How To Use CRM For Holiday Sales To Grow Revenue?

‘Tis the season of joy, celebration, and endless opportunities for businesses worldwide.

But amidst the fierce competition, how can you stand out and maximize your sales?

The answer lies in leveraging the right tools and technologies that automate your marketing efforts and align your teams seamlessly. And one tool that can make all the difference is a CRM.

In this article, we’ll unveil the secrets to using CRM for holiday sales campaign, helping you generate leads, convert them into customers, and create brand advocates. We’ll cover everything from the basics to find the perfect CRM in businesses.

Don’t be just an option for your customers; become their preferred choice. Learn how to plan an efficient CRM marketing campaign and make this holiday season your most profitable one yet.

Let’s dive in and unlock the power of using CRM for holiday sales.

What Is CRM Software?

For people from the business world, customer relationship management (CRM) is a staple of their day-to-day work. But what is a CRM software?

Let’s unravel all the mysteries one by one.

CRM Software

A CRM software connects your marketing, sales, and operations teams seamlessly. It eliminates departmental disconnect and personalizes the customer journey.

The outcome?

Inbound leads generation and delightful experiences. But why does every business need a CRM?

Let’s uncover it by looking at the benefits of using a CRM for holiday sales.

Benefits Of Using CRM Software

The 5 biggest benefits of using CRM software are:

1. Trustworthy Reporting

Imagine effortlessly collecting data from all your marketing channels and having it presented on a single reporting dashboard. That’s the magic of a CRM solution.

No matter the size of your company, CRM solution is your go-to tool for measuring the performance of your marketing and sales efforts. It collects data from various channels and compiles it into clean reports.

With CRM software, you can bid farewell to messy data and welcome a clear and concise reporting system.

A quick example,

Let’s say you run an online store. With HubSpot CRM, you can track customer interactions across your website, email, and social media platforms. You’ll have a complete view of each customer’s engagement, purchase history, and preferences, all in one place.

2. Personalized Outreach With Automation

Businesses today are continuously capturing data and insights of their customers with only one goal which is to highly personalize their outreach strategy. CRMs allow marketers to segment their audience on the basis of different personas and drip them into different campaigns.

Also, CRMs come with the power of automation that completely eliminates manual efforts to give you the advantage of features like dynamic content and automated messaging.

A quick example,

Using HubSpot CRM, you can categorize your eCommerce customers into segments such as “new customers,” “loyal customers,” or “potential upsell.” This allows you to tailor your messaging and offers to each segment, delivering a more personalized and relevant experience.

3. Meet Customers’ Needs Proactively

A CRM solution is a very helpful tool for customer support and service team as it helps them proactively meet customer needs.

It shows relevant customer data to the customer support team that saves them from digging deep into a shopper’s buying information. As a result, your team can focus on making your potential and current customers feel important and delighted.

A quick example,

Let’s say a customer contacts your support team with a question about a recent purchase. With HubSpot CRM, your support representative can quickly access the customer’s order history, preferences, and any previous interactions.

Armed with this information, they can provide personalized and efficient assistance, resolving the query promptly and leaving a positive impression on the customer.

4. Enhances Efficiency

Automation is an unsaid advantage that comes with a CRM solution which is responsible for enhancing the efficiency of day-to-day business processes.

Here are some scenarios that show how CRMs enhance efficiency with automation:

• With CRM platforms you can create workflows with dynamic content to automate your outreach efforts.
• Features predictive lead scoring helps your CRM marketing and sales team in automating the lead scoring process and, prioritizing follow-up by scoring your contacts across thousands of data points.
• CRM solution allows you to efficiently manage customer queries even when there’s zero human presence with the help of chatbots.

In short, CRMs are the ultimate solution for serving the customers effectively which is very important for the longevity of a growing business.

A quick example,

Imagine a customer visits your website and signs up for a free trial. With CRM automation, they can receive a personalized onboarding email series, guiding them through the key features and benefits of your product/service.

5. Simplified Collaboration Between Teams

CRM in businesses keep a record of all your conversations, interactions, and contact information which your teammates can easily look at and make important decisions.

Also, CRMs have built-in collaboration tools that allow multiple teams to work together for nurturing and converting a contact. Consequently, your CRM marketing, sales, and customer service work together seamlessly instead of worrying about siloed information.

With this, we come to the conclusion that CRMs are very important for growing a business and delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Now that we are well acquainted with what a CRM is, let’s jump to the core of the article and learn how to create efficient holiday CRM marketing campaigns for the festive season.

Step-by-step Guide To Plan A Holiday Marketing Campaign With CRM

Let’s see how to use the CRM for holiday sales planning.

Step 1. Divide and Rule

The best way you can use a CRM for holiday sales is by segmenting your contacts. Segmentation helps you divide your contacts into different groups based on their characteristics.

For example, you can group your contacts as per their Country, Age, Gender, Qualification, and more.

Reports say that brands who segment their emails and personalize them witness a 46% higher open rate and a 27% better click-through rate.

Apart from that, the benefit of segmentation is that it sharpens your holiday marketing campaigns. Let me tell you how.

When you divide your users into different segments, you already know what they’d be interested in. Let’s say you’re running a holiday sale where you’re selling both men’s and women’s products. You can create two different segments in your CRM, called Men and Women.

And then you can target the Men segment with offers related to men’s products and do the same with the Women’s segment.

Now, this has more chances of conversion since the offers they’d receive would be more relatable.

Step 2. Identify Your Top Spenders

Another tip to use your CRM for holiday sales is identifying the top spenders.

Top spenders are those customers who’ve spent the most amount at your store. They’ve already shown their interest in your products by spending the most on your eCommerce store. And they will not think twice to grab an amazing deal if you offer it to them.

In short, they will need a little nurturing to convert again.

Just to let you know, our HubSpot eCommerce integrations like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc. come with a pre-built Top spender HubSpot list. You can create it in your HubSpot CRM in a single click to start segmenting your high paying customers.

Step 3. Automate Your Social Posts

When it comes to using CRM for holiday sales, social media becomes a goldmine of potential customers. People are eager to make purchases, making it the perfect time to showcase your brand.

However, managing multiple social media platforms can be overwhelming, especially during the bustling holiday season.

But fear not! Your CRM can come to the rescue by automating your social media marketing activities. By automating your social media posting, you can save precious time and ensure a delightful experience on all channels.

Think about it: Your brand is growing, and you’re actively using various social media platforms to gain exposure. But manually staying active on each platform during the holiday rush is a daunting task.

Instead, let your CRM take the reins and automate your social media efforts.

Step 4. Deliver Personalized & Relevant Content

Personalized content is more relatable and converting.

A report found that 80 percent of customers are more likely to buy products or services from brands that offer personalized experiences.

Thus, you need to make sure you provide personalized content. Because content that’s not personalized is no good. And CRM for holiday sales can be a great help when you want to delight every customer.

So while sending emails, SMS, or other content to your users through your CRM, you can use personalized dynamic content to make sure the recipient connects with it. You can use properties and tokens to do this.

Step 5. Automate Lead Generation

Marketing automation, according to 80% of marketers, generates more leads and conversions.

Generating leads is one of the most painful jobs for any business. But you need leads to convert them. And the holiday season is a time when you get more traffic as well as leads. And if you use CRM for holiday sales, you can make this process easier yet more powerful.

And again, why put manual effort when you can automate the job.

Using forms, you can automate the lead generation process and eliminate the need for manual data entry.

Step 6. Never Lose a Customer with Automated Follow-ups

Follow-ups really work. I’m saying this from personal experience.

But if you keep my experience aside, there are reports that say, when businesses follow up on leads within 5 minutes, they are 9 times more likely to convert.

They may sound bothering to customers but if you gently remind them about your offer, they will consider it sooner or later.

But when you have hundreds of contacts, it’s hard to connect with each one of them on a regular basis. Automating the follow-ups would make this process seamless. And this is where you should use a CRM for holiday sales.

Taking follow-ups is an effective way to convert them. So you can use your CRM system to create such follow-up campaigns to make sure you convert every opportunity.

Step 7. Focus More on Mobile

Prioritizing mobile devices would give you more sales. It’s because people shop more from their mobile devices.

A Statista report found that eCommerce sales from mobile will reach $3.56 trillion dollars by 2021.

And what’s interesting is that these figures are going up every year. Obviously, mobile shopping is more accessible and more convenient. So in the holiday season, targeting mobile devices could greatly benefit your business.

You can make your website pages mobile responsive, send emails that fit perfectly on mobile, show retargeting ads to mobile users, and more. You can do all of this if you use CRM for holiday sales.

Always remember mobile shoppers can be more profitable than others. So try to offer a better experience on mobile even if most of your audience comes from the desktop.

How To Plan Holiday Marketing Campaigns With HubSpot CRM?

HubSpot is a powerful and user-friendly CRM platform that helps businesses create a delightful buying experience for their customers, especially during revenue-generating opportunities such as the festive season.

I have shared with you all the steps for creating holiday marketing campaigns, which require a CRM solution to be implemented. HubSpot is the perfect choice for businesses of every size, as it comprises all the tools and integrations needed to manage CRM marketing, sales, and customer service.

Therefore, HubSpot is the ideal CRM in businesses that want to create a delightful buying experience for their customers during the festive season.

Let’s see how to create an efficient CRM marketing campaign with HubSpot:

Creating Lists For Customer Segmentation

Well if you talk about HubSpot, segmenting contacts is quite simple. Just go to your HubSpot portal, then follow these steps:

• Click on Contacts from the top bar and then go to Lists.

• On the top right, click on the Create List button.
• Then select the type of list you want to create and what records it will be storing. (You can create a Contact or Company based list. The contact-based list will store the contact records while the company based list will store the company based records).
• After that, select the type of list. You have 2 types of the list here:
  • Active: Active list automatically updates itself.
  • Static: Static list doesn’t update itself automatically.

• Select the type of list and enter the name of the list and click Next.
• Then select the filter type and whatever data fits into the criteria will appear.

• Click on Apply Filter and then Save.
• Once the list is saved, you’ll have your list.

Identifying Top Spenders With HubSpot CRM

Let’s say you have a contact in your CRM. That contact would have some data associated with it. Data like its Name, Phone Number, Country, Gender, Age, etc.

But where is this data stored in a CRM? In properties. Properties contain specifics about a CRM object. And these properties can be used to identify the top spenders at your store.

Here’s how:

• You can create a property named Spending Amount (if there isn’t a property that calculates the spending value).
• Based on that property, you can create a list where you can enroll only those contacts who’ve got the spending amount above, let’s say $500.
• Whoever gets enrolled in that list will be your top spenders.

Once you get your top spenders, you can target them with the content and offers they’d be interested in.

If you’re running your online business with WooCommerce, you can use HubSpot For WooCommerce Integration which helps you identify top spenders within the WordPress dashboard.

Automating Social Media Campaigns With HubSpot

Well if you’re using HubSpot for this, you just need to connect your social media accounts with the CRM.

Here’s how to do it:

• Go to your HubSpot Portal settings.
• Scroll down from the left panel and navigate to Marketing > Social.

• There under the Accounts tab, you’ll see a Connect Account.
• You can connect your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts.

• Connect the accounts you want.
• Then click on the Create Post button and draft your post.

• Lastly, schedule the post to be shared on your social media handles.

In addition to scheduling your posts, you can also configure other settings, such as delaying the next post. This can help you streamline your social media management and free up your reps to focus on other tasks.

For more information, be sure to check out the knowledge base on how to create and schedule draft social posts.

Delivering Personalized Content With HubSpot CRM

There are different ways to deliver personalized content. Like you can send personalized emails, SMS, and newsletters. I’ll show you the example of emails.

So to send personalized email, you can:

• Go to your HubSpot portal.
• Navigate to Marketing > Email from the top bar and click on Create Email.
• You’ll see a drag-and-drop editor where you can edit the content of your email.
• In the editor, you’ll see a Personalize button in the top bar.
• Select the text you want to personalize and then choose the token. Tokens help you create dynamic content that changes its values accordingly. For example, if you have a welcome email, using a First Name token, you can greet the user with “Welcome Sam” or whatever the recipient’s name is.
• After you personalize your content, just save the email and you’ll be good to go.

The First Name token is just an example. If your content has some values that differ as per the recipient, like name City, Browsed Product, you can use the token for it to change that value dynamically.

Automating The Lead Generation Process With HubSpot CRM

HubSpot uses forms to generate leads. You can create different types of forms like an embed form, popup form, a dropdown banner, and more.

These forms will appear to the users automatically as per their behavior, hence automating the lead generation process.

To automate the lead generation process through HubSpot CRM, you can:

• Go to your HubSpot portal.
• Navigate to Marketing > Lead Capture > Forms from the top bar.

• Click on the Create form button in the top right corner.
• Then select the form you want to create.

• Choose a form template or start from scratch.
• Configure the form settings and save it.

After saving the form, you can use it on whichever page you want to use it. Whoever fills these forms will automatically be added to your HubSpot CRM as contacts.

Automating Follow-ups Using HubSpot

Emails are the best way to take follow-ups. And if you use HubSpot (or any other CRM), you can send automated emails to take follow-ups.

Here’s how:

• Go to your HubSpot portal.
• Navigate to Workflows from the top bar (you should have a Professional or Enterprise plan to access workflows)
• Click on the Create workflow button on the top right.
• Then select the type of workflow and a template or start from scratch and click Next.
• You now need to select the enrollment criteria for the workflow (in this case you can select the enrollment criteria whenever a contact visits a product page multiple times.)
• Once you set the enrollment criteria, you can add further action for the follow-ups.
• First, you can set a delay time for a few hours (just to give the buyer some time.)
• Then you can send a follow-up email reminding them that they might be interested in the product.
• After the first follow-up, you can send a couple of more emails with some delay if he doesn’t respond to the first mail

In the holiday season, people browse many more products than usual. Sometimes they end up purchasing it, sometimes they don’t. But if they don’t make a purchase, you shouldn’t give up on it.

Creating A Wonderful Mobile Experience With HubSpot

Surprised! Yes, HubSpot is not just a CRM but also offers a content management system known as the CMS Hub.

You can offer a good mobile experience by providing mobile-optimized content to the users with CMS Hub.

• Go to your HubSpot portal and navigate to the section where you can create website pages.
• Create a new page or edit an existing one.
• Make whatever changes you find suitable for the mobile devices and then click on the Preview button and check the mobile view.
• Once you’re satisfied with the mobile view, you can save the page.

For delivering mobile responsiveness in your email marketing campaigns, please trace the following steps:

• Go to your HubSpot portal and navigate to Marketing > Email.
• Then create a new email or edit an existing one.
• Configure it as per the mobile devices. You can use shorter sentences, avoid images, etc.
• Then preview the email to check how it looks on the mobile devices.
• Once you’re satisfied with the mail, save it and use it in your email campaigns.

So this is how you can use HubSpot for creating effective holiday CRM marketing campaigns and winning maximum prospects for your business.

To know more about HubSpot CRM implementation, explore our HubSpot Onboarding Services. You can also connect with our experts to make the most of the festive season.

Final Thoughts

Irrespective of your chosen CRM system, whether it’s HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Agile, or any other, you can effectively implement the strategies shared in this post to maximize your holiday sales and drive greater profitability.

Take these shared tips like segment your customers, identify high spenders, automate social media marketing and lead generation, etc. into action. If you use these methods, I’m sure you’ll witness significant improvements in your results.