Harness your holiday momentum from 2023 and take it with you in the new year. The fall and winter seasons are quite busy for businesses and marketers. It’s the season of events and holidays (Halloween, Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year) neatly packed in several months.
Many plan and prepare to finish the year strong but fail to plan for the post-holiday season and find themselves scrambling at the beginning of the new year.
How to Take Your Holiday Success into 2024
You can use this year’s holiday wins to start the new year with a bang and make the most of the post-holiday season. Here’s how to gain from your holiday momentum.
1. Organize and update your audience with holiday data
You got both new and existing customers to engage and buy stuff during the holiday season. Go over your campaign insights and dashboards and see what you can learn about your new subscribers. With Loopify, you can use this information and assign tags, and create or update segments.
Segment your audience in a way that makes sense for your business. By doing this, you can improve your targeting, which will increase your open rates and engagement.
2. Use your insights to follow up with targeted emails
As soon as the holiday peak season is over, it doesn’t mean you should abandon all efforts. You invested a lot of time and resources into planning and executing successful holiday campaigns, so don’t waste the opportunities they provide.
Follow up with your customers and leads. Use your data and segmentation to send relevant and tailored communication to those who purchased from you this season and say thank you. As a sign of gratitude, you can include a special offer or a coupon for their next purchase.
Tip: Use segmentation to ask for product-specific feedback or reviews depending on the purchase your customers made. Share great feedback on social media, follow up on negative feedback, and use it for improvement.
3. Nurture new leads acquired during the holiday season
Don’t make the mistake of forgetting the leads you captured during the holidays. You must have left quite an impression to pique their interest during a super busy time when brands compete for attention.
So why lose people who already lean towards you rather than your competition? They hold great value, and with the proper nurture, you guide them to become customers.
4. Bring back lost shoppers and holiday visitors
Did you have people add stuff to their cart for Christmas or New Year’s but never completed the purchase?
You can bring these back with retargeting ads or abandoned cart reminders. And by creating a sense of scarcity or urgency, you increase the chances of a successful sale.
Also, not every person who visited your store or browsed through your offers made a purchase. These people already know you, so it’s a good idea to retarget them with paid ads.
Website visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert on the retailer’s website.
You can nudge them to check out your new stuff or attract them with a targeted post-holiday offer. Plus, paid search and display ads are not the only way you can retarget lost shoppers or visitors. Use your emails or place and time pop-ups on your website and landing pages.
5. Continue engaging people on social media
Once the holiday hype is over, your social media activity shouldn’t die down. Keep posting and connecting with people who know and follow you, and aim to find new followers.
Share your holiday success and yearly stats, do polls, ask people about their New Year’s goals, or let them reflect on the most positive thing in the past year.
6. Educate and provide resources for the new year
Ask people about their goals for the new year and then provide materials to help them achieve their goals. It’s a great way to keep your audience engaged after the holidays. Educate people about your brand and industry and position yourself as an expert on the topic(s) you tackle.
7. Look back at the past year
The post-holiday season is a good time to reflect on the success of the previous year. Offer success stories, annual reports, infographics, and stats of the last year that will intrigue and excite your audience and encourage them to move forward with you into the new year.
8. Plan and prepare for the year ahead
Take what you learned in the past year, Find what you do well, and do more of it. Learn what are your weak spots and put some extra effort into improving them.
Plan and prepare your upcoming marketing activities and campaigns. How are you going to attract new leads? How are you going to engage your newly acquired customers? Do you have any events, local holidays, or celebrations coming up?
Go over the materials you need and create the content, visuals, campaigns, and offers with each event. Use our tips and a marketing automation tool like Loopify to schedule and interconnect your campaigns upfront to avoid getting overwhelmed (or forgetting something) when the time comes.
9. Take advantage of the fact there is less competition
Many businesses go all out during the holiday season and then reel it in after it’s over. Everybody competes for attention during the holiday season, but you can plan to keep pushing even after the holidays.
And since there’s less competition, it can be cheaper and easier for you to stand out, especially if you run paid ads. Which means you can get more at a lower cost. This can be an excellent opportunity for your business.
10. Recreate the buying environment
People are in a spending mood during the holiday season for obvious reasons. However, there are several ways you can get paying customers in the offseason as well. Use special promotions, clearance sales, and post-holiday bundles to get people to buy after the holiday season.
Maybe someone didn’t manage to buy a product during the holiday season because it was ‘out of stock’. You can send people a ‘back in stock’ email when you have it and make sure they don’t miss out on it.
11. Keep working on partnerships with organizations and charities
The past couple of years have been rough for many businesses due to COVID-19, and it will take some time to recover from it. Don’t try to go through it alone or forget to stay human during these times. If you partnered with some local businesses or organizations to support a cause or help each other out in these challenging times, keep lifting each other up in the new year.
Remember to humanize your brand. It’s all about establishing human and personal connections with people.
There’s no need to let your efforts during the holiday season flop. Take advantage of the slow period after the holidays to draw attention to your brand and increase your customer base.
It’s worth the effort to squeeze every bit of juice from your holiday marketing momentum and take it with you in the new year.