The holiday season is the busiest time for retailers across all industries — and it’s the perfect time for you to find new ways to reach your customers and continue to grow your subscriber base. 

You’re likely already planning holiday-themed campaigns and emails, but have you thought about how you can prioritize your customer acquisition, identify, and list growth during this time of year? 

Now more than ever, potential customers are visiting your site to see if you have the products they’re looking for to complete their shopping list. If you play your cards right, you can convert them now and keep them as customers all year round. 

In this article, we’ll provide you with tips on how to improve your efforts in all three of these areas. Then we’ll share eight marketing platforms to help you manage it even more effectively. 

So what are we waiting for? Let’s dive in!

Acquisition Strategies That Will Help You Attract New Customers

Customer acquisition is an essential part of your marketing plan. It’s the process of attracting new customers and then convincing them to buy your products. 

Focusing on improving your customer acquisition is important because you’ll likely find yourself plateauing when it comes to increasing sales and revenue without a steady influx of new customers. 

You can acquire customers through almost any channel you’re already using to reach your audiences. Whether social media, email marketing, display advertising, or other channels you’re present on — they can all work to improve your acquisition strategy. 

While you can focus your acquisition strategy on one singular channel, bringing them together will improve results. 

It’s been shown that retailers who engage shoppers in email and SMS marketing can drive increased affinity with 30% higher customer lifetime value, 15% more orders, and 10% higher average order value. 

Let’s look at a few ways you can work to prioritize your acquisition efforts this holiday season. 

Tips to Improve Acquisition This Holiday Season

Who doesn’t want to attract new customers during the holiday season? The answer is no one. 

This is the busiest time of the year for most retailers and presents a great opportunity for businesses to attract new customers and increase sales. 

Customer acquisition is a big part of this process. If you don’t have a plan in place to reach new audiences and do it in an effective way, then you’re likely losing sales to your competitors who already have a plan in place.  

But no need to worry. These three strategies are a great way to get started building an effective acquisition strategy for this holiday season. 

Personalize Your Acquisition Efforts

It’s no secret that personalization works in marketing, and that’s no different when it comes to customer acquisition. Customers now expect that companies understand who they are and use that information to create personalized experiences curated just for them.

Knowing your customers and personalizing their experiences from start to finish is an important element in your marketing strategy. Finding ways to create a personalized experience from the beginning will help improve your acquisition strategy and keep your customers engaged throughout the entire journey. Image courtesy of DataFeedWatch Blog. 

That’s why finding ways to add personalized touches into your acquisition strategy will go a long way with your new customers. 

It can be a bit more challenging to find ways to personalize your acquisition efforts simply because you most likely don’t have much data on these new customers — but it’s not impossible.

These are a few examples of how you can build personalization into your acquisition strategy: 

• Adapt to the needs of your customers 
• Improve product pages to match the needs of your target audiences
• Integrate live chat and support options on your website
• Encourage sign-ups with extra sales and discounts 
• Target your local markets 

Using personalization in every customer journey stage, starting with the acquisition stage, will provide you with a higher return on investment and increase your sales this holiday season. 

Create High-Quality Content That Provides Value to the Customer

Another great way to attract more customers is by creating high-quality content that provides value to the customer. 

For many shoppers who are in the very early stages of their purchasing journey, they may not be looking for a specific product quite yet. When someone is just in the discovery phase of the purchasing journey, they’re just starting to look for products that meet their needs. 

During the holiday season, that could mean researching the best gift to get their father-in-law or the hottest toys for five-year-olds this year. 

To reach these customers, you need to create high-quality content that will attract them and drive them further down the sales funnel. By sharing different types of content with these audiences, you’re providing them with something of value based on their needs and giving them solutions. 

Going back to the example of a customer researching the perfect gift for each of their loved ones, you could create comprehensive gift guides for each audience. That will give them some gifting ideas and allow you to share and drive sales to specific products that you already know people love. 

Of course, this strategy doesn’t have to be limited to the holiday season and can be implemented all year long. Just always keep in mind that the content you create needs to be high-quality and provide your customers with some sort of value. 

Identity Strategies That Will Help You Get to Know Your Customers Better

Once you’ve attracted and converted your new customers, it’s time to get to know them better — this can be done through a customer identity strategy. 

Customer identity is the idea of bringing all of a customer’s behaviors and interactions, both online and offline, together to better understand who they are and what they want. This allows companies to make better marketing decisions and improve customer interactions. 

We talked a bit about how you can customize your acquisition strategy already. This is the next building block in that process. Once you have acquired a customer, you need to continue tracking and understanding their needs to continue providing them with the best possible experience. 

Let’s look at a few tips that will help you get started with improving your identity strategy this holiday season. 

Tips to Improve Customer Identity This Holiday Season

Having a huge customer database is great — but if it’s filled with unengaged audiences, it won’t get you very far. On the other hand, if you have a little smaller list with highly engaged, loyal customers, then you’re headed in the right direction. 

To determine what types of customers you have in your subscriber list, you need to learn who they are through customer identity strategies. With this insight, you can build stronger customer experiences personalized to each individual’s identity needs. 

A Seamless Omnichannel Customer Experience

More and more customers are moving towards an omnichannel buying experience. Knowing this means you need to understand how they use and interact across all of these channels — then use that data to create highly personalized experiences. 

Most of your customers are shopping through more than one avenue. Less than 30% of people shop only online or only in the store. That means you need to track and understand your customer needs across various channels to really understand who they are. Image courtesy of Okta. 

Gone are the days of someone simply waking up one day, deciding they need a new TV, then walking into a store and purchasing it without doing their research. Of course, there are still a few exceptions to the rule — but for the most part, consumers are taking their time and researching products before purchasing now. 

While that does present the challenge of determining how you will reach your customers, it also provides you with the ability to create a seamless omnichannel experience that can attract them to your products. 

Giving customers a simple, easy way to access your marketing content across various platforms is a great way to improve this omnichannel experience. Whether that means building comprehensive advertising strategies from one to the next or making it simple for people to save passwords for a quick login process — it all improves their experience. 

As a customer moves through these different channels, you can track their behaviors and identify their shopping habits, personal interests, demographics, and more. 

The more you know about the identity of your customers, the better omnichannel experience you can create. And the better your omnichannel experience is, the happier your customers with content and interactions with your company. 

Create Loyalty Strategies to Drive Even More Personalization

Building a loyal customer base is the ultimate goal for companies. Loyal customers continue to choose your company over the competition and are telling their friends and family about your products. 

Loyalty programs are a great way to encourage customers who love your brand to spend more with your company and share their positive experiences with friends and family. It’s a great way to foster a relationship and find new ways to provide even more personalized experiences for these customers. Image courtesy of PeertoPeer Marketing. 

Having loyalty strategies in place will help you identify who these brand evangelists are and tap into their data insights to build even more personalized experiences for them. This will result in even higher engagement with these audiences and improve their customer experience with your company. 

Understanding their identities will not only allow you to keep them engaged and interested in your products but also help you find other new similar audiences. Tapping into the wants and needs of your loyal fanbase can help you identify lookalike audiences that may also love the products you’re selling. 

List Growth Strategies That Will Help You Reach New Customers 

Growing your subscriber list is something you always want to be focusing on, but it’s especially important during the holiday season.

By tapping into the holiday shopping frenzy, you can encourage new audiences to subscribe to your list. Once someone new has subscribed to your list, they’ve given you consent to connect with them regularly — it doesn’t just have to be holiday sales and promotions. 

That’s why you’ll want to work to develop a solid list-growing strategy to attract more subscribers while people are ready to buy. 

Let’s look at a few ways you can start to grow your subscriber list this holiday season. 

Tips to Grow Your Subscriber List This Holiday Season

As with anything in marketing, there are tons of different ways to approach your list growing.

Use Popups to Attract New Subscribers 

As more people visit your website, why not use that platform to increase your subscriber list? 

Your website can be prime real estate and one of the most successful places to reach new audiences interested in your products. So if you’re not planning to use this channel in your list growing efforts, you’re missing a huge opportunity. 

So how do you do it? Website popups.

Adding popups to your website is a great way to increase list growth. They will grab a user’s attention and provide audiences with all the reasons they should join your subscriber list. Image courtesy of ConvertFlow. 

There are various ways you can use popups on your site to grab people’s attention and encourage them to subscribe to your list. Here are a few examples of website popup types:

• Exit-intent popups that appear when someone is about to leave your site
• Popups that engage shoppers with a game like a wheel of fortune
• Multi-step forms that give the shopper multiple chances to subscribe
• Popups that provide the shopper with a special offer or discount 

Popups are a great way to grow your subscriber list because they stop the customer in their tracks and tell them exactly the benefit of subscribing. Some of the highest-performing popups average around a 9.2% conversion rate, meaning people engage with these elements. 

Give New Subscribers a Special Coupon

This one might be a given, but it’s one of the best ways to attract new subscribers, especially during the holidays — so we have to mention it. 

Email, SMS, or any other channel your audiences need to subscribe to will all be the same. Customers are most interested in receiving information about coupons and sales, so why not offer them to get started? Image courtesy of Hubspot. 

When someone sees a coupon for the products they’re interested in, they’re much more likely to provide their email or phone number. This is especially true during the holiday season when people are trying to save a little extra while they find all the perfect gifts for their loved ones. 

By providing discounts and coupons as an incentive for people to subscribe to your marketing channels — you can almost guarantee you’ll get more conversions than any other strategy. 

Just make sure that those offers are worth the customer’s time. A 10% off discount might not be enough to entice them to provide their personal information for many people. Figure out what percentage of your customers react to most and run with that as a way to grow your subscriber list. 

8 Marketing Platforms to Help Make Managing These Strategies Easier 

When it comes to managing all of your marketing campaigns, the best thing to do for your sanity is to invest in a reliable marketing platform. These tools provide you with everything you need to automate your process and provide your customers with a more personalized experience at scale. 

The challenge can be finding the one that’s right for your needs. Some focus on one specific channel, some have advanced marketing technology, and others let you bring all your marketing efforts together into one place. 

To find the right platform for you, you’ll need to identify your main goals and find the tool that fulfills those needs. 

In this section, we’ll take a look at eight platforms you’ll want to consider as you look for a marketing tool to make your holiday campaigns easier. Each has its unique capabilities, but each one is a great option to help you make the most out of your marketing efforts. 

1. Listrak

Listrak is an integrated digital marketing platform used by retailers to create, manage, and execute marketing strategies across various channels. It’s the perfect tool if you’re looking to create highly personalized, cross-channel marketing strategies that tap into advanced technology like AI and predictive technology. 

The Listrak platform has everything you need to get to know your customers on a more personalized level, from acquisition to loyalty. With this tool, you’ll easily be able to manage all of your marketing strategies and provide your customers with the best experience possible. Image courtesy of Listrak. 

Platform Highlights: 

• Easily develop cross-channel marketing campaigns that have sophisticated multi-stage, non-linear journeys and 1:1 real-time interactions across various channels
• Get to know your customers with a unified 360° profile and customer insights to help you understand each customer on an individual level
• Automatically react to customer interactions with behavioral-based triggers to keep content engaging and relevant to their needs
• Integrate identity resolution that increases conversion rates for anonymous visitors and grows your subscriber list with their Growth Xcelerator Platform 

Available Marketing Channels: 

• Email
• Social media
• Web
• SMS/MMS messaging 
• Mobile push 
• Direct mail

Pricing: Pricing is customized and based on specific business needs, you’ll need to contact a Listrak representative to learn more about your pricing options. 

2. Customer.io

Customer.io is an automated messaging platform that helps businesses. You’ll control and build more flexibility into their data-driven messaging strategy. This platform is an excellent option for any business looking to elevate its messaging efforts while understanding customers on a deeper level.

Get to know your customers by their real-time actions and behaviors. Then, with the help of simple workflow tools, you can create customized experiences that move each customer through their own personalized journey. Image courtesy of Customer.io.

Platform Highlights: 

• Use their segmentation engine to narrow down the audience for each message you send to ensure it’s timely and relevant based on the audience group
• View individual customer profiles to understand each person on a deeper level better and create customized experiences based on their needs
• Easily create customized workflows that seamlessly move your customers from one stage of the purchasing journey to the next
• Send more personalized messages by using the Collections capabilities that tailor content for each person with ease

Available Marketing Channels: 

• Email
• Push notifications
• SMS messaging

Pricing: There are two plan options available, the Basic plan starting at $150 per month and the Premium plan that starts at $995 per month. Pricing does increase based on the number of profiles you have. 

3. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a customer experience automation platform that allows you to connect with new customers, grow relationships with existing ones, and drive increased revenue. This platform will make it easy to create customized experiences for your audiences through automation, personalization, and more. 

ActiveCampaign provides you with one centralized dashboard to manage all of your marketing automation needs. It can all be done from developing customized workflows that move users through a personalized journey to tracking and understanding customer insights. Image courtesy of ActiveCampaign. 

Platform Highlights: 

• Easily automate your marketing efforts with a drag-and-drop automation building tool that allows you to build workflows within minutes
• Build customized segments to group similar audiences together and provide personalized experiences at scale
• Create sign-up forms to grow your subscriber list, learn more about your customers, and develop trigger campaigns based on engagements 
• Track the entire customer lifecycle to understand your customer attribution better and identify exactly where each customer came from

Available Marketing Channels: 

• Email
• Landing pages
• SMS messaging 
• Social media 
• Web personalization

Pricing: There are plans available for multiple business types, including B2C, B2B, and Ecommerce. Pricing for each plan is based on the number of contacts you have. The plan options for B2C customers include the Lite plan starting at $7.50, the Plus plan starting at $35 per month, the Professional plan starting at $79.50 per month, and the Enterprise plan starting at $139.50 per month. 

4. Omnisend

Omnisend is a marketing platform that is made for businesses in need of an eCommerce email marketing, SMS, and automation tool. If you’re looking for a platform to take your email and SMS marketing to the next level while continuing to grow your subscriber base and learning more about your audiences — look no further. 

Easily grow your subscriber base with popups and simple signup forms. These will allow you to reach new audiences and continue to learn more about the customers you already have to improve their customer experience. Image courtesy of Omnisend. 

Platform Highlights: 

• Drive increased sales by creating campaigns that are designed to win back lost customers through abandonment campaigns
• Segment your audiences based on their shopping behaviors and other relevant data points to improve personalization and targeting 
• Grow your subscriber list with popups, landing pages, signup boxes, and wheel of fortune games to keep people engaged
• Track campaign success to learn more about what’s working, what’s not, and how you can improve in the future

Available Marketing Channels: 

• Email
• SMS messaging

Pricing: Pricing for this platform does vary based on the number of contacts you have. There are three plan options available including the Free Email plan, the Standard Email plan starting at $16 per month, and the Pro Email & SMS plan starting at $59 per month. 

5. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a marketing platform that is designed to help grow your business through the marketing and sales tools you need. With the help of this platform, you’ll easily be able to connect with your customers and provide them with the most relevant experience to keep them engaged and coming back for more. 

Get to know your customers through their data and interactions with your brand. From there you can start to build more personalized experiences that they’re more likely to engage with — increasing your chances of landing more sales. Image courtesy of Sendinblue. 

Platform Highlights: 

• Connect with your customers on the channels they’re most engaged with to get your message across at the right moment
• Improve personalization with marketing automation tools, transactional messages, segmentation, and more 
• Grow your subscriber list through customized landing pages and signup forms to convert site visitors 
• Track campaign success and report on real-time statistics with reporting tools that will help you improve your marketing efforts

Available Marketing Channels: 

• Email
• SMS messaging
• Chat
• Inbox

Pricing: Pricing is based on the number of emails you plan to send monthly. The four options available include the Free plan, the Lite plan starting at $25 per month, the Premium plan starting at $65 per month, and the Enterprise plan that is customized based on business needs. 

6. Autopilot

Autopilot is a marketing automation platform that provides you with all the tools you need to create customized experiences for your audiences at scale. This platform is a great tool that allows you to reach your customers via email and build customized experiences to move them through their purchasing journey. 

Easily create personalized experiences for your customers based on their real-time interactions and behaviors. This will allow you to connect with them with more relevant content, which will lead to increased engagement and higher sales down the road. Image courtesy of Autopilot. 

Platform Highlights: 

• Visualize your automation efforts and customer journey mapping with an easy canvas tool that allows you to drag and drop everything into place
• Easily sync information from your CRM platform to better understand your customers and use existing data to create personalized campaigns
• Continue to grow your subscriber base by capturing new leads from your website, app, or blog, and then get to know them better with strategic nurturing campaigns
• Build customer experiences that are designed to create repeat buyers and loyal customers 

Available Marketing Channels: 

• email

Pricing: There are multiple options available, including the Silver plan costing $49 per month, the Gold plan costing $149 per month, the Platinum plan costing $249 per month, and customized plans for businesses with more than 10,000 contacts. Additional add ons are available as well. 

7. Drip

Drip is a marketing automation platform for eCommerce businesses looking to improve their email and SMS marketing efforts. With this tool, you can focus your efforts on connecting with your audiences through these two channels and continue to drive increased sales revenue.

The better you know your audiences, the more targeted your marketing campaigns can be. By identifying specific actions and interests of each of your audiences, you can easily build personalized experiences by dynamically pulling relevant content into the message. Image courtesy of Drip. 

Platform Highlights: 

• Easily create and send personalized emails that include things like dynamic product recommendations to increase sales 
• Send your messages to the right customer at the right time through customer data insights and tools like trigger campaigns and more
• Grow your subscriber base with the help of popup forms that are so simple to create you won’t need to deal with any coding
• Get to know your customers on a deeper level with segmentation and then create campaigns customized for each audience group

Available Marketing Channels: 

• Email
• SMS messaging

Pricing: Pricing is based on the number of contacts you have in your subscriber list and starts at $19per month for 1-500 contacts, increasing monthly from there. 

8. GetResponse 

GetResponse is a marketing tool that will provide you with everything you need to send emails, create pages, and automate your marketing efforts. This tool has everything you need to connect with your audiences on a personalized level and make the process simple for your team. 

The more you know about your customers, the more personalized experiences you can provide them with. GetResponse helps you collect all of this data and put it into action to attract, engage, and convert your customers. Image courtesy of GetResponse. 

Platform Highlights: 

• Convert new subscribers with automated welcome emails and turn them into loyal customers through nurturing campaigns
• Add personalization into each of your messages with the help of robust customer data insights 
• Build personalized customer journey’s based on real-time customer interactions that move them towards completing a purchase
• List management tools will help you reach new audiences and continue to refine to better understand the people already on your list

Available Marketing Channels: 

• Email
• Website builder
• Web push notifications
• Live chat
• Paid aids

Pricing: There are four plan options available for this platform, including the Basic plan starting at $15 per month, the Plus plan starting at $49 per month, the Professional plan starting at $99 per month, and the Max plan with customized pricing. Prices do change based on the size of your subscriber list. 

Make the Most Out of This Holiday Season

There you have it! The holiday season is the perfect time of year to focus more on your customer acquisition, identity, and list growth. As more people visit your website and learn about your products — you have the opportunity to convert them into purchasing customers and maybe even loyal fans. 

Don’t let this holiday season pass by. Start planning how you’ll tap into the busiest time of year and make the most out of your customer acquisition, identity, and list growth efforts.