With the holiday season quickly approaching, it's time to start using your forms to drive conversions. For many small business owners, this is the most crucial time of year. Customers always look forward to this time of year with great anticipation and are eager to begin shopping, while looking for great deals and special offers.

Firstly let's list out the 3 important dates coming up to connect with your customers:

Know your customers

While there are numerous channels to market your products, it is critical to focus your marketing efforts where you believe potential customers will seek you out. Assessing the efficiency of your past holiday strategies can help you understand your target audience's behavior. To generate leads, share your order forms directly on your social media channels.

Aside from conversions from your form embedded on website or AdWords campaigns, it's essential to comprehend your customers by knowing how they find you. This is where you can use the UTM tracking parameters to determine which of your marketing efforts is performing the best.

Geolocation tracking for mobile submissions can be helpful to learn where your visitors/customers are from.  

Retain your loyal customers by making a list of your returning customers and create a buyer persona for them. This can help in your marketing success by getting you to foresee what they expect from you during the holiday shopping season. You can also use this information to customize the Thank you page, and the triggered emails, allowing you to create messaging that strikes a chord with your customers.

Revamp your forms and website

Add holiday flare to your website's home page and select a form background that reflects the holiday spirit, for example, a Christmas holiday theme featuring bells.

You can take behind-the-scenes photos of your business preparing for the holiday season and use them as wallpapers for your different forms to portray your realistic efforts for the customers. Use relevant images and include your brand logo wherever possible, such as in social media posts or email notifications. Choose festive CTAs (like SHOP NOW!) for your form to grab the attention of your online customers. 

To connect with each of your customers, use personalized holiday greetings while customers fill out your form with our dynamic field labels.

Offer your best deals and offers with a lightbox order form just when the website visitor is about to abandon your webpage. 

Use the form description to convey the perks that the customers will benefit from purchasing your products or services this holiday season. For example, reassure customers by announcing a free delivery or return policy and a 24/7 support in the form description to win the trust of your customers. 

Offer multiple payment gateways to collect payments and streamline the payment process, allowing customers to choose their preferred transaction gateway.

If your store gets a lot of foot traffic, you could place the QR code of a donation form at the check out counters to collect any festive donations.

Share your story in short

Figure out what information you require, and avoid asking for information you don't need. Instead of having a long form with multiple unnecessary questions, segment the form into multiple pages, where each page focuses on different information.

Use the first page of your form to tell the story of your brand, and the reason why this holiday is special, making it easier for you to create an impact on people to connect with you, no matter where they're from. 

Following up your story with simple segmented questions will help closing the deals faster. You can also avoid showing up irrelevant questions or pages and customize the form filling experience for each customer based on the choices they make on your form with conditional rules. For example, if you have more than one event planned or you have different options to offer each attendee, you can avoid making multiple forms for each of them. Collect all the information you need in one form and customize the entry process with rules.

Customers are wary of advertisements that take advantage of the holiday season. Carefully use the holiday season to show appreciation to your customers, so that your message is heard and your actions are perceived as genuine, rather than as a ploy to make some easy money from them.

Send customized party invites to the participants

Share an event registration form or a custom RSVP form for any holiday event, say a Christmas party, or a game night.

As an attendee enters their data and submits the invite form, be sure to acknowledge them instantly. You can also send a personalized auto-generated party invite as an attachment to the acknowledgement email triggered.

Use the Document merge feature to merge form responses with document templates and generate personalized merged documents on each form submission.

Host virtual celebration with contests 

Hosting an Ugly Christmas Holiday Sweater contest is a beloved Christmas tradition and hosting it virtually is just so simple with Zoho Forms. Create a contest form with a tacky sweater background and fields asking for name and email. Ask your respondents to upload their picture with their sweater on using the Image Upload field. They can just take a snap with their phone's camera and instantly upload it to your mobile form.

The judge can view and analyze the images consolidated at one place in the All Entries section, which can make it simpler to select the winner. Offering your products as freebies to the winners can drive traffic to your website, regardless of the nature of your business.

Over to you!

The goal of holiday season sales is to reach a larger audience and outperform your competitors. Taking a few of these steps will get you on your way to higher conversions. As you gear up for your holiday events, remember to spread the holiday cheer along the way! We'd love to hear about what you do to make your forms more exciting and stand out for your audience in the comments.