This holiday season will be different from others. With hundreds of brick-and-mortar stores around the country closed, consumers are quickly shifting to shopping online. For you as a business owner, this means new potential customers and the opportunity to engage old customers to revive and grow your business this upcoming season. When it comes to promotions and deals, nothing beats text marketing to ensure customers learn about it quickly. In this article, we’ll talk about all the major upcoming events and how you can use the power of text marketing to bring success to your business.
Halloween kicks off the holiday business season. In the US, the Halloween industry is worth 9 billion dollars. Costume sales, candy, themed parties, food, products and all sorts of themed merchandises contribute to the success of this event. Businesses around this time offer Halloween freebies to customers, coordinate events with notifications and promote their goods and services using the theme of the dead.
You may think that Thanksgiving is a time for restaurants and bars to close shop since they can’t compete with the home-cooked meal tradition on this holiday. However, that is far from the case. By stepping up Thanksgiving discounts and awareness, retailers were able to generate up to $4.2 billion in 2019 with 45% of the sales made from mobile devices.
Black Friday is the main event of the holiday shopping season. It is arguably the most famous and established shopping day. This event along with Christmas accounts for 30% of annual retail sales in the US and amazingly, 40% of online Black Friday sales are made on mobile phones. Text marketing is now one of the most trending marketing channels and 98% of marketing messages are opened, so reaching out to potential customers with text messaging makes a whole lot of sense.
Cyber Monday is the Monday after Black Friday and came to be as an online answer to brick and mortar Black Friday sales. Did you know that Cyber Monday generated more sales than Black Friday and Thanksgiving between 2015 and 2019? In 2019, Shopify reported that nearly 70% of all online shopping on its websites were made on mobile devices as compared to desktop. So, you can imagine how text marketing could be useful during this event.
Christmas sales start as early as Mid-November and December. This gives businesses almost an entire month to generate more revenue than in previous months. In 2019, Christmas retail sales surpassed the trillion-dollar mark. More than 60% of Americans buy gifts a week before Christmas and purchases using smartphones rose by 11% in the last two years.
So, once you know what upcoming events suit your business that you can take advantage of, you can devise a strategy to maximize your sales. Here are just a few tips to help guide you along the way:
When it comes to event marketing, it’s all about timing. Too soon and no one takes it seriously. Too late and people end up missing out. For example, businesses start announcing their Halloween sales promotions at least two weeks before the event. It is vital to understand the timeline for each event so you can plan accordingly.
Adding urgency in your text marketing campaign makes customers feel like they’re going to miss out on the value you’re offering. This is why flash sales have become so popular and businesses today show low stock or availability to trigger customers into quick action.
By offering your customers more, you might just persuade them to buy from you instead of your competitor. Reduced profits are better than no sales.
Before you execute your campaign, make sure you have your target audience divided into segments. This way, you can vary your campaigns according to factors such as gender, time, location, preferences, and purchase history among others.
Words like free, discount, exclusive, savings, click, and promotions add more muscle to your call-to-action, in your aim to persuade recipients to respond.