If you’re an ecommerce or retail brand, you know how vital the holidays are to your bottom line. Last year, the holiday season experienced a 16.5% year-over-year increase in ecommerce sales during the holiday season, rising from $108.2 billion in 2017 to $126 billion in 2018. While brick and mortar is still a major part of the equation, 60% of consumers did more than half of their holiday shopping online (and 80% did at least a quarter of it online).

What does that mean for marketing, growth, and engagement teams? It’s never been more important to optimize your customer engagement strategy to make the most of the holiday period. Not only will it impact your immediate sales but it can also have a ripple effect in the months to come. Let’s take a look at 5 essential campaigns sure to make the holiday season worth celebrating for your brand:

1. Seasonalized Cart Abandonment

Over three quarters of shoppers will leave a store without completing their purchase. Holiday shoppers are more likely to begin the purchase process, but are more likely to abandon their cart as well. This makes investing in your reactivation campaigns critical during this time of year. Abandoned cart campaigns are an effective way to increase your purchase conversion rate to drive sales. You can improve the performance of this campaign by tailoring it your customers’ situation, including the holiday season.

How’s it done? Seasonalize your abandoned cart campaign with holiday related copy, creative and special offers. Utilize the season to create a sense of urgency to remind shoppers not to leave their gifts to the last minute. Offer a discount or a promotion to encourage customers to pull the trigger—think free expedited delivery or 15% off. You can also use this as an opportunity to promote gifts and other purchases not just for your customers but for other household members.

2. Holiday Special Promotions

Hoping to boost sales during this key period? Consider starting your holiday outreach between November 1 and November 15—that’s when people are most primed to open your holiday marketing emails, giving you a chance to get your message kicked off before open rates drop. Then keep your brand front of mind with customers using a campaign journey management tool like Braze Canvas to drip a series of emails or messages over time leading up to your main holiday sale.

What should these promotional messages look like? They could be based around a gift guide, limited-edition offerings, or a sale where a portion of the profits is supporting a seasonably-appropriate good cause. But whatever you do, make sure you do it in a data-driven way to optimize your results. By leveraging messaging testing you can assess the impact that different discounts or promotions have on conversions and then optimize your holiday outreach over time to be certain you get the optimum result from each send.

3. Holiday Referrals Promotion

Do you have a strong base of loyal customers who already love to engage with your app, website, or customer messaging? People are 4x more likely to buy when referred by a friend. This presents a unique opportunity to leverage your repeat or loyal customers to drive traffic to your site with referral promotions. Offer them a discount or site credit in return for promoting your brand via social media or by forwarding your promotion. You can leverage their fandom to drive referrals and bring in new customers when you need them the most—and if you do it using email, they can easily forward along to their friends.

4. Drive Sales By Offering Holiday Point Accelerators

The holiday season revolves around shopping and what better way to drive up revenue at this key time of year than by upselling customers who have already made their purchase decision? To make it happen, consider offering a reward to users for making a larger purchase—for instance, giving out a $25 gift card for every $200 spent. Trigger a promotion campaign to send after a customer has completed a purchase that rewards them for that behavior.

5. Promote Shipping Options and Highlight Loyalty Program Enrollment

Nobody wants to be the one who buys a gift online that shows up two days after the holiday. Tap into that apprehension by with a dedicated campaign to communicate holiday shipping deadlines to your customers and nudge them to make their purchases before time runs out. The holidays also present an opportunity to entice customers to join your loyalty program by offering them free shipping or 10-15% off first purchase as a member.

Final Thoughts

The holiday season is coming—and the time to get ready is now! Think about what campaigns you haven’t tried and test them out, then iterate and optimize when the snow starts to fall. Want to dig a little deeper? You can get more campaign inspiration from our client stories page.