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The holiday season is here — marketers are you ready? From engaging shoppers on social media to brainstorming attractive offers and campaigns, you’ll need new ways to attract customers and nudge them to complete purchases. As you plan memorable holiday marketing strategies for this year’s holiday sale, take a look at these lessons from the best-performing campaigns across the years.

Get your eggnog and prepare yourself for some quick tips on successful marketing this holiday season.

#1 Emotions Work. Always.

The holidays are a lot about spending quality time with your family and friends. Heathrow airport, the second busiest airport in the world becomes busier with people traveling back home for holidays. Heathrow Airport did a phenomenal job of capturing the sentiments of the holiday season through its Homecoming advertisement in 2016. The ad shows two Heathrow bears, supposedly an old couple, coming home to spend holidays with their grandchildren. The ad captured the smallest acts such as waking up the partner when the flight lands, to thinking twice before stepping on the escalator beautifully. It’s impossible to not relate to it. Though the ad did not talk about the airport, it played a major role in the entire film production. Everyone on social media loved the ad, some even calling it better than John Lewis’ Buster the Boxer ad. Heathrow continued with the homecoming story last year. However, this time they traced the journey of the Heathrow airport in the last 50 years – take a look at the video here:

Holiday Marketing Lesson 1

The holiday season is also an emotional time for your audience. Focus on connecting with your audience through their emotions and sales will follow.

#2 Holiday Marketing Campaigns for B2B

Holiday marketing is not just about promoting offers and deals to your end customers. It is also about educating them and promoting their businesses. So, if you are a B2B marketer and have not planned holiday marketing campaigns yet, this is the right time to do it. WeWork, a leading co-working space provider created a #wwgiftguide campaign that featured gifting ideas for families, gifts to get the party started and gifts for digital nomads. The best part of the campaign was it featured products of its member companies. Inbound marketing software like HubSpot was also at the forefront of B2B holiday marketing in 2017.

To help companies maximize their marketing efforts during the season, HubSpot put up a holiday-themed microsite that had everything from blogs on holiday marketing, eBooks on successful marketing, to helpful tools such as holiday trend tracker.

Do also check out the 7 brilliant holiday marketing ideas to boost eCommerce sales this holiday season.

Holiday Marketing Lesson 2

Holidays are meant for giving and sharing with your near and dear ones. This applies to B2B companies too. Think of memorable holiday marketing campaigns and giveaways for your customers. Unleash your creativity — it’s the holiday season after all.

#3 Add Goodness To Your Marketing Campaigns

Spread happiness, and cheer this holiday season through an act of goodness. Everlane, a t-shirt manufacturing company, initiated a Black Friday Fund last year. The brand leaned on email marketing to inform its customers that all proceeds collected during Black Friday campaigns would be used to improve the working conditions at their Chinese factories. They also mentioned the sales figure they planned to achieve during the season. The non-pushy, simple email struck a chord with many buyers.

Holiday Marketing Lesson 3

Think of ways in which you can add goodness to your campaign. If you support an NGO or if there is any special cause that you wish to promote, then you may include that in your campaign to create a positive image for your brand.

# 4 Find Ways To Make Holidays Less Stressful

Fun, as it might seem, the holiday season can also become stressful when one has to think of ideal gifts for family and friends. As a marketer, you must provide a good offline and online experience that makes it simpler for the customer to make that decision. Annie Selke, a website that offers functional products for homes, created a personality quiz to help shoppers select the right gift for their near and dear ones. This interactive marketing kept buyers engaged on the website and took the stress out of gift shopping.

Holiday Marketing Lesson 4

Find ways to reduce the stress for your customers. It can be a personality quiz as in case of Annie Selke or a holiday guide of curated products — help your buyers find the right gifts for their friends and families.

#5 Amplify Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

Last year, over 61% of the web traffic to retail websites were from mobile phones. Shoppers prefer to browse through products and order them on the move. You cannot ignore the power of mobile phones and should focus on a razor-sharp mobile marketing strategy for the holiday season if you haven’t already done so. Walmart, for instance, revamped its SEO strategy for mobile and gave a preview of their upcoming deals to users who downloaded the app. Similarly, Amazon offered mobile-only deals that were not available on the website and offered customized incentives to its app users through push notifications. This increased the traffic to their mobile app and enhanced the user-engagement.

Holiday Marketing Lesson 5

Plan your mobile marketing strategy to engage customers who prefer to shop through their smartphone. Push notifications are a great way of informing your clients about new offers and deals and driving traffic to your website and app. Choose a push notification platform that will help you segment and tailor the push notification messages sent to your customers.

Get Started With Holiday Marketing Campaigns

According to the International Council of Shopping Centers, holiday shopping in 2018 will be worth $807 billion and over $685 billion will be spent on purchasing gifts and other holiday products. As a marketer, the onus lies on you and your team to create a seamless shopping experience for your customer especially in the digital space. With so many marketers vying for your customer’s attention, it’s important to break the clutter. Push notifications are the best way to do it. You can send personalized messages and flash notifications to your customer with push notifications. MoEngage offers an AI-powered push notification platform that can help you create different marketing campaigns for your diverse audiences, analyze their performance, and engage with users across their preferred channels. The laser-sharp targeting and 1:1 communication will help in building better engagement with your clients during the holiday season.