A CRM Guide to Building a Winning Holiday eCommerce Strategy

The upcoming holiday season is among the most revenue-driven and benefitting periods for brands globally. It is not just about festive cheer, but also about sales charts shooting through the roof if brands play their cards right. And by playing their cards right, we mean having a robust holiday ecommerce strategy. 

One of the most important aspects of getting your e-commerce strategy right this festive season is centralizing it in your CRM to deliver growth. Now, if you have as good a CRM as HubSpot, you’ve already started ahead. The platform offers all the essentials of a holiday strategy and, evidently, one of the best CRM ecosystems, tailor-made to run campaigns like Cyber Monday deals, that boost holiday sales.

But the big question is this! Are you doing everything you can to ensure a successful holiday season, backed by the capabilities of the HubSpot CRM? If you’re not too sure, we’re here to help you figure out the answer and build a stellar holiday ecommerce strategy.         

Understanding the Holiday eCommerce Opportunity

Before jumping into tools, tactics, and the centralization of multifaceted strategies, it’s important to understand what makes your holiday marketing ideas click:  

• Peak buying intent: Customers are actively looking for deals, gifts, and limited time offers like cyber Monday deals, Black Friday offers, etc.
  
• Emotional purchasing: Campaigns that appeal to sentimentality, urgency, and community perform better.
  
• High competition: Your competitors will also increase ad spend and marketing frequency.
  
• Customer experience matters: A smooth, personalised journey can make or break sales.

The key to success lies in centralizing and leveraging data and automation to deliver personalised experiences at scale, and that’s exactly what HubSpot enables.      

Step-by-Step Guide for a Winning Holiday eCommerce Strategy

Here’s a practical checklist to help you ensure that you tick all the right boxes: 

Plan Ahead and Plan Well with HubSpot CRM

In order to sell huge in the holiday season, the first step has to be understanding your customers well. Clean and accurate data is key in that regard. Fortunately, HubSpot offers functionalities to centralise and segment customer data, based on engagement, buying behaviour, preferences, and more.     

So, before you run a single campaign, remember to: 

• Segment your audience by past purchase behaviour, engagement level, and interests. 
• Use custom properties to identify top buyers, inactive customers, or high-value leads.
• Set up smart lists for dynamic segmentation that automatically update as customers engage.  
• Analyze sales reports and dashboards to forecast demand, track key trends, and identify top-performing products. 

By analyzing this data, you can craft personalized holiday offers for every segment, from VIP shoppers to first-time buyers.

Count On High-Converting Landing Pages 

For every campaign, a landing page serves as the central point of engagement. So, your festive season campaigns like your holiday loyalty program need a visually-appealing, high-converting, and optimized landing page. 

The great thing about HubSpot is that its landing page builder makes it super easy for you to build a solid landing page that is tailor-made for conversions (you won’t even need a developer for that). Marking another task off your holiday strategy centralization list. 

Things to Consider while creating Holiday landing pages:  

• Ensure that the visuals and content on the landing page align with the festive mood and are likely to resonate with your core target audience. 
• Make use of urgency-inducing tools like countdown timers and time-bound special discounts to make your customers think they need to act fast.  
• Leverage HubSpot’s A/B testing capabilities to check which variation of your landing page is striking the chord with the audience. 
• Lastly, ensure that your CTAs are well-placed and optimized for different customer types like first-time buyers, loyals, returning buyers, etc.  
• Additionally, you can also consider creating separate pages for your Black Friday sale, Thanksgiving deals, and Cyber Monday offers, etc.

Leverage Workflows to Automate Customer Journeys

The holiday season rush is real. For e-commerce businesses, it is practically impossible to follow-up manually, running behind each lead or customer. That’s where automation steps in as the saviour. 

HubSpot’s workflows allow users to set up timely, trigger-based, and personalized campaigns that keep the leads and customers engaged right from the beginning to after the business is done. It also means that you can track each customer’s journey on one centralized platform, i.e., your HubSpot CRM, thus unifying your holiday ecommerce strategy. 

Here are some examples of holiday workflows:  

• To win back old customers: These campaigns can be leveraged to interest old customers with early bird deals to start shopping with you again. 
• To create a sense of urgency: Holiday countdown campaigns can be automated to keep reminding prospective customers about your sales deadline as it approaches. 
• To recover abandoned carts: By far the most useful workflow during the festive sales surge, HubSpot’s abandoned cart recovery workflows are your best chance at nudging your customers towards completing their purchase. 
• To thank your customers: For the much-needed gratitude during the holidays, post-purchase thank you emails are a great idea to delight your customers and encourage them to give referrals. 

Coupon it Up to Boost Conversions

What are the buyers looking for during the holiday season? A great deal, right? Naturally, they enjoy nothing more than some personalized holiday coupon codes, made just for them. Makes them feel special, as well. 

Luckily, with the HubSpot CRM and MakeWebBetter’s Automated Coupons App, you can up your coupon marketing game. The latter easily integrates with HubSpot and helps you automate coupon generation, distributing, and tracking, as well, making sure that all your coupon marketing data is stored and organized on one holistic platform.  

Best Practices to Maximize Results: 

• Reward loyal customers or try to re-engage inactive users with targeted holiday discount codes and coupon codes during the festive season. 
• Leverage HubSpot workflows to send these smart coupons via emails, triggered by actions such as cart abandonment or product enquiries. 
• Create special and personalized coupons for each segment of your customer base. 
• Track all your coupons and their performance within HubSpot, to check ROI and boost coupons that are working well. 

For this, MakeWebBetter’s Automated Coupons App Helps in: 

• Syncing all your coupon codes seamlessly across HubSpot contacts, workflows, and deals. 
• Eliminating the manual coupon management work that is exhaustingly time-consuming. 
• Easily running personalized and measurable festive campaigns to boost conversions.  

Explore Automated Coupons

Build a Robust Holiday Season Knowledge Base for Support

During the holiday sales surge, your support team can end up being bombarded by queries from customers. That’s why it is a much better idea to create a robust Knowledge Base on HubSpot, that can work wonders to make your holiday ecommerce strategy customer-friendly. 

Here are some reasons why HubSpot Knowledge Base stands out: 

• Its AI search and categorization feature helps customers find answers swiftly. 
• It allows you to build ‘how-to guides’ for everything from gift wrapping to using products, and every other ecommerce usage query one can think of. 
• You can add FAQs on the full range of queries related to shipping, return, refund, etc. 
• When you choose HubSpot to build a solid Holiday Season Knowledge Base, you also get impressive reporting and analytical capabilities. This assists in finding common queries that customers have and creating content regarding those, beforehand. 

Leverage HubSpot AI and Analytics to Measure Campaign Impact

Backed by its ever-evolving AI capabilities, HubSpot CRM not only offers real-time insights into your ongoing campaigns but also offers predictive recommendations. 

How Can You Leverage HubSpot’s AI Capabilities in Holiday Season? 

• Utilize AI to generate email subject lines and CTAs that will make your readers click. 
• Leverage AI-backed predictive lead scoring to identify leads that have the highest chance of converting into customers. 
• HubSpot’s AI-driven analytics dashboard will help you measure campaign analytics across channels, including emails, ads, sales, etc. 
• Ensure instant customer engagement with AI chatbots to make sure no opportunity to convert goes unattended. 

Collaborate with HubSpot Experts for a Winning Holiday Season

Before you start creating the perfect CRM holiday ecommerce strategy, won’t it be better to identify the shortcomings first? 

We think, yes! As HubSpot Elite Solutions Partner, MakeWebBetter is offering a special FREE Festive Readiness Business Audit. Yes…it’s absolutely free!   

Here are the areas where MakeWebBetter’s FREE Audit will focus on: 

• Abandoned Cart Workflows 
• Loyalty Programs 
• Cross-selling and Upselling Strategies 
• Festive-based Campaigns (Cyber Monday offers, Black Friday deals, etc.)

Each FREE Festive Readiness Audit from MakeWebBetter comes with an Opportunity Card that breaks down the following:   

• Gaps: Here’s where your current processes fall short.
• Impact: The impact that it is having in terms of lost revenue.
• Fix: We then suggest practical and strategic methods for you.
• ROI: The gains you can expect after optimizing your systems and CRM.

Claim Your FREE Audit

The Holiday Takeaway

The coming few weeks can be the perfect opportunity for your business to amp up sales and call it a ‘successful holiday season’ for your business. But you need to act now and the first step has to be a quick FREE audit before you can move on to put all the pieces in the right places! 

So, what are you waiting for? We’re already in the thick of the season! Start preparing your winning holiday strategy with a HubSpot elite partner like MakeWebBetter by your side.