How to Take a Global Approach with Your Holiday Campaign

Imagine this: it’s December 26th, and a United States-based marketing company swears they forgot something. That’s when they check their global calendar and realize it’s Boxing Day in some areas of the world. Unprepared, they miss out on the opportunity to nurture their customers, offer them Boxing Day deals, and show they value customers outside the United States. 

For companies across the globe, a major challenge is taking a global approach with their holiday campaigns. It’s easy to know how to market to people based in the same geographic location as yourself, but knowing how to take your holiday campaigns global can separate you from the competition.

Why taking a global approach is important

Taking a global approach to your holiday campaigns will not only separate you from the competition but also show you genuinely care about your customers. Besides nurturing the relationships you have with said customers, it will also give you the upper hand. 

Consider the following example: Morrow Audio is a United States-based company. If they only marketed to those who celebrate United States-based holidays, they would miss out on various opportunities to sell their product. 

Additionally, a global approach means tailoring content to understand the different environments different people may be in. 

For example, a company can email saying they have a sweatshirt to sell you to the right constituencies rather than to everyone at once. They can hit the colder markets with their email and change their messaging (or even their suggested product) for the warmer markets. 

In most cases, someone from Florida does not want to receive the same messaging as someone in New York, and someone in New York does not want to receive the same messaging as someone in Paris. 

Read on to see how you can tailor your message to the right people at the right time. 

Forms, custom fields, and segmentation are here to help

Before you can market to your customers, you need to know the demographics they fit into. To do that, you need to have a way to collect information from your customers. That’s where ActiveCampaign’s forms come in handy. 

Forms

Forms allow you to collect specific information from customers. Let’s say your company wants to send out an email for every holiday their customers celebrate. Using forms, you can collect customers’ geographic information. Then all you have to do is match the geography to the holidays, and voilà! 

Of course, there’s more to forms than just basic information. Custom fields present you with the opportunity to choose, well, custom options for the data you want to collect. 

Ask specific questions using text fields (where customers can type in their answers), date fields (where customers can pick a date), or drop-down menus (where customers can select from options on a menu). 

Consider the example of OctoNation. Some questions they might want to ask are for birthdays, locations, favorite oceans, or even their favorite octopuses! ActiveCampaign also collects global data, which can help determine demographics too. 

Segmentation

Next, there’s segmentation. Once you have information collected on your customers, you can move to the next step of marketing specifically based on a customer’s demographics. These demographics will help create their customer persona, which will be extremely useful in knowing how to market to said customers.

It’s important to be aware of different audiences and understand the messages you need to relay to different groups. With ActiveCampaign, you can do this in less time with less work.

Segmentation can be used in various ways to help with a global approach. For example:

• Lists: Consider making a list of everyone in your campaign celebrating Bastille Day.
• Campaigns: Send an email to the list of contacts who celebrate Bastille Day. 
• Segmented Automations: Choose an automation to run based on when someone self-identifies as celebrating Bastille Day. This could be anything from an SMS to an email campaign. 

You have the data, now what?

Now, you use it! This is the step where everything comes together, and you create a successful holiday marketing campaign. Remember, the goal is to send the right message to the right people at the right time. That entails using the data you’ve collected and determining who needs to receive what messaging and when. 

To do this, you will want to utilize automations and web personalization. For automations, you can easily create fully automated workflows tailored to your holiday goals. Consider using a recipe automation like the holiday discount email series. 

Using this automation, you can reach out to people who celebrate a holiday, such as Independence Day in the United States, and offer discounts based on the holiday. In this scenario, you’re avoiding sending a 4th of July email to other countries that don’t celebrate, which will make it seem like you don’t understand your customers and their personas. 

You can also use dynamic content here to send the same general email, then tailor it specifically to match the recipient’s demographics or interests. 

In this scenario, let’s say a company like Slick Business wants to send an email in late December. For their UK-based clients, they can have the email mention Boxing Day discounts. However, those not based in the UK can focus the email content on New Year’s Eve. The variation in the copy makes all the difference, and the time saved is a life-saver.

In the same vein as dynamic content, there’s web personalization. You can personalize your website using web personalization to match what a user is tagged. 

For instance, if Demistificando wants their website to look super bright with palm trees for customers based in warm weather climates, they can do that while making their website look jolly with jingle bells for cold weather visitors. This way, the site experience will always match what they want the user to see, and the users will be more likely to sign up for their webinars.

Take a global approach today

Taking a global approach to your holiday campaign is important for helping your customers feel important and nurtured. 

Additionally, you’ll provide them with more opportunities to buy, as with the features listed above, the customization can lead to a better user buying experience. Make sure you don’t miss any of the holidays or skip out on understanding your customers and take a global approach to the holiday season.