Holiday 2014 retail eCommerce grew 7 percent to a total of over USD 100 billion, and Cyber Monday 2014 drew in USD 2.038 billion in sales on desktops alone.  Some of the highlights from 2014 are:

• Cyber Monday is the biggest day for online sales, Green Monday is the second biggest digital Holiday Season Shopping day.
• Mobile sales accounted for nearly 22 percent of all online sales on Cyber Monday.
• Mobile search volume grew by over 112 percent in 2014 during the holiday season.
• Conversions from PLAs peak on Cyber Monday.

Top Ten Tips To Plan Your Holiday Campaigns

Decide on your campaign theme and core campaign idea.

Start with analyzing the holiday data that is available to you from last year as well as Back To School campaign data. Highest priority is to make sure all budgets and metrics are aligned to factor in any changes in consumer behavior.

Allocate budgets to optimize your campaigns across channels and devices with a single customer view. Key days are Halloween, Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday, Black Friday and Christmas.

According to an SEO firm,WPromote the best practice is to begin setting up heavily targeted paid ads, display/image ads, product listing ads, and remarketing ads in Google AdWords and Bing Ads at the earliest to coincide with seasonal days.

Plan your Mobile engagement strategy. Optimize your every campaign for mobile, with mobile PLAs, a mobile website, and accurate device tracking set up in your analytics. In case you have an app then planning an app engagement campaign within your brand campaign can increase your conversions.

 

Develop content marketing and promotion initiatives as early as mid-October and launch content systematically during the downtime between holidays, instead of only in limited windows around the holidays themselves.

Create holiday-optimized  content, including an infographic or holiday gift guide hosted on a website page instead of a blog, and leave it on the main site navigation until launch in order to get indexed in Google and start building equity as early as possible. This could improve CTR for holiday related terms.

Embark on a campaign of social network posting about holiday gift guides, sales, wish lists, and other promotions as early as October but no later than the beginning of November; budget for paid/promoted social posts to increase visibility and audience reach, especially in the run up to Thanksgiving.

Set up a new email promotion workflow specifically for the holiday season based on what holiday products, promotions, or categories a user visits on your site.

Personalize your promotions, in particular mobile, social and email promotions; tailor specific offers to customers’ needs to increase CTRs and conversions and turn mobile, email and social channels into huge revenue generators. Look for the mobile moments that are right for promoting your offers with push messaging campaigns. Create a Follow through marketing plan to optimize ROI from your campaigns, by analyzing reasons for cart abandons and setting a remarketing or an email marketing campaign.

Source: Holiday Marketing Calendar and Top Ten Tips by Wpromote