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Intelligent Strategies for Holiday Marketing

February 23, 2017 | Elaine Arnold

One of the most challenging tasks for small business owners is knowing how to best plan and execute effective marketing strategies. Knowing the right campaigns to run, when to initiate them, and utilizing the most impactful channels to do so are crucial in maximizing an ROI. Communicating with your customers during the different holidays throughout the year is particularly beneficial.

Valentine’s Day and President’s Day just passed, but not to worry as there are plenty of other holidays still on the calendar for marketers to capitalize on. Easter, 4th of July, Halloween and Christmas just a few of the big holidays throughout the year that can create tremendous marketing opportunity.

Knowing which products are most likely to be purchased off the shelves or ordered off the menu during that particular holiday promotion will go a long way in ensuring a high redemption rate with your customers. For example, dessert shops want to market their top selling chocolates and candies during Easter and Halloween whereas retail stores want to market their top products such as toys, clothing and accessories during Christmas.

Once you have their attention with a message centered around those popular products, it’s about incentivizing them to come to your store instead of another in the neighborhood. Offering double points, or a flat discount are typically a great way to entice customers to come in on that particular holiday. After all, you’ve enrolled these customers into your loyalty program so it’s imperative to make sure they come to you for their holiday shopping needs.

Of course, business owners are very busy especially around the holidays. Therefore it can be a little tough to make the proper preparations for these campaigns and schedule them accordingly. With AppCard, each merchant gets their own dedicated marketing expert who can not only plan these promotions for you ahead of time, but analyze your store’s data and help you put together the most effective campaigns. Additionally, with AppCard’s machine learning capabilities, all of the data that is collected can be used to automatically construct these campaigns based off of the algorithms built into the platform. Having these resources at a business owner’s disposal can certainly help lift a lot of the headaches during the stress of the holiday marketing season.

Here are some important holiday dates to look forward to in 2017:

  • Tuesday, February 28th: Mardi Gras
  • Friday, March 17th: St. Patrick’s day
  • Sunday, March 14th: Mother’s Day
  • Monday, March 20th: First day of Spring
  • Sunday, April 16th: Easter
  • Tuesday, April 18th: Tax Day
  • Monday, May 29th: Memorial Day
  • Sunday, June 18th: Father’s Day
  • Wednesday, June 21: First day of Summer
  • Tuesday, July 4th: Independence Day
  • Monday, September 4th: Labor Day
  • Sunday, September 10th: Grandparent’s day
  • Friday, September 22nd: First day of Fall
  • Monday, October 9th: Columbus Day
  • Tuesday, October 31st: Halloween
  • Saturday, November 11th: Veteran’s Day
  • Thursday and Friday, November 23rd/24th: Thanksgiving and Black Friday
  • Saturday, November 25th: Small Business Saturday
  • Thursday, December 21st: First day of Winter
  • Sunday, December 24th: First day of Chanukah
  • Monday, December 25th: Christmas
  • Sunday, December 31st: New Year’s Eve

To learn more about how AppCard can assist your business during the holidays, click here to check out our most recent webinar!

About Elaine Arnold

Elaine is a Senior Customer Success Manager at AppCard, the personalized marketing and rewards platform. Elaine specializes in helping independent grocers to engage their customers with data-driven marketing campaigns to grow their business.