It's the season of giving. Combine that with the social web and you could come up with some creative ideas to weave through your website, email, Facebook, and Twitter marketing. If all your holiday marketing is simply attempting to sell, you will quickly lose your audience, so how can we spice up your website and email messages?
A good place to start is to think about what people do during the holidays other than buy gifts. They get together with family, catch up with friends, decorate their homes inside and out, watch seasonal movies and TV shows, bake, sing carols, and anything else you can think of. What are your traditions during the Holiday Season?
Actually that's a good question to ask on your Facebook Page: What are your Holiday Traditions? You could even make it a contest and have every shared story entered into a random drawing for a free gift.
Do you bake, or does someone close to you bake holiday treats? You could post your favorite holiday recipes online with explanations of why you like them or how they were introduced to you. This is a personal level of sharing that some of your customers will enjoy, especially since doing so will clearly separate you from a large chain store and help to identify you within your local market.
Traditions, photos, stories, and anything you can think of will help establish your jewelry store within the local community, and create lasting memories even if your customers don't buy from you this season.
Speaking of buying jewelry from you, what can you do on your website and in your emails to make it easier for them to buy from you? Perhaps some sort of gift buying guide?
Holiday gift buying is different than gift buying for the rest of the year because many people will declare their spending budgets or gift budgets for individual people on their list. If the spending budget is $60, $160, $260, or $2600 that entire budget will most likely be spent.
For you, this means you need to advertise within various price point levels, but instead of simply listing "Jewelry Gifts for Under $200" like we suggested in Friday's Nugget you could, and should, create a few sales tools to both entertain and help the wary shopper's decision making.
You could create individual web pages dedicated to him, her, mom, dad, sister, brother, or any other member of the family. On each page you would list an array of gifts in various price points. From your home page and in the body of an email you would say something like "We've made it easy to find the right gifts for everyone on your list and still stay within your budget." Then link to the main landing page for those gift guides.
Periodically, share the location of these guide pages on Twitter, Facebook, Google+. You probably only want to send the "gift guide" notice once, but you can reuse the same landing page for other reasons and in other emails. It all depends on how many messages you have on that landing page.
Perhaps set up a page with the URL jewelerystore.com/gifts. On that single page you could load up all the messages for the entire season. Then in each email you send out you could keep referencing back to the same page over and over again. After the 2nd or 3rd email with that URL, your customers are likely to remember it.
