It’s the little details that get you. You can avoid these four big hazards of holiday marketing by taking some small steps—if you act early.
1. Don’t let your email messages get blocked
Been waiting for the holiday season to make a big email marketing push? A sudden increase in mailing volume can make you look like a spammer to the email service providers. Ditto for a large number of undeliverable email addresses, likely to be left on your mailing list if you haven’t used it regularly.
Start sending to your list in small segments in advance of the holidays, ideally with an enticing offer to get customers to open the message. For those who don’t respond, send another message asking if they want to continue on your list, and remove those who don’t reply.
2. Don’t let your search ads budget run out
That killer holiday sale offer you planned can’t kill if your ads on search engines go dark. Carefully watch your burn rate–dollars spent against your budget–and be prepared to recalibrate by focusing on your high performing campaigns or lowering your bids. See these suggestions from Google on how to avoid a burn rate flameout.
3. Don’t forget to change to holiday hours on your Google listing
Let customers know you’re open before dawn on Black Friday or open late Christmas Eve with the new Special Hours feature from Google. Enter the hours in your Google My Business account (here are the instructions) and your listing will display the times with a green “Holiday Hours” callout.
4. Don’t leave your social media unmonitored
Social media never takes a day (or a night) off. A complaint or even a friendly request for information that goes unanswered can spoil the holiday cheer you have so carefully constructed on the rest of your pages. Schedule your staff for social media guard duty during the holidays (and give them these tips for handling complaining customers). Luckily, you can schedule publishing of fresh posts ahead of time—see these 8 creative content ideas for the holidays.
