Visual Marketing Tactics For Ecommerce Startups To Delight Buyers In Holiday Season
Featured Image: iStock/elenabs
The holiday season is always a crucial time for eCommerce businesses, especially for startups. During this time, visual marketing is one of the best ways to reach shoppers while they browse products and gifts for themselves, family, friends, colleagues, and strangers.
Visual marketing helps to engage customers, retain their attention, and make them trust the eCommerce brand even when there are plenty of options available. With the help of visual marketing tactics, eCommerce startups use creativity, design, and technology to keep selling their products.
Compared to text, photos and videos can be more persuasive and create a more emotional connection between your customers and your brand. So what are we waiting for, let’s make our way to visual techniques that’ll sprinkle a festive touch to your ecommerce marketing designs.
Visual Marketing Tactics For Ecommerce Startups
There are different tactics that businesses can employ to optimize their visual marketing and maximize their chances to hit the jackpot. We’ll talk about how eCommerce startups can delight their customers with visual marketing, this holiday season.
Create Creative Catalogs
The holiday season is the biggest retail season of the year! The increased number of customers, higher conversion rates, and higher customer lifetime value make it an ideal time for retailers to garner leads and sales.
Consumers are more likely to buy something when they see the product in detail and feel like they can touch it. And, with the rise in popularity in online shopping, social media, augmented reality, virtual reality, and now metaverse, this trend is only going to grow as time goes on.
Without a doubt, for eCommerce companies, catalogs are a key component of their marketing strategy. They attract customers by showcasing the variety of products they sell and their features/benefits. Utilizing an online screen recorder, businesses can also create engaging walkthroughs of their digital catalogs, providing a dynamic shopping experience even from afar.
Image Source
To make the most of your eCommerce catalog, consider the following:
- The presentation of the catalog
- The content in the catalog
- The usability of the catalog
Explore: Online Product Catalog Design Inspirations For Your Startup
Let’s look at a few creative catalog examples below.
Bloom and Wild sell flowers online. The unique feature of this product catalog is that it showcases five photographs of each flower set. When buyers hover over the images of the flowers, they see an arrow that takes them through all the images. Through this idea, it seems they are portraying a buyer’s journey.
Image Source
Etsy, an online marketplace, dedicated an entire section called the Holiday Shop with categories like “holiday stockings”, “festive wreaths”, and “jolly face masks”.
Image Source
The trick to designing an attractive and click-worthy catalog is to not be boring. Make the most of the hovering, and make sure the photographs are appealing. Also, offer personalization and customization through styles, colors, patterns, and engraving.
Holiday Season Ideas For Product Catalog
- Sprinkle confetti when users hover over the photo
- Have the Santa hold your products in different poses
- Wrap each product in a gift box and upon hovering reveal the product
- Play a Christmas song on the catalog page to boost the holiday spirits of the buyers
Picture Perfect Product Photography
There are different tips and tricks photographers need to know for the best holiday season product photography so they can complete this task with ease and professionalism. The main goal of a product photographer is to click photos that showcase the best side of the items so consumers become eager to buy them.
ECommerce brands need to put in a little more effort during the holiday season. The holiday season is a great time for eCommerce stores to increase their sales. One way to do this is by offering high-quality product photography.
Amazon is one of the biggest eCommerce websites that sells literally everything from a to z. The website has a dedicated page for the holiday season that is presented as a guide for those looking specifically for festive products or deals. The images may show their usual products but they are uplifted with some elements of Christmas, for example, wrapped gifts and ornaments. Hints of the red and green color palettes are prominent since the hue has been associated with the festival since forever.
Image Source
West Elm is a home decoration and furniture online store that provides a holiday section on its website that is filled with holiday photographs and products to recreate the holiday vibe. In the image below, you can see that a normal dinner table has been given a subtle holiday-inspired theme, giving the impression of a dinner party.
Image Source
Product photography is an important aspect of eCommerce shopping. It is the first impression that potential customers will have of your store. The right photos can bring in the customers, while bad photos might even scare them away.
Image Source
Holiday Season Ideas For Product Photography
- Focus on expressions and emotions that manifest holiday spirit
- Use holiday-themed elements like decorations, colors, and patterns
- Experiment with different angles for catchy compositions
- Use photography trends like
- 3D virtual photography
- 360° photography
- Drone photography
Give Your Website Festive Vibes
Christmas is a time for festivities and joy. It is a time when people spend quality time with their loved ones and buy gifts for them. In the context of eCommerce, this season has been generating billions of dollars in revenue for the last few years.
Image Source
In a digitally optimized world where more and more people are turning to the internet for information and making purchases through the web, your online eCommerce store needs to up its game, especially during the holiday season. Teri Shern Cofounder of Conex Boxes says, “People like to see new things, and when you change up the look of your store to match a festive season, it gets them in a festive mood while browsing your website.”
Image Source
Image Source
No matter the kind of products your eCommerce store is selling, fill it with graphic elements that suggest you’re not a bore during the holiday season. A lot of people are looking for the perfect gift as they head into the Christmas and New Year spirit. To deliver an unforgettable experience, you need a website design that is cheery and interactive.
Image Source
Without a doubt, holiday shopping is an important part of the retail industry, and eCommerce websites are an important part of the holiday shopping experience.
Image Source
Holiday Season Website Look Tips
- Dedicate a page to holiday season shopping
- Decorate website header with festive photographs
- Use a befitting color scheme fit for holidays
- Add personalized discount offers and deals
Visualize Display Banner Ads For Holidays
The holidays are the most important season for retailers. They are looking to capture as many customers as possible, often through digital channels. Digital marketers, thus, need to prepare display banner ads with holiday-themed designs in order to get shoppers into the ecommerce sites.
Image Source
While there are simple banner ads with store name, promotional offer, and call to action button, for the holiday season marketers and designers need to include visuals that helps the ecommerce store celebrate festivity for end of year sales.
Image Source
Display banner ads are a type of advertising which is commonly used for holidays. While some banners are more popular than others, they all have their own purpose.
Explore: 13 Ways Of Personalizing Banner Ads For Upholding Customers Loyalty
Animated banners or video ads are often used for the holiday season. They create a more interesting and attractive visual that grabs the user’s attention in an instant, provided it is good quality and evokes an emotion.
Image Source
Image Source
Static banner ads are the most common type of display banner. They use less bandwidth since they don’t include animation or video content, but they also don’t have as big an impact on users as animated banners do.
Charles Demarkles, Digital Consultant, shared a great tip, “eCommerce brands can use dynamic display ads to begin the top end of their conversion funnel from anywhere on the web that uses Google’s display network.”
According to Hubspot Blog, “Dynamic ads, also called dynamic banner ads or dynamic creatives, are ads in which the content, promotions, and calls-to-action change based on user behavior.”
Holiday Season Banner Design Tricks
- Have a consistent design for all banner of a particular holiday campaign
- Use photos, videos and illustrations that speak creativity and festivity
- Add cheerfulness and motivation to the banner ad content and call-to-action
- Use animation techniques to make still graphics come alive in holiday season
Use User-Generated Content For Holiday Social Media
You may wonder what is user-generated content so, user-generated content (UGC) is content that is created by customers, not by the business itself. It’s like the modern-day version of word-of-mouth advertising. UGC provides a way for your customers to become your brand ambassadors for little to no cost.
Ecommerce Manager for OLIPOP, Melanie Bedwell says, “Your brand needs to be current and align with the season. You can also tap into your social media followers and encourage user-generated content.” Such digital assets can be used to make your products more appealing and exciting for the target audience.
User-generated content for the holiday season can include images and videos, questions and answers, reviews, quotes, captions and other information that the customers provide on their own.
Holiday Season UGC Campaign Ideas
- Ask customers to share a photo with their favorite product from your store
- Run a contest for a live unboxing video to win a holiday gift hamper
- Dress up ratings and reviews from customers on your product catalog page
- For holidays, pick users that have great following and interaction on social media
Gamify Ecommerce Visual Marketing Posts For Holidays
Gamification is a technique used to make something more interesting and engaging. It changes the way we approach a task by adding an element of fun and providing rewards. In this article, we will discuss how gamification can be used in eCommerce visual marketing posts for holidays.
Gamification has become popular for interactive marketing activities, including web design, mobile apps, and social media.To market your eCommerce company effectively during the holiday season, gamify your posts with engaging content that encourages customers to buy goods directly from your store or use your coupon codes.
You can also take advantage of technology like Amazon Rekognition, which allows you to create a game that doesn’t require any coding knowledge and is fully customizable for any business size and niche, and it’s free to use!
Holiday Season Ecommerce Marketing Gamification Tips
- Create reminiscence of classic board games referring to your products
- On your social media feed, post different types of online games
- Scavenger hunt
- Spin the wheel
- Trivia
- Word search
- Scratch off
- Always assign a purpose to the game rather than it being engagement in vain
- Make an interactive and functional game that can be played rather than just looked at
Holiday Season Video Marketing For Ecommerce Businesses
Holiday season is a time of year when many businesses are looking for ways to increase sales. One way to do so is to invest in video marketing for holidays. As consumers are increasingly turning to social media to shop, holiday videos are an opportunity for eCommerce companies to create rich media experiences that will increase customer engagement. You should use an online video editor to edit your videos professionally before posting them.
The holidays are an excellent time of year for video marketing. People are looking for gifts, or ideas of what they want to buy their loved ones. They turn to social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, and Pinterest for inspiration during this time of year.
Walmart Connect is a platform that allows customers to purchase products from Walmart by watching videos on Facebook Live. Brands can advertise during these live streams with product placements, content sponsorships, event endorsements.
Holiday Season Video Marketing For Ecommerce
- Have a compelling storyline for eCommerce holiday season videos
- Consider native video marketing for different online channels
- Set up the video stage for holiday festivities with props and motion graphics
- Make sure the script is inspiring, cheery, motivating, and full of hope
- Keep your website faster by upgrading to a faster web host to offer an exceptional user experience.
It is not just critical for the business but also a smart move for eCommerce startups to use visual marketing tactics to delight buyers in the holiday season. Visual marketing is an important component of any company’s marketing strategy, but it becomes even more important during the holiday season.
How are you using visuals to create your holiday season marketing strategy?
