New year, new yarns to spin: Seasonal sales tips for ecommerce
The new year is an opportunity to refresh branding and marketing. It’s probably a great time to refresh everything, but here’s why you should start with your marketing:
- Communication trends change and it’s vital you keep up with them for marketing to be effective.
- Platforms where you might be advertising (search engines, social media) constantly edit their functionality. Marketing simply needs to keep up with the algorithm.
- Branding can make or break a brand. Staying visually and verbally relevant will make you attractive to shoppers, and the new year is a logical time for a light facelift.
Branding refers to creating and sustaining a company’s image, while marketing is creating, distributing, and selling products or services. A brand revamp might include updating your store’s logo, website, and sales materials. On the other hand, an update to your Shopify store marketing will ensure that impactful branding and message reaches the most people possible, to continue earning shoppers’ trust.
Escape the January dip: New Year sales
To remain competitive in the retail sector, many stores turn to new strategies in the early part of the year. Relying purely on seasonal sales like January discounts or New Year promotions is not a long-term strategy, but it can help you capture new shoppers.
Ideally, stores should weather the January dip without resorting to discounts:
- Launching new lines or products gives you a way to grab attention without slashing prices. This works even better if you promoted your store during winter sales.
- Positioning products as relevant to the season attracts new buyers. Examples include intensive skincare for cold weather, or health kick products for new year’s resolutions.
Refresh your Shopify store marketing
You know you don’t want to resort to discounting your wares, this is like putting a bandaid on a knife wound. To generate recurring sales and a steady stream of new visitors, your best bet is to update your marketing in January.
How to start the new year with new shoppers:
- First, gather your artwork and posts from the past year and integrate the best posts into your calendar for the rest of the year. If you are indeed updating your branding, edit these posts to reflect your new look and feel. On the other hand, you can upcycle successful posts with better-quality photographs, more urgent messaging, or a seasonal-relevant tip.
- Next, refresh and upcycle your best blog posts and tutorials. You’ll want to go through your top-performing articles, and update them with new products, fresh hyperlinks, improved meta descriptions, and better information for your audience. While some of your tutorials might need re-recording if you’ve updated your camera and microphone, others might simply need a little SEO touch-up on their YouTube description or similar to reflect your latest focus as a store.
- Lastly, all ecommerce should be programming marketing campaigns for important dates and holidays. New Year is the perfect time to plan: look at all the upcoming holidays, and decide which ones you’re going to use to promote your store. Relevancy helps! Consider promoting your chocolate brand around Easter and Valentine’s Day, or your pet foot protector when the hottest months hit. Save yourself time by automating holiday marketing, and using holiday-specific templates for ecommerce.
Just with these 3 strategies, you’re already well on your way to creating successful online store strategies for the upcoming year! Now, these techniques will help you grab brand-new site visitors. How are you going to keep them coming back?
Delight your loyal, return customers
Shoppers are inundated by Christmas emails, perhaps a Happy Hanukkah or Diwali email if they’re lucky in the fourth quarter, but a Happy New Year marketing email could really stand out. At this time, less email marketing is taking place.
Moreover, at New Year you’re not competing with other winter sales that some countries consider more important than Cyber Weekend: The UK, Canada, Australia, and many other countries that were once under British rule, all celebrate Boxing Day on December 26th. Boxing Day is primarily a shopping holiday, and similar deals to those promoted for Black Friday might be found in late December and January for stores that market in those nations.
While we’ve established that New Year’s Day online sales are not the best strategy for long-term Shopify store marketing, you might want to offer a special offer to repeat buyers: New Year’s Day online sales for our loyal patrons only.
How can you ensure only your loyal customers get access to these sales? Offer them:
- A unique discount code
- A landing page that’s off-site, and send them the link
- Share upcoming products with an option to pre-order
Make it easy to attract loyal shoppers
Last of all, activate marketing automation that will bring back repeat buyers, cart abandoners, and at-risk customers. Aument reminds shoppers about your store at the optimal time, encouraging them back to checkout.
