What Are Your Holiday Season Goals?

​The holidays are upon us and for some reason, it is a time when people are more inclined to spend money for various reasons. As a business owner or organization, what is your plan to engage them using your online presence?
Here are a few suggestions of what you can do this holiday season: Boost sales, show your customers how much you appreciate them or simply staying on your clients’ minds until the next time they are in need of what you have to offer.

Boost Sales
As stated above the holidays can be a very good time to boost sales if your business is in a dull state of affair. There are several ways you can do this, depending on the nature of your business. If you’re a product based business it would mean that you may have to take a different approach compared to a service based business or an organization. All the same here are a few things you can do to boost your business sales during these holidays.
Discounted sales: you can run a sales promotion that is for a limited time period. For example, if you’re a company that sells handbags you can offer a buy one get half off or 20% off promotion. The trick is to create a certain window of opportunity for people to take advantage of this offer. You want this window to be at a duration revolving around the specific holiday. If it’s too long people may feel they have all the time in the world t act and may delay taking action. One of the best ways you can do this is through an e-mail marketing and Cloud Awards breaks down how you can use e-mail to accomplish your goals.

Contest: You can also run a contest that offers people a reward for their participation. Right now, Uzo Design is running a photography contest for Halloween offering the $25 and other prices. The goal of this contest is to generate more buzz around Uzo Design in order to engage existing clients, fans, and potential clients. The idea is for them to share their Halloween images with us on our social media pages or through our website in hopes to increase our traffic, boost our relevance on search engines and hopefully generate some new sales. Besides, it will be cool to see all the costumes ideas people have to share from their Halloween events.

Referral incentives: This is also a good time to ask people who might visit your website or Facebook or other social media pages for referral in exchange for a reward.

Call to Action: People are often in an emotional mood during the holidays. What better time than then to rally them to support a cause that your Not-For-Profit Organization is standing behind?

Customer Appreciation
The holiday season is the perfect time to let your existing customers and clientele know how much they mean to you. You can do this by sending out an e-mail blast thanking them for their support or offering them a freebie or discount on regular priced items or services. This is a nice gesture that will further endear your customers to you. Perhaps you can also use this time to get some feedback from your clients on how you can better meet their needs in the future. You can use an auto responder like Mail Chimp to accomplish this.

Staying on Clients’ Minds or Simply Celebrating the Holiday Spirit
If you’re not looking to boost your sales or show your clients your appreciation you can simply just stay on their minds or celebrate in the spirit of the holidays. Some ways you can do this is by displaying holiday themes on your website homepage or your social media banners. Some clients are always looking through these pages and if you have a cool display it will make you memorable and might even prompt the clients to invite others to check out your cool theme. Be sure to use your brand colors or logos somewhere on the display to keep your branding consistent.
If you’re very busy the best practice might be to create your holiday themes for your website or social media pages ahead of time for each holiday and simply upload them when that specific holiday comes around. This way you’re not pressed for time and even if you don’t have the funds at that time to create these elements you would have already had them made.
What are your holiday goals for this season and how are you achieving them? What has brought you the most success?