Your 2019 E-commerce Marketing Calendar – Free Campaign Planner

It’s well known fact that the e-commere store traffic and sales goes up during the key shopping days. It’s amazing to see how web traffic surged around the Black Friday in 2018. But the traffic surge shouldn’t contain with only the peak shopping days, such as Christmas or Cyber Monday. There are many other special days around the year which you can use to stay relevant with your marketing.

Posted 5 years ago by Tamal Santra

You can spice up your marketing with promotions around International Women’s Day, Pet Day or Health Day. Day-specific marketing content holds unparallel marketing opportunities for your brand, but it’s not an easy task to keep track of all the special days out there. Here at Carson, we have created a marketing calendar with a campaign planner template to help you plan your marketing campaigns throughout the year.

Download the 2019 E-commerce Marketing Calendar with the Campaign Planner  Click here to download

How to leverage special days for your stores:

1. Plan targeted promotion for special days

Plan your campaigns for the special days in advance. Use the Campaign Idea column in the Holidays sheet to jot down your campaign ideas and then. When you plan a campaign here are the three most important things you need to consider:

i) What will be the offer?

Plan your offer according to the day and your target audience. The easiest choice is the discount. However, it ’s not always wise to offer a storewide discount but only on a specific collection or product related to the special day. This makes it easy for you to plan the promotion.

ii) How to promote the offer.

Decide how will you promote the offer. Which channels will you use for the promotions? Brainstorming these things will give you a better idea of the things you will need to prepare for your campaign.

iii) How to measure and optimize.

It’s very important that you have all the measurement tools in place to measure the success (or failure) of every campaign in order to experiment, learn and improve your strategy. Make sure you can track the conversion rate on each step of the funnel.

2. Prepare your store for the day

For any successful campaign, along with your promotional email, social media posts or ads you also need to prepare your store. Here are the few things you can do make your store ready for your visitors.

i) Update the banners with the coupon code or offer details.
ii) Create a special collection for the special day.
iii) Add product label to mark the products with an offer.
iv) Recover site abandonment with exit intent pop-up with an exciting offer.

3. Prepare social media campaigns

The special days bring the opportunity to increase engagement with consumers. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for social campaigns, but with so much marketing noise during these special days, you do need to be super creative.

I will not dig dip into all you can do with your social media but here are few tips to get the most out of the social media.

Come up with genuine posts

Along with all of your promotional posts, it’s good to have some genuine, emotion-evoking messages aligned with the sentiment of the special day.

These messages can be humorous, sentimental or sweet or. Just remember to use the purpose of the day in the most of your content along with the salesy ones.

Here’s how Merci Maman did it last year on Mother’s day

Start promoting offers & new products early

Announce your sales before they happen. Get your audience excited about big promotions and offers that they are going to get. Showcase your best selling products/collections and offers along with non-promotional posts to get maximum attention.

Schedule your social media posts 

Don’t wait for the last minute, prepare your posts ahead of the events. Use any of the social media scheduling tools out there to schedule your posts.

4. Plan email campaigns

Via email, you can target your highest engaged audience – customers and subscribers you already have. That’s the reason a proper email strategy can generate more revenue than your paid ad campaigns!

Here are a few tips to maximize your return from email marketing

Use segmentation

You must segment your email list to be successful in email marketing. Targeting a group of users with similar interest to send campaigns matching with their interest will definitely improve the ROI of your email marketing.

For example: if you are running a sale on a luxury collection on your store then it’s not a great idea to send the campaign to the group who never spend over a certain amount. You should send the campaign to those customers who shop luxury items or tend to spend the amount. You will certainly see an improved open and click rate with this kind of targeted campaigns.

Be super creative

As with all marketing efforts, email-marketing should also need to be creative. I believe, we all have a sense of creativity. We just need to find the right way to do it.

Here’s a great example of a creative Mothers Day email by Anthropologie

Use urgency

Using urgency on the checkout steps is a good strategy to boost up sales during special day offers. It creates

For example, if you offering 25% Off sale going on which you are going to end on Deceber 25th then say that the promotion ends on the 24th on your initial emails. Then send a ‘One Day: Sale Extended’ email promotion on the 24th. You’ll have a far better likelihood of making sales.  The extended sale could even win over people who didn’t convert in the actual sale.

5. Create landing pages

Conversion optimized landing pages drive higher sales. During the special days, it’s really important that you prominently feature the same offer on your landing page which you have used in your paid ads or other campaigns. If you offer “30% off sale” in your ad content, the user should see this same offer as soon as they land on the landing page coming from the ad.

Here’s a great example of a special day landing page by Paul Smith.

If you are using your homepage or collection pages as a landing page, make sure that you advertise your offers on the top of the pages prominently in the banners.

To Conclude:

Don’t wait for the holiday season to see your sales go high. Every special day brings an opportunity for e-commerce merchants. Pick the ones suitable for your brand and stay prepared for it.