The Green Sheet Online Edition
August 11, 2025 • 25:08:01
Helping retailers shine through the extended holiday season
What the heck is Summerween? I don't know about you, but for the past few weeks I've been bombarded with ads promoting the launch of Halloween product lines for various retailers. Consumers are being encouraged to stock up on spooky decor ahead of time and celebrate Halloween early by throwing Summerween parties.
Just when I'd adapted to Christmas in July promotions and shopping for Back to School before school got out, here comes another way to grab shoppers early. With threats of inflation, tariffs and supply chain uncertainties, retailers and eTailers are looking to take advantage of the changes in consumer shopping habits by extending the sales season for the upcoming holidays.
And that's where ISOs, merchant level salespeople (MLSs) and reseller partners come in. Your organization can effectively market to retailers for key seasonal events like Back to School (BTS), Fall Y'all (not to mention pumpkin-spiced everything), Halloween, Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) and Christmas by tailoring your messaging and solutions to the unique pressures and opportunities retailers face during these high-volume sales periods.
Here's a breakdown of strategies, messaging and campaign ideas to help your organization market effectively.
Develop an overall seasonal strategy
Marketing your payment services and solutions to retailers during the ever-expanding holiday season means tapping into their urgent need for speed, reliability, ease of use and profitability during their busiest time of year. Each season comes with specific needs, whether it be mobile terminals for Halloween pop-up stores, BNPL or subscription-based solutions for high-end ticket items sold during BTS or BFCM, or gift and loyalty card integration during the winter holidays.
ISOs and MLSs can run targeted promotions to help meet the demands retailers face with pressures to manage increased foot traffic, manage inventory, and deliver a seamless, scalable customer experience.
Offer limited-time promotions like free terminal rentals for seasonal campaigns, waive the setup fee for retailers signing up before a set date or for a limited time, bundle products at a discounted price, or offer a bonus for referrals during the holiday season.
Highlight how your ISO services support both in-store and online transactions seamlessly, crucial for BFCM and Christmas shoppers.
Targeted messaging for all seasons
Even with all the uncertainties, projections for spending during back-to-school, Halloween and Christmas are expected to rise year over year, so your payment solutions and services need to rise to the challenge.
Position your ISO as a holiday sales enabler, not just a payment provider. Product positioning should emphasize the following benefits:
- Speed: Fast checkout online or in-store for shorter lines and more sales.
- Reliability: No downtime when it matters most.
- Flexibility: Ability to handle gift cards, loyalty, split payments and mobile orders.
- Scalability: For pop-ups, multi-store setups and online stores.
- Integration: Synchronization of accounting software with inventory management solutions to prevent stockouts across channels.
- Data-driven insights: Real-time sales reporting for smarter stocking.
Channels and tactics
Effective holiday marketing to your merchants involves a multi-channel approach, combining social media, email, organic and paid advertising, and content marketing.
Through email campaigns, you can position your organization as their trusted partner, working collaboratively to ensure they have everything in place for a successful season.
Create and send a calendar-based holiday guide that provides merchants with helpful tips on what they'll need to do to prepare for each season. Or try running a multi-part series highlighting testimonials from some of your top merchants who have found success using your products and solutions.
Using social media such as Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and Pinterest is an ideal way to visually tell your story, especially with imagery, reels and stories to attract and retain followers. As Instagram has expanded the length of its reels function, it's the perfect format to show demo videos of your products in action, especially if you're engaging one of your merchants to give the demo.
And don't shy away from paid ads on your social media channels. Both Meta and LinkedIn make it easy to create, launch and track your ads, and for relatively little cash, you can create targeted campaigns to help drive potential customers to action.
And don't forget other aspects of content marketing—for example, your website, webinars, blogs, ebooks and holiday setup guides—to provide further information about your capabilities and what you can do to make their holidays simpler and more successful.
Try creating a holiday themed landing page for your website that includes a testimonial from a retailer who used your POS system last Christmas or include a simple call to action on the home page, for example, "Click here to book your 15-minute holiday setup call!" You can also create blog posts with titles like "5 ways retailers can prepare for BFCM payments."
Partnerships and community outreach
Using the resources available from business partners can help ease the pressure of having to create everything on your own and is advantageous to both parties involved.
Team up with your OEMs or gateway provider to cross promote each other's services and solutions, offering bundled discounts for a limited time; work with regional retail associations and chambers of commerce to host a webinar on how to maximize sales with the right POS solution this holiday season; or offer a free in-store checkup for chamber members.
Make sure your sales reps are armed with the right tools to reach out effectively to existing and potential customers. Create seasonal toolkits that provide them with details on what services and solutions are right for each industry, especially for each season. Develop talking points to help approach each vertical, such as payment solutions for seasonal merchants or what services etailers need for a successful BFCM.
Whatever your marketing efforts are this season, make sure they're consistent and aligned with your brand. Merchants are stretched thin over the holidays, and as seasons are being stretched over longer periods of time, they'll look to you as a trusted partner to help provide a sense of stability so they can make the most of every traditional and newly manufactured celebration—Summerween or whatever—that's thrown their way. 
As a seasoned marketing professional, Jaki Kackert has contributed to the success of organizations within the payments space and financial services sector and has helped brands, both big and small, create awareness and drive results through effective marketing strategies. Contact her at jbkackert@gmail.com.
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