For most Cratejoy merchants, the fourth quarter of the year is their strongest. At the end of 2016, we saw a huge surge of sales on the Cratejoy Marketplace, and are expecting an even bigger holiday season this year. Our product and marketing teams have been preparing for the holiday rush since September, and we wanted to share some of the initiatives we’ve been working on to help our Marketplace merchants get as many sales as possible this holiday season!
We’ve outlined 11 of the marketing tactics we’ll be working on to make this holiday season a blowout for our Marketplace merchants below.
1) Black Friday/Cyber Monday (+ bonus Subscription Box Sunday)
We’ve created exclusive collections for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Subscription Box Sunday, and content for Small Business Saturday and Giving Tuesday is also in our marketing pipeline. Cratejoy’s marketing team and Cratejoy affiliates will be heavily promoting these dates online (via email, social, and more).
2) NYC Subway Ads
Cratejoy is running a total of 1,000 subway ads throughout various populous subway trains in NYC this holiday season. We’ve never tried subway ads before, but it’s something we’re super excited to test this year!
3) Austin Airport Ads
This year, we’re also running ads in the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (Cratejoy is based out of Austin, TX!).
4) Times Square NYC Ads
We’ve doubled down on advertising this year and have purchased ad space in Times Square in NYC (right under where the ball drops on NYE). These ads will run right through the entirety of the holiday season.
5) Public Relations
We have partnered with a PR firm to support our marketing efforts this holiday period. We’ve already gotten a number of Marketplace merchants featured in major media publications like Buzzfeed, InStyle, Brit+Co, HuffPost, and many, many more! Our marketing team is also working to promote the Cratejoy Marketplace as a whole to drive overall traffic to the site.
6) Gift Guides
We’ve written a number of gift guides around various themes and verticals. Each highlights a different collection of subscription boxes. Cratejoy’s marketing team will be highly promoting these guides through email and paid ad campaigns. These guides are also going to get syndicated with influential publications that do holiday guide round-ups and promotions.
7) Gifting
It’s no surprise that gifting is popular over the holidays. Merchants typically see a 40-60% sales bump in Q4 with a large portion of that coming from gifts. Plus, our gifting experience is now better than ever for both merchants and gift recipients!
We also highly encourage merchants to offer 3 and 6 month prepaid options as those are higher value gift purchases.
8) Sendable Wishlists
Cratejoy customers can create and share wishlists with their loved ones! This will lead to more gifting and also attract new purchasers to the Marketplace who may not have known about it before.
9) Radio Ads
For the first time ever, we are running targeted Cratejoy ads on SiriusXM, a satellite radio station that has similar audience demographics to current Cratejoy Marketplace subscribers. With over 87 million gross impressions in an 8-week period, this is fantastic exposure for Cratejoy merchants!
10) Paid Email Promotion
A number of large websites and influential publications have daily or weekly e-mail newsletters. Our PR firm is placing Cratejoy merchants’ boxes as gift ideas in these emails.
11) Direct Mail
We’ve designed Cratejoy postcards (similar to flyers but heavier stock) that we are mailing out to thousands of households.
Additional Marketing Efforts
This holiday blitz in addition to all our normal Marketplace marketing efforts! We’ll continue to work with affiliates and YouTube influencers and run paid advertising (like on our Facebook page) as we normally do.
How We Choose Merchants to Feature
Our marketing team chooses merchants to include in promotions based on a number of factors: high ratings, good reviews, great product photography, low churn, and good fit with our chosen themes and verticals. Read more about it here!
Join the Cratejoy Marketplace in Q4
Over the holiday season, we expect to see a much higher volume of visitors to the site and sales overall, which should help all merchants who are listed in the Marketplace. For Cratejoy, 35 percent of all subscription sales occurred in November and December last year. If you’re not listed on Cratejoy already and want to be included in all of our marketing effots, now is a great time to join!
Cratejoy is an all in one subscription commerce platform that includes everything you need to start your own subscription commerce business online. Try it free for 14 days.
