How to Use Video for Holiday Sales

For many retailers, and ecommerce businesses, the holiday season is the most profitable time of year. We’re talking about the time span from about October through January 1 each year. While there are several celebratory days marked on calendars during this short period, what retailers are most focused on during this time is sales! Forming a strong holiday video marketing campaign is essential to holiday sales for any business, but if you’re not sure how to use video for holiday sales, you could find yourself struggling with nuances like where to being or how to get started. 

If you’re like most business owners, you’re looking for ways to use video to increase your holiday sales.  Of course you would want a piece of the estimated $4.44 trillion that we expect shoppers to spend for the 2021 holiday season – why wouldn’t you? Holiday sales are forecasted to account for a huge amount of post-pandemic economic activity and there’s no reason why your brand can’t stand to grab a piece of the pie.

To help you get started, we’ve put together our top holiday video production tips for increased sales. 

1. Plan Your Holiday Video Marketing Campaign Early

If you haven’t already planned, it’s not too late, but you definitely want to get started right away and prepare to plan earlier next year! Holiday shopping begins before Halloween technically, so you really want to have your campaigns in order and videos ready for release before this time if you wish to maximize on holiday sales. 

When planning your campaigns, make sure that you:

• Focus on your target audience – make sure you’re speaking to the holiday gift purchasers, not just those who wish to receive the gifts!
• Prepare audience specific, and platform specific, video ads that target your audience niche. 
• Plan holiday videos around key shopping days: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, etc.

Make sure that you’re mapping out your campaign so that it’s following the buyer’s journey from awareness through decision making and purchase. 

2. Set Clear, Measurable Goals for your Video Campaigns

If you really want to know how to use video for holiday sales, you’ve got to be focused on not only planning your video content, but on setting clear goals for your video campaigns. You need to be paying attention to more than just how many people have watched your video. Set realistic goals that you wish to achieve with your holiday videos such as:

• Attract more social media followers to increase sales.
• Attract new website visitors to increase sales.
• Share expertise to improve authority and increase sales.
• Engage with prospective customers and increase trust.
• Offer product discounts to encourage gift giving.

It’s also important that you can measure your success, whether it’s by:

• % of increased sales.
• % of increased video views.
• % of increased video reactions.
• % of increased video shares.

Don’t be afraid to set a goal of posting a specific number of holiday videos such as 1 per week throughout the season or even 1 per day!

3. Share Holiday Videos in Email Campaigns for Increased Traction

One of the easiest ways on how to use video for holiday sales is to incorporate videos into your email marketing campaigns. The addition of the word “video” to your email subject line can increase open rate by 7% more than emails that do not include this term. Additionally, sales teams that incorporate videos into their emails get a 16% higher open rate and a 26% increase in replies. Finally, emails with videos improve click-through-rate by up to 300% over campaigns that do not use video!

Incorporating holiday videos into your email campaigns can help you increase holiday sales exponentially! Consider the following types of videos in your emails:

• Holiday how-to videos that help consumers use your products.
• Holiday thank you card videos. 
• Behind-the-scenes videos that show your team at work during the holidays.
• Holiday giving videos which share your philanthropy and sharing.
• A simple holiday greeting card video.

Any of these videos as well as many other options could be used in your email campaigns to increase holiday sales.

4. Incorporate Holiday Videos into Landing Pages

A great way to use holiday video to increase sales is in your landing pages. Retailers often incorporate video into their landing pages as way of improving the overall festive spirit of the page while improving conversions. Create a festive landing page that includes your holiday sales video announcing to visitors that big savings are here. Statistically, including a video on your landing page can boost conversions by up to 80%!

Just make sure that you keep your videos short and engaging. You have only 8 seconds to grab the attention of your core audience! Make sure you stick to the point, have fun, and keep it interesting.

5. Share Videos on Social Media

If you’re still looking at how to use video for holiday sales, when nothing else seems to come to mind, consider the use of video on social media. You can’t go wrong with sharing video on social, and there are plenty of ideas to get started. Whether you’re just having fun with some branded content or behind-the-scenes holiday insight or you share things like what your team loves most about the holidays or your most important traditions, using video to increase your holiday sales is literally just about having fun and being creative!