Christmas and Boxing Day are great opportunities to make merry but they’re also lucrative days for retailers like you. Last year, the end-of-the-year season was worth between $942.6 and $960.4 billion!
So, if you want to close the year with a bang, it’s essential to think about your campaigns and be prepared. This article will ensure that you have the savvy and tools you need to make the most of Christmas and Boxing Day.
Why you need a marketing budget and strategy
It can be tricky to decide how much to allocate towards marketing, especially if you don’t have a fixed budget and strategy. With so many ways to advertise, you may end up spending too much and throw away your ad spend over too many channels, diluting your message without any measurable gains.
To help you avoid this, the general rule is to spend 2% to 5% of your revenue if you’re a B2B company. Meanwhile, B2Cs can spend more, usually from 5% to 10%.
Of course, being resourceful and knowing about tools that can help is a huge advantage. For example, the graphic design site PosterMyWall offers hundreds of thousands of templates that are ready to use. Social media graphics are free to download while a paid subscription only costs around $10 a month.
Having it in your arsenal means you can save on graphic design services and gain better control over your content.
Now, let’s take a closer look at other must-have marketing collaterals from your toolbox.
Advertisements
Advertisements can be online or offline.
Online
If you want to boost your Christmas and Boxing Day sales, you can’t ignore online advertising. Consider the following statistics:
- 2.5 billion monthly active users on Instagram
- 2.9 billion monthly active users on Facebook
- 4.3 billion users on Google
Posting ads on these platforms can go a long way in increasing brand awareness and providing market data, allowing you to achieve your business goals.
Emails and social media posts (which we later discuss) are two examples of online advertisement. However, you can also try search engine marketing, display advertising, and video marketing.
Offline
Offline advertisements still hold weight in our digital-first era. They offer a superior return on investment (ROI) compared to digital ads while being cost-effective. For example, instead of hiring a graphic designer for $20–$160 an hour, you can tap into PosterMyWall’s extensive collection of Christmas retail templates and Boxing Day ad templates.
And the best thing is, they’re effective!
Consider flyers, for instance. Up to 79% of people keep, pass on, or at least look at the flyers they receive. If your budget can’t accommodate full-size flyers, you can use tear-off tabs to save on paper and printing.
Emails
Why email? Ninety-nine percent of email users check their inboxes daily. As a marketing tool, email offers a 36% return on investment for every dollar spent. Plus, it allows you to reach 4.26 billion people compared to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Leverage this channel by using email templates and coming up with relevant content and offers that your audience will be interested in. You can also measure your campaign performance to tweak and improve results.
Social media posts
Over 4.59 billion people used social media in 2022 while spending an average of 151 minutes per day on social media platforms. So, if your goal is to spread the word about your Boxing Day sale, you must have an active presence on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Prioritize apps where your audience can be found. Find out which platforms they frequent and establish a presence there.
Posting regularly and interacting with customers via comments and DMs can:
- Increase customer loyalty
- Build brand awareness
- Foster brand recognition
- Drive traffic to your website
- Get people talking about your brand
- Gather valuable data on your audience
- Provide responsive and timely customer service
- Help you make connections and collaborate with new people and businesses.
While it’s good to be relatable as it humanizes your brand, don’t lose sight of your marketing goals. Be professional. You can use our social media templates to design engaging graphics and videos that you can publish directly on the platforms. Even better, you can prepare them ahead of time and schedule when they should be published.
Prepare early
One of the best things you can do to make your Christmas and Boxing Day marketing strategies less stressful is to prepare early. Instead of waiting until you need to send something out, formulate a strategy that will take your audiences from awareness to conversion.
What are your marketing objectives this year? How will you create buzz around your campaigns? Which channels will you use? How many emails, social media posts and ads do you need to create?
Getting everything ready beforehand will make your efforts more fruitful. It will also make your communications more cohesive, organized, and effective. If you haven’t begun anything yet, now is the best time to start working on your Christmas and Boxing Day marketing strategies.
Here are a few additional tips you can integrate:
- Use your data from last year to improve your campaign.
- Segment your customers.
- Perform a competitor analysis.
- Keep your customers up-to-date by publishing content regularly.
- Consider how you can upsell and cross-sell products.
- Feature customer reviews.
- Create an auto-generated email for abandoned carts.
Once you have a carefully planned campaign, you stand a higher chance of raking in those holiday sales.
Take Home Message: Profitable Sales Don’t Happen By Chance
Regardless of the season, we can’t overemphasize how important planning is for a successful campaign. Remember that you can only maximize the tools we’ve described if you use them effectively. So, design a strategy, leverage cost-effective tools that can speed up content production, and have everything ready to go before you launch. This way, you only need to tweak minor details and monitor operations once you begin your Christmas and Boxing Day promotions.
Senior editor at PosterMyWall.
