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2022’s Holiday Social Media Trends

Couple using self stick to get content ready for holiday social media trends

Halloween is over. Ghosts and the Monster Mash have been dethroned by the holiday spirt and Mariah Carey. It’s also time for social media channels to shift into holiday gear. So, to start the season, Rosewood is gifting to a list of the major trends that you should consider while creating your social media content for the holiday season of 2022. 

Visual Content

Nearly half of consumers want to see images and video of the products they might buy. As a result, visual social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok are especially suited for holiday content. Livestreams on these platforms are also a great opportunity for engagement where you answer questions or provide personalized recommendations to your followers. Overall, ensure your holiday content is going on the right channels.

Experiences and Outside

The last two years have left many wanting for moments outside that the pandemic prevented. As a result, people are putting increasing value in experiences over things. Content that appeals to this desire is perfect for the holidays, especially as many seasonal activities will be resuming this year. People are far less worried it’s cold outside than they are excited about getting to go to holiday markets and winter festivals. Content that includes these holiday experiences is likely to resonate well with your audience. Connect products and/or services you provide to holiday experiences. This product or service might be the perfect thing to unwrap! You can also invite followers to comment about their holiday plans and hopes to create engagement. 

Influencer Gift Guides

More than half of social media users buy products based on influencer recommendations. Many influencers now provide gift guides or recommendations as the holidays approach. If you have relationships with influencers, send them a gift or see about the possibility of them recommending one of your products or services as one. If an influencer organically recommends you, be sure to share their content on your own page. Lastly, if you aren’t working with any influencers yet, it can be a good idea. Even for small businesses, micro-influencers can give you a huge social media boost.

User-Generated Content

You might not just have influencers creating content for you. The holidays are a particularly active time on social media. Users will regularly be posting about gifts and services they are giving or receiving. These users are actively making your business a part of their holiday celebrations and experiences, which will lend your brand more authenticity and interest others to do the same. If they tag your business and praise your business, products, or services, then be sure to repost their content on your own page, 

Sharing is Caring

You can also use your followers to help spread your business. Many of your followers are those who are interested in your products or services already. This means they probably would like those as gifts this holiday season. Create content that highlights popular products and services with call to actions for followers to share as a gift idea. They can provide a family member or friend a not-so-subtle hint while sharing your content. 

Shopping Early 

For the last two years, the major surge in holiday shopping has begun in November and now, over half of holiday shopping is done by December 1. Most shoppers look for early holiday sales by November 1 so that’s more and earlier than just black Friday. Highlight deals and offerings now so that they capture your audience’s attention when they are starting their holiday searches.

Last Minute Reminders and “Super Saturday” 

While most shopping happens in November, plenty still happens during the quintessential holiday month of December itself. Plus, there are always last-minute purchases happening in-store. Super Saturday, the last Saturday before Christmas, is still a big last-minute shopping day. Continue to highlight special offerings as well as smaller products or services that make perfect last-minute gifts. 

Online and In-Store

Most holiday shopping now happens online, especially the first wave in November. Thankfully it is much easier to convert social media engagement into online purchases, so ensure holiday posts include call to actions that direct followers to your e-commerce marketplace. 

Delivery Woes

On the other hand, the last two years have also familiarized folks with the constraints of shipping around the holidays. Canada Post and other shipping companies become quickly bogged down by the onslaught of orders. As people have now learned the lesson that holiday gifts might not arrive in time, they are more likely to shop in-person as the holidays get closer. Content that highlights your storefront may induce more to come. Alternatively, if you can guarantee shipping times or use a more local delivery option, highlight that advantage in your content. 

Services are Timely

If you’re business focuses on services, the holiday’s delivery woes won’t be an issue, something you can emphasize in your content. However, your business is still limited by its availability and the holidays can be busy. Provide content that highlights your availability and its limits. For both product or service-based businesses, it’s a good practice to communicate when your business is taking its own time to celebrate the holidays.

Enjoy!

The holidays are festive, so have fun with creating this season’s content. If you’re looking for more tips or want some support on your holiday social media trends and content, our marketing team are masters of every social media season. 

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Email Marketing 101

Person golding phone in front of laptop on desk

This week’s blog is an introduction to email marketing. With the rise of social media, some believe email is “dead”. In reality, email is still essential, and there are over 4 billion email users daily and most customers prefer to receive communications from brand by email. Email marketing is an incredibly important tool for reaching and communicating with your audience, community, customers, or clients and keeping them engaged. We’re going to provide you with some essential starting tips for effective email marketing. 

Email Marketing Platforms We Recommend

If you have any experience with email marketing, you’re familiar with email marketing platforms. These help you create emails and campaigns, manage your audience, set up automations, and more. They make email marketing possible and effective. The best ones have toolsets to create visually impressive and gripping emails and tailor specific parts of your audience. Today, there are countless services out there and most offer comparable functionality so here are our top picks. We ultimately recommend testing out the email builders and automation tools in each to see which you prefer. Those listed here are all free to try with advanced functionality behind premium plans. 

  • MailChimp 
  • Klaviyo 
  • Drip

Create Templates

Every email marketing platform will let you create templates. These provide a basic structure for you to insert content. With these as a foundation, you will significantly cut down on the time needed for making emails. If you regularly send different kinds of emails, build a template for each. Use some variety to prevent them from being identical but ensure each also matches your branding for visual continuity and recognition. Consistent templates will also improve that recognition between your emails. 

Piquing Subject Line

Most inboxes receive a torrent of emails daily, with a large portion of those going right to the trash. For effective email marketing that gets clicks, you first need opens. That means you need an enticing subject line. Effective email marketing uses subjects that create urgency and kindle curiosity to encourage opens. Using words and phrases like “still time”, “expiring”, “last chance”, or enticing questions will quickly generate more opens. Be careful about certain other words like “Winner”, “Cheap”, “Satisfaction”, or “100% Free”. These can immediately trigger spam filters. 

Personalization

An extremely effective way to generate opens is to personalize emails. A personalized subject line can increase open rates by 50%! When having people signup to your newsletter or audience, try to collect their first names in a website popup or signup in your website’s footer. If your email marketing platform is hooked into your website’s back end, it will be able to then add their names into the subject line or email body to create a more personalized touch. 

Call to Action

It’s great if you are getting good open rates on your marketing emails. You need to ensure those generate into clicks and, even better, sales. Include call to actions in your email that incite readers to follow through to your website, store, forward the email to others, and complete any other action you are hoping they perform. Simple commands or buttons with “Order now” or “Read More” will direct readers to your desired outcome. For promotional emails, include product or service images that are clickable. 

Link Everything

It’s great if your email has call to action that encourage readers to go beyond and visit your business’ social platforms or website, shop for products/services, or subscribe to more emails. However, any call to action also needs to be quick and convenient, else readers are unlikely to follow through. Provide visible and accessible links for readers to easily click and act. Don’t just link text either; add a URL value to any of the images you include in your email. A dead link is a missed opportunity. A logo at the top should link to your website’s home page. A product image or blog image should link and open their respective landing pages on your website. The goal is to make it as easy and convenient as possible for your reader to follow your call to action. Show some restraint though, and do not flood your email with links. Too many URLs in an email will trigger spam filters.

Email Automations

Email automations are useful, and if you have a moderate to large-userbase, completely necessary. They automatically contact your customers and users at certain triggers without you needing to manually write and send them yourself. They can update customers about shipping information, provide product suggestions, and reengage old customers. Without email automations, this would be an infeasible amount of work. If you want to learn more about email automations and the kinds you should start with, check out our blog post here.

Manage Your Audience

Email automations are also a perfect way to manage your audience. At some point, certain members of your audience may become disengaged. They receive but don’t open your emails and haven’t for months. While a larger audience number seem more impressive, a disengaged audience impairs your open and click rates. Users immediately deleting your emails or even marking them as spam can also impair your sender rating, affecting your ability to reach the engaged members of your audience. It’s a good idea to actively try and reengage this disengaged audience. If they still don’t open your emails, remove them entirely. This kind of list cleaning should be done once or twice annually. You can use email automations to do this regularly.

It is also valuable to section off your audience for specific communications. Email marketing services hooked into your store’s backend can create “personas” according to your users’ purchase and browse history to identify their interests. You can then tailor emails to these sections. For example, if you provide various services, you may have some clients who should receive emails about service A while other clients will be interested in emails about service B. This ensures users are receiving communications that matter to them.

Email Marketing Law

Canada’s anti-spam legislation limits to whom you can send emails and what you must include. You specifically need consent from any user to send them emails. For newsletters, this means readers need to be subscribed. However, automated emails like product recommendations or an abandoned cart have consent so long as user purchased or visited your site within the past year. However, there’s still a limit to how many communications you can send, and all emails need to include unsubscribe links so that users can revoke consent at any time. All your emails also need to provide alternative contact information such as your physical address or phone number.

Email Marketing Key Performance Indexes (KPIs)

Lastly, you need to track how your emails are performing. These are tracked with primary statistics called “Key Performance Indexes” or KPIs. An email marketing platform will provide you plenty of data to parse, but not everything might be pertinent and each needs to be interpreted differently. These are the essential email KPIs:

  1. Clickthrough Rate – The percentage of readers that follow a link in an email.
  2. Conversion Rate – The percentage of emails that turn into sales or other activity.
  3. Bounce Rate – The percentage of emails that don’t reach the targeted inbox. 
  4. List Growth Rate – The rate at which the email audience list grows.
  5. Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate – The percentage of emails that are forwarded or shared to others who did not receive the original email. 
  6. Overall ROI (Return on Investment) – The financial return generated from an email campaign. The simplest formula is: ROI = (Gross Return – Cost of Investment) ÷ Cost of Investment
  7. Open Rate – The percentage of emails opened.
  8. Unsubscribe Rate – The percentage of readers who unsubscribed after receiving an email.

More to Learn

There’s plenty to learn with email marketing, but for now we’ll stop the lesson here. If you’re practicing these essential tips, you are already most of the way there. If you have questions or are looking to improve your email marketing, contact us at Rosewood. We’re email experts and provide a variety of email services for any stage of the email marketing process whether your business is ecommerce or service based. 

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Rosewood’s Guide For Website Mobile Optimization

a smart phone and laptop both showing the same website

Phones have changed the way we think about web design overall for mobile optimization. A website must be responsive, meaning it will adapt and resize based on any sized device. Once, long ago in the 90s and early 2000s, websites were primarily designed for the one browsing device: computers with keyboards, mice, and square or horizontal monitors. (Need a blast from the past? Here’s the original 1996 Space Jam website still live.) Websites still need to work on computers, but many now browse the internet with their phones. As a result, websites need to be optimized for mobile devices to look good, load quickly, and be responsive. Smaller, vertical touch screens, specific operating systems, and cellular data bring different design considerations than mouse and keyboard. To provide an ideal experience for your users and potential customers/clients, you need a website optimized for mobile.

The Importance of Mobile Optimization

You probably use a smartphone to browse the internet all the time. When you’re working, walking, chatting, or just bored. You and everybody else. Touchscreen smart phones have completely changed internet browsing over the last 15 years by providing constant easy access. Today, over 62% of website traffic comes from mobile devices, and over 92% of users access the internet with a mobile phone. Similarly, 83% of the world’s population has a smartphone, nearly double the number of households with a computer. Many only ever access the internet and your business through a mobile device.

Those numbers alone prove mobile optimization is crucial for your business’ website. Most users are likely visiting with their phone. It only becomes more important when considering that the third most common task on mobile devices, right behind playing games and listening to music, is browsing social media. Since 55% of consumers discover new brands on social media which they primarily browse on their phones, most new potential clients or customers are first visiting your website with a mobile device. Their first experience with your website should be a painless one to give them a proper impression. Mobile optimization is also important for current and returning users. 55% of users also use their phones to make online purchases. An optimized website ensures they have a seamless experience and are more likely to buy from your business and return.

Mobile Optimization Tips for Your Website

There’s a lot that you can do to optimize your site, and you may not be a web design wizard. That’s why Rosewood has some easy tips to help you start thinking about optimizing your website for mobile users. 

  1. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool – Google has made a convenient and simple tool that tests how mobile-friendly your website is. It will quickly help you discover any issues in your mobile optimization. Enter your URL or even the website’s code, and the tool will crawl your entire website for several minutes. The tool will then list any issues in your site’s mobile optimization. Google regularly crawls websites for mobile optimization itself, ensuring they should be populated on mobile searches.
  2. Design “Mobile First” – When creating a new site or redesigning your old one, it’s a good practice to design a website that prioritizes mobile use over desktop computers. Many users discover businesses and browse the internet with only a mobile device. Mobile sites can still function on a desktop, but a site designed primarily for computer use can leave mobile users frustrated with a dysfunctional site. When designing, think about small screen sizes and clean aesthetics.
  3. Create a responsive website – A responsive website is one that adjusts to a device’s screen. Smartphones have a variety of screen sizes. To accommodate these different screens, websites scale up or down. A responsive website will keep elements visible and text readable as it scales. Many modern web design platforms include responsive functions or plugins to easily make your site response. They also allow you to view your site as it would appear on mobile devices.
  4. Easy Visibility – Ensure all the essentials to navigate your site, like menus, search bars, buttons, and any text are immediately visible on a small screen. This will also make them easy to interact with on a touchscreen, the primary way users will interact with your site on a mobile device. If users need to zoom in on your site to hunt down information or touch the right element, they are far more likely to become frustrated and leave.
  5. Reduce the File Size of Your Images – Users hate loading times and big images are often the guilty party, especially when users are on slower internet or data connections. Resizing or compressing your photos reduces file size so they load faster on slower connections. 
    1. Resizing means reducing the overall resolution of the image to make it smaller. It only wastes data for an image that never displays large than 400 pixels wide to be loaded at 4000 pixels. Cutting down on that extra resolution, will shorten its load time. Be careful to not reduce the image below its display size, or it will lose quality as it stretches. You can resize multiple photos simultaneously with Bulk Resize.
    1. Compression is an alternative to resizing that keeps photos the same resolution and instead reduces the file size by using math to simplify data. It isn’t magic though, and too much compression can also jeopardize quality. Use Batch Compress to compress photos in batches.
  6. Pop-ups For Mobile – Every website has at least a few pop-ups to get a user’s attentions. However, they can be more obstructive and disruptive on mobile device screens than desktop browsers. You can try removing pop-up elements altogether to create a more seamless browsing experience, placing the elements on the site. If you are using pop-ups, use only a few and ensure they only cover a small portion of the screen and are easy to close. 

Your Digital Space

You know all too well that your website is essential for your business. It’s how people discover, learn about, contact, and purchase from you. It’s your storefront or office on the virtual streetside and just like in a physical location, you want to ensure customers have a painless, seamless, and pleasant experience. Optimizing your website for mobile with these tips is a great start to ensure your potential customers or clients are less likely to leave frustrated. Curious about other ways to update your site’s mobile optimization? Maybe you think it’s time for a redesign? Rosewood’s website design team will be happy to help. 

Finger about to tap on a touchscreen smartphone
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