5 Strategies to Boost Your Holiday Marketing Program

Ideally, you'd integrate your customers’ actions and preferences across all channels, but we might be too far into the season to engineer that. So, add it to your 2015 "to do" list and look for content and functions you can add to marketing channels now to engage more customers.

Try this tactic: Cross-promote content across channels. For example, use your social channels to propagate email offers and promote your app, or add email offers and social links to your app.

4. Test and tweak now. You don't want to find out in November that your transactional emails aren't launching on schedule or that iOS 8 broke a key feature of your app. Take time now to audit all of your forms and processes and to test emails, SMS messages and integrations with add-on services such as remarketing, recommendation and e-commerce engines.

Try this tactic: Ask friends and family to test your systems (e.g., email opt-in, mobile app downloading/installation, checkout process, cart or browse abandonment, etc.) and report on their experiences.

5. Keep new customers coming back after the holidays. You'll be attracting a whole new class of first-time shoppers this season. Now you need to retain them and bring them back to shop again and again instead of once or even once a year. Reach out with a program of special content and offers that entices them back to your site, whether to opt in, create an account/profile, download your app, connect socially, join a loyalty program, or buy again.

Try this tactic: Email or text a "thank you" bonus redeemable after the holiday season to first-time buyers/subscribers.

Loren McDonald is the vice president of industry relations at Silverpop, an IBM company, that is a cloud-based digital marketing provider.