Boost Holiday Sales With Our 5-Point Marketing Checklist

As we enter the final countdown to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’re probably putting the finishing touches on your marketing plan.

People come ready to buy on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and they do most of their shopping online. In 2016, consumers spent $3.39 billion online on Cyber Monday, making it the biggest shopping day in the history of U.S. e-commerce. Is your store ready for that kind of traffic?

In our last post, we talked about how you can use MailChimp to attract an audience for your holiday marketing. This week, we’ll cover how to use that audience to make more sales and get more repeat business during the holidays.

Enhance your campaigns to sell more stuff

Now that you have your audience, it’s time to focus on creating campaigns that help you make a sale with every send. When you turn on marketing automations—like order notifications and Google remarketing ads—and leave them running, you have more time to spend on other parts of your business (or doing your own shopping).

Update customers on the status of an order

Make the most of the high open rates your order notifications receive by adding a product recommendations block. When you suggest more items customers might like within your transactional emails—like order invoices, shipping confirmations, and more—you can encourage them to return to your store right after they complete a purchase.

Design your order notifications

Recapture sales

Have you turned on abandoned cart in your account? It’s a powerful automation we talk about a lot, because it can help you recapture sales you’d otherwise miss out on. And when 67% of online shopping carts are abandoned before a customer completes a purchase, that’s a lot of revenue you could be taking advantage of.

Abandoned cart emails run in the background of your business, so you can reconnect with customers who navigate away from their shopping cart and remind them of the awesome stuff they left behind. We even found that an abandoned cart series can help you increase orders per recipient by 37%.

And if you have a Shopify, WooCommerce, or PrestaShop store connected to your MailChimp account, you can show your subscribed contacts the specific products they browsed on your site with a product retargeting email.

Turn on abandoned cart

Encourage bigger checkouts

When done strategically, offering shipping incentives and other discounts to your customers can move them to buy more at checkout. Try adding a promo code to your campaigns that customers who spend over a certain amount can use to take a percentage off their purchase, and specify a time window so they know to act fast. Or take Fowler’s Chocolates’ approach to shipping promos and only offer them to customers who spend at least $40 across multiple products.

How to add promo codes

Turn website visitors into customers

Even if folks are ready to buy when they visit your store, they can still get distracted and leave without making a purchase. In fact, 97% of people who visit an online store for the first time leave without buying anything.

But with Google remarketing ads, you can recapture their interest, wherever they go online, and bring them back to buy that product you have in the right color or size. Whether you’re looking to introduce a seasonal collection or move inventory after the holiday, retargeting is a smart way to make sure you don’t lose the new audience you worked hard to build.

Set up a retargeting ad

Keep customers coming back

It’s not too early to think about how you’ll continue to engage with your customers—old and new—after the holidays. People lose interest in a brand if they don’t feel they’re getting the best service, the best communication, or the best value, and MailChimp’s marketing automation tools make it easy to do just that.

Welcome new customers with an automation series that introduces them to your brand, and use our other pre-built automations to always keep your brand top of mind. Try using our reward your best customers automation to show some extra love to the people who really love you, or set up a date-based automation that will send to subscribers on their birthdays.

We hope these tips help you make more sales and connect with customers this holiday season. And the rest of the year, too!