2020 was a tough year, but it had a some great moments. More people are shopping online than before and the pandemic has accelerated the ecommerce industry. As we entered 2021, the marketing landscape has changed dramatically. Holiday season sales rose by 3% YoY and online sales rose by 49% compared to 2019. While this definitely is a shot in the arm for businesses, there’s still a lot that you can do to generate even more sales. If you haven’t started ideating, it’s not too late. We’ve got several New Year marketing ideas through which you can increase your business.
#1: Send a New Year Email
When it comes to New Year marketing ideas, there is nothing easier than sending an email. There’s no better way to ring in the New Year than by wishing happiness to the people you care about. For business owners, these people are your customers. Through your New Year’s greetings, you need to show them that you care.
#2: Welcome the New Year on Social Media
Social media is definitely one place where you cannot miss out on marketing. You want to get your brand noticed all over social media and the New Year is a great time to get the conversation started. You can use social media to get your customers excited about your brand in 2021. This is why welcoming the new year on social media is second on our list of top New Year marketing ideas.
#3: Run a Quotes Contest
New Year’s Day is also the day when people make resolutions. Many people make resolutions at the beginning of the New Year. While the resolution of every person is unique, each resolution needs inspiration. One of the more unique New Year marketing ideas is to run a quotes contest. During the contest, you can ask your customers to share a quote that inspires them. A great place to host this contest would be on social media. It will help generate buzz for your New Year announcements if any. You can ask fans to share their quotes and messages on all social media channels. Additionally, you can come up with a unique branded hashtags as well. This can further help increase brand awareness.
#4: Go Traditional
New Year marketing ideas shouldn’t be just restricted to online marketing. While you may be killing your business online, it’s a great idea to incorporate traditional marketing as well. If you have a brick-and-mortar presence, you can deck up your display window with a New Year’s theme. This is one of those underrated, but important New Year marketing ideas that you should implement this festive season.
This could be something like a New Year’s party theme in which your products or services are being used. It’s sure to catch the attention of people passing by. You can even choose to place posters and banners at places with high visibility. This could include places such as malls and shopping markets where people go to buy New Year’s goodies. If they see your banners there, your products may just stick in their minds. This can help you generate brand awareness, which could eventually result in sales.
#5: Make a 2021 Calendar
Another one of the top New Year marketing ideas is to make a calendar for the coming year. Consider creating a customized calendar and sending it out to your loyal customers. You could even offer this as an add-on to your customers’ holiday purchases. How does this help your business? Your customers can use the calendars throughout the year. This can help keep your business at the top of their minds all year long. This is one of the most easy-to-implement and simple New Year marketing ideas that can help you grow your brand.
#6: Launch a Post New Year Sale
Sales do take a dip after holidays. To keep the momentum going, here is a tip: Launch a post-New-Year sale. This sale can start off 2021 with cool offers, and you might be able to attract customers to your brand. Even if you don’t want to try something fancy, you can have a simple promotion that offers a fixed discount. You can advertise the promotion through social media and other modes of marketing as well. This type of promotion may not get as many sales as you may get during the holiday season because people have been spending so much already. However, it can still help you reduce the dip in sales that takes place as you enter the new year.
For example, Booking.com came up with a 20% discount offer for the holiday season and they’ve continued it well into 2021 to incentivize their prospects to book hotels and flights with them.
#7: Cater to Impulse Purchases
When you make a lot of sales during the holiday season, make sure you’re prepared for the post-holiday returns. Many of the products that you have sold may be returned by the customers due to different reasons. Whether you’re a brick-and-mortar store or an e- commerce store , you need to come up with a strategy to deal with these returns and get them to impulse buy from you. Think about everything that a customer might need during their returns. You can then put up all these items at locations where they go to return their purchases. For every return that they make, you can encourage them to purchase some other product. This may just get them to buy it on an impulse.
#8: Launch New Products
One of the most popular New Year marketing ideas for businesses is to launch new products at the start of a New Year. The sale must explain what the new product is and how it is better than the past products. You must also try to offer customers a deal on their first purchase. Additionally, you can offer discounts on your older products too or conduct special New Year giveaways as well. New Year marketing ideas such as this one can help you generate buzz around your brand.
Make sure that you promote such sales well to ensure that you can get enough traffic to your product page. A great way to drive traffic is through Google Ads and social media ads.
Here’s another valuable tip — you can also tie in your marketing for the product with New Year resolutions to further increase your chances of success.
Reebok, for instance, created a “New Year, New Gear” promotion through emails. The idea was to sell their new workout gear.