3 Tactics to Help Drive Marketing Success From Your Community This Holiday

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It's hard to believe the holiday season is upon us once again. As marketers scramble to tweak their last-minute holiday plans and promotions, top priorities likely include acquiring new customers, amplifying existing efforts, improving targeting, and increasing conversion. With those objectives front and center, I'd like to offer up three quick and tactical recommendations that can help assure your brand has a very happy holiday season.

Tactic: Social login/Facebook Connect.

Benefits: Acquire new customers, increase data accuracy, improve relevance, and generate new program opportunities.

Looking to acquire new customers and improve relevance? Look no further than implementing social login, which enables users to log in to your site using their social identity from leading social networks like Facebook. There is no doubt that retail site traffic spikes during the holiday season, so why not take advantage of all that increased attention and turn it into more registrations and email subscribers? Including a social login option to register, subscribe, and purchase from your site can not only grow sign-ups 30 percent to 50 percent, but it can increase the accuracy of the data collected. Be sure to include an opt-in to future email communications and gain permission to collect critical social attributes (birthdate, location, and interests) within the Facebook app acceptance process so you can create new programs and improve the relevance of future marketing efforts.

Tactic: Socialize existing email efforts.

Benefits: Grow communities, increase reach/amplification of promotional efforts, and generate new program opportunities.

Billions of emails will be sent this holiday season on behalf of thousands of retailers. As a result, email presents one of the best and easiest ways to help you grow your social communities as well as amplify your social media promotions. To do that, marketers should socialize existing email efforts in order to grow communities and encourage your most loyal audience to share key promotions with friends, family, and followers. To do that, consider including the follow components in every email:

• "Join us." Include social community icons to encourage existing subscribers to join social communities offering you the ability to engage users across multiple channels in the future.
• "Like." Give email recipients the ability to like/approve an offer within your existing email communications. When liked, offers will appear on their wall/friends' newsfeed and will result in greater visibility for your brand and promotions.
• "Share with your network." SWYN enables further distribution of the email offer to some or all of the recipient's friends. Include multiple share options including posting to Facebook, tweet, and email.
• "Connect with us on Facebook." Including a connect option that when clicked includes an app acceptance process offers brands the opportunity to collect critical social profile data (birthday, location, interests) that can then be used to optimize your future email marketing efforts or generate new programs (e.g., new store opening announcements based on location).

Tactic: Relationships retargeting.

Benefit: Increase conversion.

Targeting known users via relationship retargeting is one of the most effective and efficient uses of holiday budgets any marketer can make. Setting cookies across known users interacting with your brand via a site visit, purchase, or email opt-in and open allows marketers the opportunity to create a rich and addressable audience online that can later be used for display retargeting efforts. Once the cookie pool of active known users is built, the possibilities are endless and benefits great. Imagine being able to then leverage those cookies to target users who visited and then abandoned a purchase on your site, or who opened and clicked on an offer in email but didn't convert, or perhaps someone who didn't open the email at all. As a result, brands experience a lift in conversions, sales, and ROI in the double digits.

So there are three tactics that enable you to make simple, yet critically important enhancements to existing holiday marketing efforts. Taken together, these changes can help you acquire more customers, amplify your promotional efforts, and increase conversion. For even more tips on optimizing your digital marketing efforts for the holiday season, check out my company's 2012 Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season and my column from last year, "11 Ways to Leverage the Power of Social Media for the 2011 Holiday Season."

Till next time.

Holiday Season image on home page via Shutterstock.