Christmas Marketing for small E-commerce businesses

CHRISTMAS MARKETING FOR SMALL E-COMMERCE BUSINESSES 

When is it too early to start talking about Christmas for a small E-commmerce business? The truth is, when you research it, every result will be different. Some say you should start talking about it in August, some say after Black Friday but with supermarkets dropping boxes of Quality Street in the summer (blasphemous if you ask us), consumers are planning for the big day earlier and earlier. So, think about it in two parts, when you should start PLANNING for Christmas and when you should start TALKING about Christmas.

PLANNING

Planning for executing in-house
In terms of the logistics (products, stock, cut-off dates etc.) and comms planning in-house, it’s always good to get these squared away by September. Unless you’re John Lewis and you already started developing and filming your Christmas AD 3 years ago. Doing this puts you in a position to start working on/executing your plans in September and October.

Planning for getting outside help
If you’re running a full-on campaign or you require outside things such as a photoshoot, graphics, special packaging etc. then you need to start planning earlier as you’ll have to work around other people’s schedules.

Word of advice
If you need to get your Christmas planning out of the way by June, that’s fine. You need to work within your schedule. Just don’t leave everything to the last minute. Christmas is stressful enough.

TALKING ABOUT CHRISTMAS
You’ve done your planning, you’ve executed your content and comms and everything is ready to go. So, when should you start talking about Christmas? What tends to be industry standard for smaller ecomm, is early to mid November. But if your product has a long lead time on it, we would suggest starting the comms earlier and being very clear on lead times. You don’t want to miss out on sales.

COMBINING BLACK FRIDAY WITH CHRISTMAS MESSAGING
Should you talk about Christmas during a Black Friday sale? Absolutely. Put the idea in people’s heads that not only can they get a great gift for their loved ones, they can get it on special offer. 

Word of advice

Something to consider are the last Christmas shipping dates, normally these are mid December, so if you wait until December you’re only giving your customers around 2 weeks to shop your products. Essentially; the earlier you talk about Christmas = the more time your customers can shop before the shipping cut-off.


Something else to consider

The last thing you want during your busy season is to be answering (let’s face it) stupid customer service emails or dealing with issues that could easily have been averted. So you need to make sure you’re managing your customer’s expectations.

On your socials, create a highlight with all your general operating hours, and then create a clearly distinguishable highlight for your Christmas/holiday operating hours (include last guaranteed shipping date for Christmas too!). When can people expect you online? Will you be replying to DMs on Christmas Day? (Surely not, but you’d be surprised how many people are on their phones on the day itself!) You could also add it as a pinned grid post, to be more accessible to your audience. It’s also a great idea to create another highlight with your holiday season FAQs, what are your return/refund policies? Do you offer gift wrapping options? Do you have any holiday promotions? Getting into the habit of creating highlights and keeping everything in one place will improve your customers’ experience by making everything clearer!

Something else to consider is, does your website reflect your messaging and does it have all the up to date information it needs to manage your customer’s expectations? 

We’ve created the ultimate Christmas guide, your one-stop shop for your Christmas marketing, including content theme ideas, prompts and how we’d use them, 12 days of Christmas campaign and a final to-do list to stay on top of your tasks and promos. We also go into more detail about best marketing practices and how to get new customers with 0 AD spend.