3 Ways Online Retailers Can Take Advantage of Seasonal Holidays

by Startacus Admin

Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, Black Friday, Cyber Monday: the list of seasonal holidays and...let’s call them seasonal occasions is long, particularly when you factor in those celebrated by other countries (which an online retailer must). Presidents Day, Indigenous Peoples' Day, Fiesta Nacional de España, whatever holidays you choose to take part in, there are some things you need to bear in mind.

Plan Far in Advance 

Start planning well ahead of the first holiday that you intend to take advantage of. Not only will this allow you breathing space, but it will allow you more time for new ideas to pop into your head to add to your plans, which is less likely to happen if you leave it too late. When will you start preparing your customers for your big day of offers and sales and whatnot? When will you start sending out special codes and unique offers to select customers? What will you offer that customers can only get on that day?

Break your plan for each holiday into sections, such as discounts, unique products, temporary website redesign, etc., to make it easier and somewhat uniform across all holidays. And, speaking of all holidays, having one big calendar on your wall to help you visualise all of the holidays you will be taking advantage of will be of value too. This Buyer’s Guide focused on this Presidents Day mattress sale is a good example of how you can use content to showcase products and sales around specific seasons.

Acquisition

Whether visiting for the first time or a return customer, data capture and outreach are particularly important during one of these holidays because, ideally, you will see a big increase in traffic. One well done holiday campaign could do wonders for your business and see a boom to your loyal customer base. This is also a perfect time to really take notice of what your visitors are doing and where, allowing you to better tailor your website to their needs.

Offer extra discount codes or offer extensions to those who sign up to your newsletter, share on social media, or simply sign up for an account, but make sure not to get in their way and dissuade them from browsing and purchasing. Over the years, Presidents Day weekend has become synonymous with sales.

Make it Relevant 

Relevance is key. Obviously, if you are a clothing retailer, you will offer warm, winter clothing around Christmas, but what else can you do to be relevant to the particular holiday you are taking advantage of? As mentioned earlier, you can make temporary changes to the design of your site to fit in with the holiday and help customers feel in the spirit of said. The obvious example of this is Christmas themed colours and imagery for Christmas. What unique products can you offer at these times?

Be aware that you are likely to receive customers on these days that you might otherwise not see, but only if you do a good job of ensuring relevance to the holiday. The flip side of this is that you still need to maintain relevance to your main audience; although you want to cater for those who might not otherwise visit and therefore build your customer base, temper this with the fact that those customers might not actually become recurring customers if you aren’t so relevant to them for the rest of the year.

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Published on: 19th January 2020