Power Through The Festive Surge With HubSpot Holiday Sales Strategy

Have you thought about prepping up a specialized HubSpot holiday sales strategy? If not, there is time!

A well-executed holiday marketing strategy is critical for businesses of all kinds to bring in more leads and engagement and channel it to an effective sales process. To make the most of this opportunity, sales reps must ensure their HubSpot accounts are well-prepared for the surge in potential sales and lead engagement.

This sure must have crossed your mind, but what does this setup entail? Let’s leap into it!

HubSpot Holiday Sales Strategy To Reduce Friction

This step-by-step guide thoroughly explains how sales reps must prepare and tune up the necessary HubSpot sales hub settings, to fully capitalize on the success of the holiday marketing strategy. This caters to preparing for the influx of leads during the holiday sales season. Follow this guide to maximize the efficiency of your lead management and succeed with sales results.

1. Clean and Segment Contact Records

The first step to the checklist for holiday sales strategy is to ensure that your existing contact lists are well-organized and up-to-date. Begin with the following to ensure all this:

Data Clean-Up

As long as you want to avoid tangling in the data clutter, it’s crucial to clean up your existing contacts database as a part of your HubSpot holiday sales strategy.

• Remove Duplicate Contacts: Use HubSpot’s data management tools to identify and merge duplicate contacts. Follow a data cleanup guide if you’re unsure.
• Update Outdated Info: Reach out to contacts who haven’t interacted in a while to update their information. Automate this process to shoot email through workflows.
• Cut Priority or Unsubscribe Non-Engagers: Create a list of sleeping contacts, the ones who haven’t engaged in the last 6-12 months, and consider moving them to a low-priority segment or unsubscribing them.

Segmentation

Employing CRM features facilitating data segmentation is another way to declutter and prep your existing data for an effective HubSpot holiday sales strategy. You must utilize smart lists and groups built within HubSpot for this.

• Behavior-Based Segments: Segment contacts based on behavior, like previous purchases, recent email engagement, and interactions with targeted pages and links.
• Demographic Segmentation: Use HubSpot’s smart lists to segment by geography, age, or other demographic factors that influence holiday buying behavior.
• Lifecycle Stage: Divide contacts into various lifecycle stages—leads, marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), sales-qualified leads (SQLs), and customers. This allows for more personalized outreach.

Lists Example

• High-Intent List: Create a segment for people who engaged with your past promotions but didn’t convert.
• VIP List: Segment repeat buyers or long-term customers for exclusive offers.
• Discount Seeker List: Contacts who have clicked on or engaged with discount coupon emails, promotional links, or landing pages in previous campaigns.

2. Custom Properties for Holiday-Specific Tracking

You can target and qualify leads more effectively by utilizing HubSpot custom properties builder. This achieves tracking and segmenting contacts for events, activities, or behaviors amidst the holiday rush. Your approach must do the following:

Add Custom Properties

Your holiday campaigns would require a monitoring approach to keep hold of the rapid activities happening at lightning speed. This is why you need dedicated custom properties for your holiday promotions.

• Holiday Discount Opt-In: Track which contacts express interest in your holiday promotions. For instance, you can track the engagement of your past Christmas sale, your Black Friday & Cyber Monday and other holiday campaigns, etc.
• Preferred Holiday Products: If your product catalog has a broader range, you can have category or product-specific properties. The properties must help understand what kind of products a contact is eager to catch during your holiday marketing campaigns.

Use Properties for Personalization

Besides quality segmentation, you can employ workflows, emails, and chatbots in your HubSpot Holiday sales strategy to personalize the experience for leads. Take the case of those who are interested in ‘Discount Coupons’ or ‘Holiday Sale’ could automatically be enrolled in holiday sale email sequences.

3. Coordinate Branding Tweaks

Once you’re done with the data integrity, the next thing you need to ensure is branding. Define and communicate the agreed branding to sales and marketing teams to align better on goals & messages and form a unified HubSpot holiday sales strategy.

Align messaging and ensure brand consistency with your holiday marketing strategy — your efforts in sales outreach reflect the same holiday social media campaigns, ads, and email marketing.

Additionally, regularly review the performance of holiday marketing campaigns together and make adjustments to email sequences, workflows, or lead prioritization as needed.

4. Optimize Lead Scoring for Holiday Engagement

Lead scoring is essential for prioritizing outreach, especially during the holidays when your sales reps are likely dealing with higher volumes of leads.

Add Holiday-Related Criteria to Lead Scoring

Before you begin with lead scoring setup, analyze and segment lead scoring criteria based on the past holiday season to identify trends in customer behavior and adjust scoring criteria accordingly. Furthermore, you can implement demographic-based segmentation.

• High-Intent Behavior: Give extra points for actions such as visiting product pages, opening multiple holiday advertising emails, or clicking on calls-to-action (CTAs) linked to seasonal offers.
• Historical Campaign Performance: Use insights from past holiday campaigns to refine scoring models and identify which lead behaviors were most predictive of conversions.
• Holiday Social Media Campaigns: Incorporate social media engagement data and insights to refine scoring criteria, as holiday social media campaigns often have strong social media elements.
• Abandoned Cart Follow-Ups: Increase lead scores for users who abandon carts during the holiday season, as they might be close to making a purchase.

Your sales team should prioritize reaching out to leads with the highest scores, as they’re more likely to convert during this period.

5. Optimize CRM Sales Settings

Your sales processes should also be aligned with your holiday sales campaigns. With preparation powered with preparations

• Review and Update CRM Pipelines: Suggest reviewing and updating sales pipelines to align with holiday sales ideas, sales processes, and promotions.
• Custom Views and Filters: Show how to set up custom views and filters in HubSpot CRM to manage and prioritize holiday leads and opportunities more effectively.
• Automated Tasks and Reminders: Recommend setting up automated tasks and reminders to ensure follow-ups and customer interactions are timely during the busy holiday season.

Your data tune-up and tailored lead channels will automatically ensure smooth operations throughout the sales funnel.

6. Targeted Holiday Sales Workflows

As a pre-eminent part of your holiday sales strategy, you’ll want workflows to take care of the engagement surge. With automation, you not only handle this huge influx of leads but also ensure consistency with respect to lead engagement.

Set Triggers Based on Behavior

• Email Opens: Trigger a workflow for segmented email contacts who open holiday advertising emails.
• Holiday Landing Page Visits: Set up workflows for leads visiting specific landing pages, such as “Holiday Sales” or “Gift Guide” pages.
• Abandoned Carts: If your eCommerce platform integrates with HubSpot, set a workflow to follow up with contacts who’ve abandoned their carts during holiday shopping.

Personalized Follow-Ups

• Setup Follow-up Flows: Send automated follow-up emails with holiday-specific offers, exclusive discount coupons, or reminders about limited-time deals.
• Tokens for Personalization: Leverage Hubspot tokens and include personalized subject lines like “Don’t Miss Out on Your Exclusive Holiday Offer, [First Name]!”

Analyze and figure out what works best for your tailored HubSpot holiday sales strategy and follow the iterations in the flows.

7. Refresh Email Sequences and Templates

Holiday sale emails will likely be one of your most effective sales tools. This is why, it’s crucial to update and optimize your sequences and templates for the holiday season.

Holiday-Themed Templates

• Refresh email designs with holiday imagery, colors, and calls-to-action that focus on seasonal offers or limited-time discounts.
• Example: Instead of a generic subject line like “Here’s Your Monthly Update,” use “Exclusive Holiday Deal Just for You, [First Name]!”

Setup Holiday Email Sequence Example

Here’s an example of a holiday sale email sequence crafted specifically for sales reps to engage prospects or existing clients.

• Email 1: Holiday Teaser (2-3 weeks before the holiday)
• Email 2: Early Bird Offer (1-2 weeks before the holiday)
• Email 3: Main Holiday Sale Offer Announcement (1 week before the holiday)
• Email 4: Last Minute Reminder (1 Day Before Holiday Ends)
• Email 5: Thank You Email (Day After Holiday Ends)
• Email 6: Post-Holiday Follow-Up or Sales Success Numbers (1 Week Later)

8. Use Chatbots and Live Chat for Immediate Engagement

Holiday shoppers won’t wait up long and might expect instant responses. Chatbots and live chat can help you stand out with that and manage the high volume of inquiries.

Holiday-Specific Chatbots & Live Chat

HubSpot has built-in tools to configure the chat flows, allowing you to round up all the queries that are put up most frequently during the holiday rush.

• Create bot workflows that greet visitors with holiday-specific messages, such as “Looking for the perfect gift? Let me help!”
• Use bots to guide users to the right products, and answer FAQs about holiday discount T&C, shipping, BNPL facility, offline payments, or return policy.
• Ensure live chat is easily accessible and staffed adequately during peak holiday traffic periods. Use pre-configured templates for common inquiries like active sale navigation, order status, or product availability.

This also ensures, that you’re website visitors don’t go empty-handed, if nothing, they take away the information about your running holiday promotions.

9. Build Holiday-Specific Campaign Dashboards

Tracking performance is crucial to adjusting your strategies mid-campaign. Use HubSpot’s reporting tools to build dashboards that monitor key holiday metrics.

Track Performance in Real-Time & Adjust Campaigns

• Open Rates and CTR: See how well your holiday email campaigns are performing.
• Landing Page Views: Monitor traffic and conversions on your holiday-specific landing pages.
• Lead Conversion Rates: Track how many new leads from holiday advertising campaigns and other promotions turn into SQLs and customers.
• If one of your landing pages isn’t converting well, consider A/B testing new versions or modifying the offer mid-campaign.

10. Set Realistic Holiday Goals and Adjust Sales Forecasts

Whether you do it as the first thing or after realizing your capacity don’t overlook the importance of setting goals. You can easily set realistic holiday sales targets alongside the HubSpot sales forecast feature and robust analytical capabilities.

• Take into account the expected increase in traffic and engagement when setting sales targets for the holiday season. Make sure to monitor daily or weekly so you can adjust strategies on the go.
• Use HubSpot’s reporting tools to compare holiday performance against regular periods and historical data. This will help in fine-tuning next year’s holiday strategies.

Over To You!

Incorporating the aforementioned approaches into your HubSpot holiday sales strategy will not only maximize your efficiency but also increase personalized touchpoints and drive better outcomes for your holiday campaigns.

Additionally, to succeed with your holiday promotions, align your ideas with your holiday marketing campaigns — channel your leads through a well-defined scoring system, refine data, and establish clearer sales pipelines. And, that’s how you achieve efficiency during peak times of the holiday rush. Let’s do it, you’re surely gonna make it happen!