The internet is no different in this regard. The holiday season is when online shopping hits its peak, with stores often struggling to keep up with orders and couriers racing to deliver them. It’s a great time to take advantage of this annual boom. The sooner you start preparing, the better your chances of riding the wave of holiday shopping.

Attract New Customers

Many potential customers struggle with finding the right gifts for their loved ones. This is why gift guides like “101 Holiday Gifts for Your Child, Spouse, Grandparents, etc.” are so popular. You can create a similar guide on your own site, filled with creative ideas based on your product offerings. If you do this early enough and optimize it with holiday shopping-related keywords, there’s a good chance search engines will drive many potential new customers your way. This is a form of seasonal SEO, and when done well, it can continue to pay off for years.

Remind Them You’re Here

If there isn’t enough time to perfect your communication strategy, you can still create special holiday offers in your online store and notify both current and potential customers about them.

Traditional tools like SEM campaigns (e.g., Google AdWords) or newsletters can be executed at any time and don’t require months of preparation.

However, you can increase their effectiveness by leveraging remarketing audiences you’ve built throughout the year. A user who has visited your site before is statistically much more likely to be interested in your offer than a first-time visitor. As a result, the ROI from such a group should be much higher than from a campaign aimed at the general public.

If you’ve already built such audiences, now is the time to use them to promote your holiday offers. If not, start building them now—they might not have a huge impact this year, but they’ll be invaluable for future holiday seasons. Setting up remarketing audiences with popular tools doesn’t take much time or generate high costs, and the return on this investment during high-demand periods like the holidays will more than compensate.

ROPO

For many market segments, it’s worth considering a mobile campaign. Even when shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, customers often verify products (and prices) using their smartphones or tablets. This is known as reverse ROPO (Research Offline, Purchase Online). Maciek has explored mobile advertising in more detail here.

Staying in the holiday spirit, I hope the pre-holiday season brings you as much joy as the holidays themselves!