

Also, remember that putting the campaign together takes time, so dedicate enough of it.

Free shipping?

To carry on in the holiday spirit, have you heard about the National Free Shipping Day?

A week before Christmas, thousands of online stores in the USA abolish shipping fees and minimum purchase amount. This efficient holiday promotion strategy is beloved by consumers, especially if a webshop doesn’t normally offer it.

But even if you offer free shipping year round, put a different spin on a regular feature by offering free next-day shipping, shipping to the gift receiver’s address or shipping the goods by a promised date.

These shipping options might persuade your audience into becoming customers.

Don’t underestimate the power of free gift wrapping and free card writing, either. Offer to do everything for your consumer – or instead of them. Present it like a feature, even if it’s a part of the usual deal.

And don’t forget the so-called last-minute shoppers! These consumers are buying presents in the nick of time, so offering to be their last-minute savior and make them look good in front of their mother-in-law could earn you a lifelong (thankful) customer.

Just don’t make any promises you can’t keep because that’s just rude and unprofessional. Take into consideration the amount you’re shipping and the distance it has to go and NEVER EVER be late unless you want your sales promotion to ruin your business.

Price matters

Online shoppers do price research to find the item at the cheapest price, visiting several websites before making a transaction. Here are some strategies you can apply to encourage purchase:

• Offer coupon codes

Offer customers the possibility to lower the price of their purchase at checkout using short and thematic coupon codes.

• Set a price threshold to reach for a discount

Push your customer just a little bit out of their spending comfort zone by encouraging them to reach a certain cart total to receive a discount.

This works especially well if you divide customers into segments according to what they usually spend and give each segment a different threshold just a bit above that.

• Give store credit or cash back for repeat purchase

Use holiday customer acquisition to your benefit and make one-time shoppers repeat shoppers by giving them the incentive to come back.

• Give store credit or cash back for referral

Get valuable recommendations by gifting store credit and cashback to customers at checkout. They’ll bring in new customers + have a reason to shop with you again. At the same time, give the referee a little starting credit to encourage them to make the first purchase.

Copy & visuals

Tell a story your customers will become immersed in. Try to create seasonal content that will go viral – funny, emotional or thought-provoking copy and visuals which your customers will want to comment on, retweet or show to a friend.

Or consider creating a short and relevant video, perhaps even with your own employees as actors. Even if the video doesn’t promote specific offers, it might earn the brand significant exposure and attract new customers in the long run.

Don’t just advertise a product – create context.

Capture customers’ attention

What is the best way to focus customers’ attention on offers? Remove distractions. The easiest way to do so is with landing pages, stand-alone web pages which usually contain only the most important information and features of the product or service being promoted, with a clear and emphasized call-to-action.

Again, even if your goal is just increasing brand awareness, use a landing page to engage customers with entertaining and interactive content, like in the case of ClickAttack’s free Christmas card creator landing page.

Drop a line

Write to your customers to inform them about your holiday promotion. Combine various channels like SMS, e-mail or even instant messaging services or chatbots (very fetch at the moment).

Remember to stay in touch with the folks you’re targeting.

Keep the content simple and don’t clutter newsletters with information invaluable to your customer.

If you have active social channels, make sure you’re posting frequently and timely – there’s no point posting when everyone is back at the office. You can do this and still enjoy holidays yourself if you automate or schedule newsletters.

Give gifts

Is the holiday you’re preparing promotions for one during which people exchange presents? Try some of these promotional strategies for a boost in sales:

• Combine products into package deals

Product bundling means a) you get rid of products that are difficult to sell and b) your customers get a discount for buying in bulk.

• Offer gift cards for indecisive buyers

Major selling points for gift cards are the possibility of instant delivery for late shoppers and the privilege of picking out a gift themselves for the gift receivers. The benefit for retailers is that a huge number of gift cards go unused every year.

• Create gift guides

Fact of life: people have no idea what to give to other people as gifts. Sometimes even people who are very close don’t get creative about gift giving.

Help a brother (or a sister) out with a gift guide in the form of a separate landing page that’s convenient to share. You can do various categories – for example by the receiver (‘mom’, ‘grandpa’) or by interests (technology, gaming, fashion).

• Turn products and services into gifts

As you create gift guides, you can create product packages for specific groups or thematic packages. This means you’ll bundle unrelated products up into a package that makes sense.

Chances customers will purchase unrelated products separately = 0. Chances they’ll get a products bundle = much higher.

• Give gifts with a purchase

After all, it is the holidays. So spoil your customers and give them a gift if the purchase total is higher than your desired amount. And while you’re charming them, don’t forget to charm the prices as well – set the prices to end in 9 and 99.

Use the tech to your advantage

You don’t need Santa’s little helpers to be successful this holiday season. Having a good tracking software, such as Affiliate Software, can make a huge difference to your holiday promotion with useful features like these:

•  Precise targeting

Target by the time of the day, the location, device type, OS, connection type, mobile operator… even smartwatch, smart TV, and more. Targeting people in the evening when they are lonely and bored, and not during the day while they are busy at work.

Santa’s watching you from the Affiliate Software UI.

• Automatic traffic optimization

Why buy traffic which may not convert well? Let your tracking software choose the best-converting offer for each visitor automatically. This unique approach, combined with advanced targeting mentioned above, lets you achieve great performance in just a few clicks.

To make holiday promotion of offers easier for affiliates, it’s a good idea to label them as ‘seasonal’ or ‘promotional’ and then chose the holiday the ad is intended for.

• Real-time reporting

Timing is everything. Whether your offers are doing well or not so much, the key is to learn that in time to adapt it for better performance.

With interactive dashboards, you can select what you want to monitor in your reports, group, filter and sort data, and, finally, export reports. If any unusual changes occur in clicks and conversions, it’s very useful to have a monitoring system that will instantly notify you.

Put holiday promotion into motion with these super tips

Halloween 31/10

Halloween is the first (dead) serious holiday in the Q4 series. Depending on geography, it will be bigger or smaller – but it’s safe to say that the Halloween craze has crept up on all parts of the world.

Because people don’t give each other presents on Halloween, the emphasis should be on offering discounts and engaging customers with seasonal content, and stick with the typical Halloween tone as far as the design and the content are concerned.

Who knew spooky could attract shoppers?

Even if you’re not offering discounts, creating good Halloween related content will leave your customers entertained and impressed that you are staying up to date with trends and events, and that might motivate them to get involved with your brand.

Singles’ Day 11/11

The Chinese giant Alibaba first started Singles’ Day event in 2009, which has since turned into the world’s biggest shopping event, setting a Guinness World Record in 2015 for highest online sales revenue generated by a single company in 24 hours with $14.3 billion in gross merchandise volume.

Orders came from 200 countries worldwide, and nearly 70% of them were placed from mobile phones. Adapt the shopping experience of your website to mobile channels unless you want to lose customers and profit.

American Thanksgiving 23/11

Turkey, stuffing, pies, and families gathered together around the feast on the table. Because this day is followed by Black Friday & then Cyber Monday, it’s more useful as a day to spread brand awareness than a day to hand out discounts.

Make yourself known to the loyal and potential customers with smart branding and well thought out content, and give thanks for their loyalty and trust.

Black Friday & Cyber Monday 24/11-27/11

Repeat after me: discount shopping.

If there’s ever a day when the prices are expected to plummet like a ball dropping from the 75th floor, it’s the blackest of all Fridays. It got its name as a metaphor for retailers gaining profit for the first time in the year (not being in the red anymore).

The day after Thanksgiving used to unofficially mark the shopping season’s kick off. In the last few years, Black Friday has become a weekend event instead of just one day of bargains, and endless lines in front of stores have been replaced by online Black Friday promotions.

It’s a good idea to send a promotional newsletter to announce your top Black Friday deals – apart from attracting customers to your webshop, it’s useful to present your offer ahead so customers have time to plan their purchase, especially if it’s a larger one (and big purchases are characteristic for BF).

Christmas 25/12

Christmas frenzy starts cooking up as November is ending, and heats up in the first week of December and gets boiling in the weeks before Christmas Eve. Decorations all around us, carols on the radio – it’s the most wonderful time of the year indeed.

Gift giving increases more than on any other holiday and we all allow ourselves to spend a little extra ‘just because it’s Christmas’.

Here are some ideas you could use to encourage customers to give you their dollar bills during the holidays:

No need to get dirty to get the gifts through your customers’ chimneys.

Boxing Day 26/12

If Christmas is the period during which most consumers buy gifts for others, it is on Boxing Day, which kicks off the bargains period, when they’ll want to treat themselves. Last year, a quarter of British population made a purchase on Boxing Day!

It’s a great opportunity to sell discounted electrical appliances, health and beauty products, clothes… In 2015 alone, Amazon had more than 5000 offers available with an average of 35 percent off prices.

New Year’s 31/12-1/1

If timing is everything, the week before New Year’s Eve is the perfect time to throw a clearance sale. Everything must go! As the year reaches its end, people’s wallets are quite empty, but their determination to take advantage of what’s left of the current year grows stronger!

Use phrases such as “finish the year in style” or “prepare for the next one”.

Use celebration motifs such as fireworks, glitter, champagne, choose a lot of the black and gold colors and sell anything related to common New Year’s resolutions – fitness equipment, books, educational tutorials, electronics and jewelry, but also weekend trips and wellness packages for a relaxing finish or a fresh beginning.

Q1 holiday promotion is around the corner

When you’re done counting your dollars and blessings and the business year ends, take a break and spoil yourself – but not for very long because Q1 is here again with the biggest Chinese holiday right ahead. Of course it’s Chinese New Year or the Spring Festival, notorious for great online deals!

But Q1 holiday promotions will be the topic of another blog post – that’s right, we’ll make sure you are prepared to gain maximum profit with advertising tips and tricks all year round.

Wrapping it up

The beginning is always the hardest. To get you going, we’ve made you a simple checklist for launching a successful holiday promotion:

File -> Print -> Use.

If you get stuck thinking ‘ahhh there’s so much work to do, will it be worth it?’, just remember that consumers spend 123% of their income in December.

Finally, don’t launch any holiday promotion programs before you have the resources in place to handle the customers efficiently, professionally, and most importantly in the holiday spirit.