This the season to be jolly. OK, maybe not everyone is jolly around this time of year, and things can get pretty hyper and stressful. There’s lots to do, lots going on around us and everyone seems to be on edge.
Just like the best way to learn sometimes is to teach, the best way to improve your demeanor and experiences is to spread the holiday cheer. The more days you brighten for others, the brighter yours become.
What better platform to use for this than your business or brand? After all, you have hundreds —if not thousands —of customers within your reach. Spreading a little cheer here and there will impact quite a few people. It will also give everyone a more warm, welcome and happy feeling when they see or experience your brand.
Spreading holiday cheer is a lot easier than you’d think. It’s not like you have to hire someone in a Santa suit to sit outside your business ringing a bell and asking for charity donations, although that would work too.
1. Start Simple
Before diving into sweeping page or design changes, keep it real simple. Let’s start with your logo design, a.k.a. your brand identity. Take your logo and add some festive decorations for the time being.
Add a bell or mistletoe to certain pages or elements of your site. Swap the colors on your main page to coincide with the deep greens and reds of Christmas. You could also take a photo with your team and wish everyone a happy holiday season.
Also, try to remember it’s not just about your online presence or website. Making subtle changes to your signage, for instance, is another great way to spread holiday cheer.
2. Email Greeting Cards or Newsletters
Snail mail is still a possibility, but it’s not as common anymore. Email, however, definitely is. There are also a ton of tools, platforms and portals that allow you to send greetings, digital cards and newsletters to your customers.
It’s not a bad idea to put together a holiday-themed newsletter or email greeting and send it out. If you really want to be cheeky, you can keep it up for the entire holiday season or just do one long newsletter.
3. Launch Holiday Promotions
The holiday season is a great time to start exclusive discounts and promotions for your customers, especially around Black Friday or Cyber Monday. You can send out coupons to loyal customers, drop the prices of your most popular products or even host a free shipping day.
4. Change Your Packaging
This one may take a lot more investment, but it is a joyful and welcome gesture. Most brands have unique packaging they place shipped products or items within. Maybe it’s just a plain box with your logo on it, or maybe it’s a unique multicolored parcel. Whatever the case, you can update your packaging to meet the holiday theme.
If that’s out of scope —such as being too expensive to change all your packaging —you can do something a little smaller. For example, throw a holiday greeting card in with every purchase, or send a holiday-themed treat.
5. Start a Holiday Social Campaign
Your website isn’t the only place you’ll be engaging and interacting with your customers. Don’t neglect social media, which is often complementary to your website. Share your holiday-themed blog posts via your social feeds.
Kickstart polls and questionnaires. Offer exclusive deals and discounts to your social audience. There’s a lot you can do here to leverage your social accounts, while remaining true to your general online presence.
6. Collaborate
The holiday season is a great time to collaborate with partners, other brands and even your competition. It’s time when everyone puts their differences aside and revels in the holiday cheer, and you should too. As you no doubt realize, there are many ways to make this happen.
You could put together a special holiday bundle with products from your inventory and partners. You could collaborate with another brand via a marketing campaign, or just interact with others via social media. Nothing spreads the holiday cheer more than a delightful and friendly interaction with others.
Amazon launched a campaign that involved popular YouTubers Ingrid Nilsen and Alex Wassabi, showing off how customers could take advantage of its premium Prime service during the holidays.
7. Give Back
The holiday season is a time for family, cheer and warmth —but it’s also a great time to give back to everyone who supported you. As you head toward the final days of the year, you will have already seen the holiday shopping swarm. You will have already felt its boon and an increase in both traffic and customers. Why not give a little of that back?
There’s no better way to do this than to donate to a local charity or nonprofit organization. You don’t necessarily have to give money, though that’s always a great start. You can also donate products, old equipment and hardware, food and much more.
8. Add a Touch of Holiday Cheer to Customer Service
As we all know, the holidays are a cheerful time of year for some, but for others it’s stressful, depressing and downright miserable. No one wants to look at that side of the holiday season, but sometimes there’s no escaping it.
You can do your best to brighten someone’s day, however, by placing an emphasis on your customer support program. 22 percent of customers will stop doing business with a company after just a single poor customer service experience, after all.
Policies often change during the holidays too, such as shipping schedules, prices and insurance options, and even the length of time it takes to respond to a waiting customer.
To sweeten the pot, you can find a way to spread that cheer via your customer service platforms, whether it’s on the phone, through email or via a live chat. Why not offer exclusive discounts for a long wait?
Send a holiday-themed greeting or media file. Spread joyful cheer to your customers through simple messages and content. It’s much easier than you think to spruce up your channels.
9. Take a Break
This may seem contradictory, especially since we’re talking about sprucing up a website or online presence. How in the world would taking a break for yourself help spread holiday cheer?
For starters, it sends a message to your employees and team that they matter. You want them to have time with their families and time to enjoy the holidays, too. It will certainly improve morale and working conditions.
It also tells your customers the same thing. You’re a family- and people-oriented business first. If you care about your employees and their families, then you care about your customers and their families, too. It sends a heartfelt, warming message that many forget about the holidays.
More importantly, it allows you to really focus and nail down the hard work and dedication during the time you do put in extra work. You’re not going to take the entire holidays off, obviously. So until you take your break, you and your workforce will be pushing harder than ever before— if only because you know a lovely break and rest is right around the corner.
Don’t forget to tell your customers you’re taking a break for the holidays too!