热热闹闹的黑五和感恩节结束了，有做独立站的朋友反映流量及销量并不如预期。不要着急，马上接下来还有Cyber Monday及圣诞，大家及时做好优化，争取在年尾大挣一笔。

Christmas and New Year are fast approaching and all those online shoppers are ready to splurge for the merriest season of the year. Last year, there was a 13.6% increase in online retail sales during the holiday season. That’s an immense opportunity to take advantage of this year’s holiday shopping season as the spending behavior of online shoppers remains strong and mounting. However, while the online sales continue to rocket, some marketers and sellers still fail to make the most out of that growth. More and more people are realizing the comfort of online shopping, but what holiday marketing ideas do you need to carry out in order to convert that into actual sales? How do you draw the online traffic to your business? What are the best ways to connect with these holiday shoppers? How do you outsmart your competitors? To solve your holiday marketing dilemma, do not even think twice about using these brilliant ideas to make your Christmas and New Year marketing campaigns a sure success.
1 – Redesign your online identity to embrace the holiday spirit, but make it a tradition
Every year, when the holiday season starts, you will see storefronts, visual merchandises or any commercial street with bright Christmas lights and fancy holiday ornaments. This is also true online. A brand makeover during the holiday season is always a good idea to stand out from the rest of the competition. It is also a very easy strategy to remind your online shoppers that you are ready for the holiday season. However, annual holiday redesigning will not work unless it becomes a natural fixture to your customers. It should be something that they look forward to or they easily associate with you during the holidays.
Looking for more brilliant holiday marketing ideas to update your identity?
A merry website. Update your website to embrace that holiday warmth. First impressions do count to your online shoppers. If your website is outdated, they will most likely visit another website offering similar products. If you update your website, online shoppers who are looking for that perfect holiday item will easily notice that you may have what they want for the holidays.
The Container Store created a fully customized website design to embrace the holiday season. Suggested graphic design tool: Canva
Festive social media accounts. Do not forget to refresh your social media accounts by changing your profile pictures or banners with the holiday spirit.
Be iconic. Get a little more creative. Another great option is to transform your logo to welcome the merriest season of all.
oomlart creatively updated its logo by replacing ‘L’ with a Christmas stocking.
2 – Improve your online customers’ overall mobile shopping experience Last year’s holiday season, mobile devices generated 52.33% of the online shopping traffic outpacing the online transactions from desktop. With the rise of mobile users, marketing via mobile is still quite new which provides an ample amount of chance to evolve. After a poor mobile shopping experience, more than 60% of online shoppers leave a mobile site and won’t come back. They even share that unfortunate experience on social media sites and to make things worse they move to the competitor’s site to get that better online mobile shopping experience. Try understanding the state of your shopper’s mobile experience by capturing screen gestures such as swiping, clicking, zooming, and rotating. This will help you uncover your customer’s’ pain points when they are shopping online using their mobile phones. How to have a successful mobile shopping experience?
Mobile friendly website. Build your mobile we
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age in a responsively designed one. This means that your webpage should change its layout when it detects that the user is using a mobile phone.

Very.co.uk’s holiday marketing campaign was customized to fit perfectly on a mobile device.
Quick loading time. The loading time for your mobile site should not take too long. Make sure that the pictures’ or contents’ loading time are improved via mobile phone because online shoppers rely heavily on those visuals and information before deciding to buy.
Mobile incentives. Reward your customers with discounts or special offers for a successful online purchase via their mobile phone.
Mobile exclusives. Consider incorporating limited offers or exclusive information that your shoppers can only obtain through their mobile phones.
Mobile app. In order to really boost the overall mobile shopping experience of your customers, build a mobile app for your online store. This will not just be perfect for the holiday season but also a brilliant year-round marketing strategy. Need a hand in setting up your mobile app? Use SellMob today for a hassle free deployment.
3 – Don’t run out of stock, identify your holiday’s hottest items The flock of online shoppers during the holiday season can be overwhelming to online retailers especially if they haven’t planned things ahead of time. The ability to have an advanced insights on which of your products are likely to sell out this coming holiday season will be a useful instrument in making sure that you will not run out of your top selling products when your customers need them the most. Take for example when industry experts mocked a forecast of Apple Watch as the number trending product because of the slow-moving sales. But after following days, the financial forecast was doubled for that product.
How to never run out of your top selling holiday products?
Understand the past, invest in data-driven marketing. Become aware of the gaps you have encountered from last year’s inventory. Identify your top selling products from last year and estimate the production to be made. Pinpoint what products were your online customers were looking for but failed to deliver on time.
Foresee the future, capitalize in predictive analytics. Figure out the top trending products of the season to predict which of you products have the highest possibility of being purchased. You can then showcase your best-selling items in your front page. A great tool to help you is Personalized Recommendation for a highly targeted and customized product suggestions based on your shoppers’ behavior.
Live in the present, take advantage of real time analytics. Analyze enormous online shopping data such real time online traffic, conversion rates, abandoned shopping carts and the like. Comprehend the millions of online conversations to sort the popular products. You can even know how your customers feel about what you are selling real time.
4 – Develop an online shopper’s holiday gift guides The holiday season is all about sharing happy memories with you family, friends or colleagues…and that definitely includes exchanging gifts. But how many times have you had the difficulty in shopping for that perfect Christmas or New Year’s gift for your mom, dad, best friend, partner, coworker or even the holiday treat for themselves? Building out an online holiday gift guide is one of the most creative holiday marketing ideas there is. But more than that, you are helping your online shoppers skip that painstaking process of searching for the best holiday gift.

No Rest for Bridget’s sample holiday gift guide
What to include in your holiday gift guide?
Complete your gift, include upsell or cross-sell product links. Instead of just recommending a single product, always put links of other products to encourage your online shoppers to buy complementary products or similar higher end items.
Narrow things down. In order for your holiday gift guide to be effective, remember to subdivide the gift guides as specific as possible. “Gifts for her” or “gifts for him” won’t work successfully anymore. Instead, you can narrow things down such as “heartfelt gifts for moms”, “genuine gifts for dads”, “sweetest gifts for your lady”, “warmest gifts for your coworkers” and a lot more.
5 – Plan year-round holiday marketing ideas and strategies Developing holiday marketing ideas to drive your sales should not only last during the Christmas and New Year. If you think that by the end of the holidays, you should stop your marketing efforts, think again. Once you have identified your target market and understood how they behave, develop your online marketing strategy that should incorporate before, during and after the holiday season.
What your year-round holiday marketing strategy should include?
Utilize remarketing. Remarketing is very well-matched to take advantage of that online holiday shopping behavior. Thus, becoming a valuable year-round marketing technique. Take for example how you were searching for the holiday gift to buy for your dearest family or friends last year. Have you purchased the first item you saw online from the first website you visited? Definitely not. You must have shopped through various websites and compared several products before arriving on your holiday gift, just like everyone else. This scenario demonstrates a critical chance for online retailers to take advantage of remarketing since it helps them to recapture that lost opportunity.