How to Create a Holiday Marketing Plan

When the holiday season arrives, it’s crucial to have a marketing strategy to drive sales and help turn site visitors into paying customers. There are plenty of tools to help you make a plan to get the most out of the holiday shopping season and help your customers find the perfect gift from your ecommerce store, including promotion campaigns and website features.

For help making a product and shipping plan for holiday promotions, check out our complete Holiday Selling Guide.

1. Make an email marketing strategy

Email lists are vital to running a successful online business because they allow you to connect directly with customers who’ve chosen to hear from you. The first step is to create a form to collect email addresses. You can encourage sign-ups by offering a free newsletter, discounts, or other special rewards.

Once that's in place, the Contacts panel allows you to see everyone who has signed up for your mailing list, as well as the emails of everyone who's previously purchased a product via your website and opted to receive marketing from you. You can message these email addresses about future sales, product updates, or any other news about your brand.

The earlier you can start collecting email addresses, the better. This way, you’ll have a long list of new customers and potential customers at your fingertips when it’s time to start rolling out your holiday marketing efforts. 

Holiday email marketing tips

Every small business has its own unique design aesthetic. An email tool that comes with drag-and-drop design templates will help you create and schedule holiday emails quickly.

With Squarespace Email Campaigns, you can pull product images and descriptions and link to the product listing in your store into a pre-designed template. 

When thinking about your holiday email campaigns, plan out which holidays it makes sense for you to schedule promotions around. The holiday sales season starts as early as October, but consider your target audience and where your products fit. 

For example, a bakery might want to promote Halloween-themed cookies and cakes, but it could make less sense to send Halloween promotions for a store that sells specialty hot sauce. Look at data for a holiday email that worked well for you last year to get inspiration for an attention-getting subject line or marketing idea for this holiday season.

If you’re still unsure when to start, focus on Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend. Squarespace has a set of email templates created exclusively to help you build anticipation for this major weekend’s sales.

2. Promote your discounts

Even with the built-in tools to optimize your SEO, competition is fierce, especially during the holidays. One of the most tried and true ways to capture people’s attention, and hopefully turn an online window shopper into a customer, is by offering discounts. 

You can add an announcement bar or a promotional pop-up to your website to let your customers know about your newest products, items you have on sale, or any other promotions you want to draw attention to, such as free shipping or a free gift with purchase. Just be selective about how you promote, since a pop-up that covers too much of the screen can hurt your SEO rankings.

Use all of your marketing channels to make sure you’re getting attention from new customers too. Don’t forget to send discounts and updates to your newsletter subscribers. And if you sell physical products, try syncing your store with Google Merchant Center so that your products get more visibility in search results.

If you have active social media accounts, consider promoting your products and seasonal promotions on those platforms as well. Add your own static content to your posts or, try creating a video. To easily create promotional videos, get marketing videos in the Squarespace iOS app. Or, quickly plan and customize posts for social media with the templates in Unfold. 

You can also start a link in bio page with Bio Sites and use it to collect all of your seasonal products and deals under one, shareable URL. If you add a linkable grid to the page, visitors can easily shop your products from the Bio Site.

Once you’ve launched your holiday marketing campaign, you can start building year-round customer loyalty.

3. Add a limited availability label

If you know you're running low on an item, the holidays are a perfect time to add a limited availability label to your products so customers are encouraged to buy it right away. The fear of missing out on the right holiday gift can help turn a “maybe” into a sale. You can customize the label to match your website’s aesthetic to maintain brand consistency.

You can apply the same idea to seasonal items or offers. If time is running short for customers to take advantage, let them know in a newsletter or email blast, in your site’s announcement bar, and on social media.

4. Turn on abandoned cart recovery

Plenty of times a customer will almost purchase an item, only to back away or get distracted at the last minute. But if you turn on the abandoned cart recovery feature, you can automatically send reminder emails to customers who put an item in their cart but didn’t complete the purchase.

Once set up, customers automatically get a message within 24 hours of leaving their cart, while the potential purchase is still top of mind. If they’re planning to buy for a specific holiday, they're likely to appreciate the reminder to act soon if they want to get their gifts in time.

Learn how to create automatic abandoned cart emails

5. Give your website a seasonal refresh

While not necessary, consider updating your online store or website landing page with a holiday theme by adding seasonal imagery. If that doesn’t fit your brand, think about updating the products you feature so you can start highlighting seasonal releases or popular buys.

There’s not a bad time of year to start testing out your holiday marketing strategy either. If your products are a good gift for many holidays, you can make seasonal updates as early as October or November and continue through to the new year.

If you can’t find the right image for a holiday theme, Squarespace sellers with the iOS app can get custom marketing images, GIFs, and videos designed based on their brand and products. You can drop those into promotional banners, posts, and emails.

This post was updated on September 15, 2023.