Christmas in Summer…?!

Although we’ve only just passed the halfway mark in 2017, the sun is shining (occasionally) and Wimbledon has kicked off, many of our clients are starting to push Christmas. It's critically important that you have a joined up strategy as many of your customers simply won’t be bothered and may even be offended by your Christmas campaign. In this blog, we look at some tactics for maximising Christmas revenue without upsetting customers.

1. SegmentationIn any marketing campaign it is vital to serve up content that is personal and relevant to your audience.

One of the best ways to do this is to create a segmentation strategy that allows you to target specific interest groups within your customer database. For Christmas campaigns, we often segment clients data to previous Christmas bookers or those who visited during the month of December as identified from feedback and WiFi interactions. This way, we know we are targeting individuals who have already shown an interest and are likely to book again. We can target this segmented group for email broadcasts, SMS sends and social media advertising.

2. The Importance of Content and Creative

If you’re planning on starting to advertise for Christmas during the summer months, it is vital that your content and creative is subtle, to avoid potential frustration/annoyance of customers. Copy must be engaging and clear with the suggestion to start thinking about Christmas parties and other events rather than a pushy sales strategy.Your creative is what the customer is likely to see first. It is this which will influence their decision whether to read further and more importantly, take action. The creative must be relevant, eye-catching and consistent with your brand.

3. Utilising your CRM data for Social Advertising

We often export warm lead data from email campaigns to use as our targeting for social advertising. This would involve identifying those who have shown an interest in your brand in the past, whether that means a previous booking, provided feedback or a WiFi interaction. We can also segment the data into those who were sent a broadcast, opened it but didn’t take action. It is useful to target these individuals as they may just need that extra push to take action. This also avoids spamming people who may already have a booking in place. Whenever we upload data into Facebook, we will often create a new ‘lookalike audience’ based on this data. A lookalike audience is an audience that is similar to the custom audience, and this can be manually set to a size of 1-10% of the population.

4. Provide a Campaign Opt-Out

It is important that you allow your customer to opt out. Make sure that you include a campaign opt-out button, this should be a clear instruction for the customer, so that when they click, they will be written to a group that then is excluded from the campaign in the future.

5. Test Test and test again...

Make sure that you test the campaign, from the email subject lines and creative to the mechanic. Is there spelling/grammatical errors? Are all links correct, with the appropriate google tracking links or goals? Are the images and text being displayed correctly? Is the email responsive across a range of devices? Have you run a spam test? Taking the time to test your campaign on a small sample of your segment before the main event will yield better results.

6. Airship Gifting

35% of revenue generated on Airships gifting platform was in December.The Airship Gifting platform deals with physical cards, digital cards, experiences and also FOC cards that can be used to provide incentives to your early bookers. We integrate with Polaris, Orbis, and Zonal EPOS and are adding more partners each month. Our clients have experienced an incredible ROI due to a combination of low running costs and great customer journeys that encourage customers to utilise their cards.Using a combination of these strategies, you’ll be able to ease into a softer Christmas Campaign that will give you some learnings for your big push post summer as well as getting a head start on pre-bookings for those customers who like to get in early.If you need some help with your Christmas Campaign, get in touch today.