Are you on track to hit your year-end revenue goals? In addition to launching specific holiday promotions to boost year-end sales, you should develop five marketing strategies in 2021 to drive revenue before the New Year. Specifically, a referral program, bundled offers, a loyalty program, email marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO) are essential in the final months of a year that’s still greatly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these marketing strategies to see how you can leverage them to meet or beat your revenue goals for the year.
1. Referral Program
Referral marketing performs very well during the holiday season and the final quarter of the year. Referred customers typically spend more, have a higher lifetime value, and refer more people to your brand than non-referred customers, so build a referral program and promote it heavily leading up to and during the fourth quarter.
A successful referral program has to offer incentives that your current customers perceive as valuable enough to encourage the people they know to buy from your company. At the same time, the incentives given to the referred leads have to be perceived as valuable enough to buy from your company for the first time.
With that in mind, extend generous discounts as your referral incentives. However, referral programs don’t always have to include big discounts. Exclusive offers, freebies, seasonal items, and other incentives that are targeted to each segment of your target audience can perform just as well or better than monetary incentives.
Importantly, make sure it’s extremely easy for your customers to share your referral offers and for referrers and referred customers to get their incentives. Email marketing is a great way to promote your referral program.
2. Bundled Offers
Tis the season for bundled offers. Why? Because bundles help bring in more revenue at a lower cost for your company. Chose complementary items and promote your special bundled products as limited-time, year-end exclusive, and one-of-a-kind offers.
In other words, make consumers believe they have to act now to get access to these amazing special offers before they’re gone forever.
Bundled offers can be promoted as gift ideas or as a way to save money by buying items together. Both messages can work for different audiences with different needs. Promote them on your website, blog, social media profiles, and via email marketing. Also, reach out to other websites and ask to have your bundle included in their holiday gift guides, which is great for off-site SEO!
3. Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs are always useful in terms of increasing repeat purchases and purchase amounts. Therefore, it makes sense to promote your loyalty program heavily during the fourth quarter to drive year-end revenue.
In addition, consider offering enhanced loyalty incentives during the fourth quarter. Use email marketing and SMS marketing to share limited-time deals, special offers exclusively for loyal customers, and other short-term perks.
The key is to make your loyal customers feel extra special and highly appreciated with extra special offers that they’ll appreciate in return.
4. Email Marketing
This is it! You’ve built your email marketing list all year and tracked your campaign performance data. Now is the time to put your leads and data together to drive revenue before the New Year!
Yes, you should be sending holiday email marketing messages to promote your various year-end promotions, referral program, bundled offers, loyalty program, and so on. However, you shouldn’t just send generic messages about these promotions, programs, and offers to everyone on your list. To really move the needle and drive year-end revenue, you need to use the data you’ve collected to segment your list and only send the right offers to the right people.
Your goal should be to create highly-segmented niche audiences and send messages that are personalized to them – messages that share information about the specific offers, promotions, and programs they’re most likely to be interested in – without cluttering their inboxes with irrelevant messages.
Don’t let your great offers, promotions, and programs get lost in a bunch of irrelevant clutter! Instead, segment your lists and personalize your content, and you’ll drive the year-end revenue you need.
5. Search-Optimized Holiday-Related Web Pages
Search engine optimization is a year-round marketing strategy, but you can ramp up targeted traffic to your website by publishing web pages that are search-optimized for specific holiday-related keywords and phrases.
For example, a cannabis dispensary could create a selection of holiday-specific web pages optimized for keyword phrases like “weed Wednesday sales” or “cannabis gift guide” to try to get visitors searching for those phrases to its website from search engine results pages (SERPs).
Keep in mind, in order for these holiday-related pages to rank on SERPs, you’ll need to publish them in advance and do some work to ensure search engines consider them to be authoritative and useful enough to include in search results. Follow the link to learn more about on-page SEO for cannabis and cannabis-related websites.
Key Takeaways About Year-End Marketing Strategies
To drive revenue before the New Year, you should implement each of the marketing strategies discussed above. Don’t wait until it’s too late. Start promoting in November (or earlier) to jumpstart excitement and build anticipation in the weeks leading up to December 31st.
If you want to promote your products and services to cannabis and hemp license holders in the U.S., Canada, and international markets, schedule a demo of the Cannabiz Media License Database and see how it can help you reach your sales and marketing goals.
