“So deeply enmeshed are commerce and the calendar in American culture that most holidays would be scarcely recognizable without the trappings of the market.” - Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays by Leigh Eric Schmidt
People go to the market to purchase the things they need to properly celebrate festive days. Usually this means buying traditional items like pumpkins for Halloween, turkeys on Thanksgiving and fir trees at Christmas. But if shoppers are already in your store why not try to raise cart values by offering discounts and promotions on other items as well? Indeed, many companies leverage special calendar days to encourage more consumer spending. Several years ago, Sears used Halloween as an opportunity to promote their athletic gear. And Thanksgiving and Christmas are deeply linked to a rise in spending, with online commerce facilitating a bigger percentage of that spending every year.
This is a topic we’ve covered widely so as the American holiday on July 4th approached we anticipated some exciting online promotions. However, when we began hunting for cyber deals one week prior to July 4th, most of our findings were focused on traditional physical goods like grilling equipment and party supplies.
Beginning July 1st we began noticing more and more star spangled advertisements appear on the Internet through a variety of channels. Some of these ads came through email and some found through search. Some were located on social networks and some were even offered in-app.
Laplink, the creator of a PC migration tool, uses an intriguing subject line (3 Days Only – 4th of July Blowout Sale!), a holiday themed design and a 50 percent discount to entice their audience to convert. They understand that email is a big revenue driver and is often used to bring attention to holiday campaigns.
Laplink Email Promotion for July 4th
Search
We used Google to search for “Independence Day deals” or “July 4th deals” and found that Amazon, Walmart and Target all offer special sections on their websites devoted to the Fourth of July. However, there was not a strong presence of software products being promoted on these sites or in the initial search results. I would argue that software vendors can ramp up their PPC campaigns in an effort to market to consumers around special calendar events.
Amazon’s July 4th deals – physical products dominate
Social
As with the search results, we found little activity on the part of software companies that engaged their audience during this American holiday. Other than the New York Times offering a 50 percent discount on Facebook, we realize that this is another untapped channel for software vendors.
NYT’s Facebook promo for July 4th
One encouraging thing we noticed was the promotional activity on Google+ this year, of which we have not seen much in the two years since its debut. Though these updates were from physical product companies like 1800Flowers, they highlight the value Google+ brings to businesses, even digital product companies.
1800 Flowers Google+ promo for July 4th
In-App
Probably the most interesting July 4th promotion we came across was the in-app offer from Nitro PDF. The idea here was to offer free users an opportunity to upgrade to the professional version with a 30 percent discount for the holiday weekend.
NitroPDF July 4th in-app offer
SaaS
SaaS/Subscription companies like Salesforce and Allrecipes.com focused less on generating revenue and more on engaging with their audience. For example, Allrecipes created an entire section devoted to holiday recipes which we are sure drove a lot of traffic to their site.
July 4th sections on Allrecipes.com
Salesforce on the other hand did not use the holiday to talk about their business in a direct way at all. Instead, they focused on the holiday itself and asked people how they were going to celebrate.
Salesforce & July 4th: Customer Engagement
Keystone: People think of the winter holidays as the best time to offer discounts and promotions to shoppers. But even minor, non gift giving holidays can be used to market to customers in an effort to increase revenues and customer engagement during what is traditionally a slow time of the year.