Key takeaways:
- Best practices for building a marketing strategy that converts
- Tips for engaging and attracting your key shopper audience
- Ideas to sustain your sales beyond the holiday season
Set up your marketing campaign
Establish the right campaign, channel, and content strategy to help drive sales.
There are seemingly endless components to consider as you build a compelling holiday marketing campaign, but we’ve identified three key steps that can help guide your way.
Step 1: Finalize core campaign elements. Do you know the absolute “must haves” for the campaign elements that will help your brand stand out this holiday season? These elements might include your goals, length of the campaign, planned deals, cross- and upselling opportunities, available inventory, budget, and any historical data on what’s resonating with your audience during the holiday season. Identifying these core elements is the foundation of any effective marketing campaign.
Step 2: Establish your messaging and channel strategy. How familiar are you with the resonance of your brand messaging across your engagement channels? Once you’ve locked your core campaign elements, the next step is to identify the narrative components of your brand story, how you’ll version your messaging to different audience types on different engagement platforms, the channel mix that you’ll use (organic versus paid promotion), and any partners that you want to work with to promote your campaign. Get inventive and be bold as you establish your messaging so that your campaign stands out this holiday season.
Step 3: Build your content strategy. Do you know what content formats distributed on different channels drive the most engagement and conversions? With your campaign elements and messaging dialed in, next up is building a content marketing strategy to engage shoppers. Key considerations here are being clear on the intent of your content, knowing the needs and pain points of the audiences you want to reach, getting familiar with the format requirements for different channels, and establishing the metrics you’ll use to measure success. As you’re finalizing your strategy, make sure to set up campaign tracking tools so that you can monitor success, and invest in contingency plans based on performance, inventory, and budget.
Learn more about iterative testing and how it can affect your marketing campaign.
Holiday your way
The key to a successful holiday campaign is knowing your shoppers.
Customer segmentation can go a long way in helping to connect your marketing messages to specific audience types. Creating customer segments can help you optimize your marketing and advertising campaigns for specific audiences and journey stages, and keep different types of customers engaged over time and across channels. Learn more about best practices for establishing deeper connections with your customers.
Boost click-through on your social ads. Social commerce sales are expected to reach $1.2 trillion in 2025, with Gen Z and Millennials driving the growth. Adding social commerce to your sales channels can be a worthwhile investment, but to carve out your slice of that burgeoning commerce pie, you’ll need to develop a social media marketing strategy and allocate resources to sustain it. Learn more about social media marketing best practices.
Engaging shoppers on Facebook and Instagram with social ads can help drive traffic to your holiday deals. Buy with Prime merchants can use Social Ads for Buy with Prime to streamline ad creation and measure ad performance.
Stand out through email. During the holiday season, virtually every brand seeks to capture the attention of shoppers. This is the time to be creative and bold to help your brand stand out. To master the art of well-targeted emails, some tips to consider include creating recipient segments, using A/B tests to uncover subject lines that drive opens and content that engages, and giving subscribers a clear action to take and ensure that their click leads them to a relevant experience on your site. Learn how to develop engaging email marketing strategies.
The Klaviyo for Buy with Prime app empowers merchants like you to nurture relationships with Prime members using Klaviyo’s powerful email marketing automation tools, which can be invaluable during the oversaturated holiday season.
Personalization and creativity for the win. Whether shoppers are searching for holiday essentials or a one-of-a-kind gift, make it easier for them to find you with optimized and personalized content. Our experts recommend investing in SEO early as a steady foundation for growth all year long.
Holiday gift guides are known to boost brand awareness and inspire shoppers to make a purchase. Gift guides that offer personalized shopping experiences (as simple as personalized emails or individual coupon codes) can help you not only convert shoppers, but also turn them into repeat customers. And, don’t forget the importance of nurturing your existing loyal customers by offering holiday-themed rewards or additional discounts on their purchases.
Tap into the Buy with Prime marketing toolkit
Tap into the trust of Prime to engage Prime members shopping on your site.
Promote the trust of Prime. Buy with Prime merchants can use the Buy with Prime badge to signal to Prime members that you offer Prime shopping benefits directly on your site. We’ve created the Buy with Prime Merchant Brand Guidelines to help you leverage the badge in your emails, blogs, social media posts, website copy, or other marketing materials. Think of the Buy with Prime badge as a confidence booster that can help build trust in your brand beyond Amazon.com.
Holiday selling beyond the holidays
Attract shoppers to your site before, during, and after the holidays.
Long gone are the days when Black Friday was the only shopping day of the holiday season. Not only does the shopping season start earlier each year, but it also extends well into the new year. So it’s worth putting together a marketing plan that sustains your sales beyond key moments like Black Friday and Cyber Monday into the new year.
Create your lead-up plan. Use your early campaign to position your products and build momentum with an ongoing event that helps your customers wrap up their gift list early. If you’re looking for inspiration, consider daily giveaways, like a small free product when someone makes a purchase or a lucky-shopper campaign where one shopper every day or month gets a surprise, such as a deeper discount.
Have a post-event strategy. After the long weekend of big deals is behind you, dig into your sales and engagement metrics to learn which products performed the best, and look for opportunities to reengage shoppers who started checkout but didn’t complete their order. It’s important to be thinking about your post-season strategy to follow up with customers, offer additional (ideally personalized) promotions, engage last-minute shoppers, and encourage repeat purchases. Consider:
- A post-event clear out. Delight your shoppers with an extended sale. Determine the performance of your promotions and adjust as needed. Test a different type of promotion on overstock items or discount slow-moving products. This can help you drive more sales and reduce inventory storage fees.
- Reconnect with casual browsers. Remarket featured products to stay top of mind with shoppers who browsed or viewed your products during the event but didn’t end up completing a purchase. Buy with Prime merchants can set up an abandoned checkout email campaign through a marketing automation platform like Klaviyo. Using the Klaviyo for Buy with Prime app, you can send automated email reminders to Prime members who started to check out using Buy with Prime but didn’t complete their order, which can help drive more sales.
- Nurture Prime members. As you look for ways to drive long-term value with new and existing customers, Buy with Prime offers a way to build on those relationships. When a Prime member completes a purchase using Buy with Prime, you receive customer and order information, including email address, that you can use to build direct relationships with these customers.
Learn more about elevating your marketing—all year long—using Buy with Prime.