The holiday is just around the corner. To consumers, this might be the perfect time of the year for shopping, however, the burden is on businesses. Competition is always strong during this time of the year, especially with many eCommerce stores offering free shipping or other special promotions for the holiday season. So, in order to keep up with the game-changing day by day, it is better to be well prepared. This article will show you top 10 eCommerce strategies to boost sales this holiday season.
Inventory Management
It is much harder to track your inventory at this time of year since people would come and go with plenty of things. But what will happen if your inventory equals 0 on an eCommerce site? It can be understood easily that your consumer will go to another store to find, and don’t care about the fact that you can immediately restock. In this case, refer to Backorder. This app allows consumers to order even when the inventory equals 0. By doing that, you will not lose your potential consumers.
Automation
Making your emails stand out is probably the first and the most important factor if you want to catch attention and create interest to click on, or otherwise, your emails will get lost in the avalanche of promotional materials.
To accomplish this, first and foremost, designing. Your design should be relevant and eye-catching. Secondly, content. Your content has to be single minded, clear and easy to remember. In addition, your email recipients should be strongly encouraged to complete the purchase then and there.
This process of sending emails might be exhausting during holidays. Refer to automation and Atom8, an app for BigCommerce, Shopify and Magento platform that automates all the website tasks, including sending emails as well. You will be free from all the desk work and have more time enjoying holidays yourself.
You can discover Atom8 here:
- Atom8 on BigCommerce:
- Atom8 on Shopify:
Optimize website for mobile
At this step, consider you are able to attract consumers to click on your email and lead them to your site. But if it is slow and not friendly to mobile, then still you are missing a potential lead.
Why optimizing websites for mobile is crucial? 2020’s lockdowns significantly increased not just online shopping, but shopping on mobile devices in particular. This was witnessed by Facebook’s 2020 Holidays Insight report that mobile purchases increased on average by 50% year on year, this is the report done with participants of Gen X and Boomer. In fact, where retail sales in 2021 are concerned, mobile is anticipated to account for nearly 73 percent of eCommerce sales, according to data from Statista.
As a consequence, if retailers fail to optimize their websites or optimize the site for small screens, then sooner or later people will leave you, even when your product is exactly what they are looking for.
Offer free gifts with purchase
This method could be an excellent way to promote word of mouth, as well as be able to increase their sales. Since holiday season is the time when people shop a lot, once you can offer free gifts, you help them to save the budget. Therefore, the chances are that they will buy more to get more gifts. However, if you do want to give a gift to drive sales, you have to ensure that your gift is worth receiving. If it is too small or not worth taking, then probably you are just wasting your time. You should at least make it enticing enough to not chip away at your brand.
Ad targeting based on behavior
Ad retargeting can be significantly effective during the holiday season because you can approach shoppers via different tabs for multiple different products for multiple different people, any time and anywhere.
Since consumers might encounter tons of ads this time of year, if your ads are not attractive enough to provoke buying, then the chance of shoppers inadvertently bouncing from your page or never completing a purchase is extremely high. Ad retargeting allows you to get a second or third shot based on their behavior.
Creative holiday special content
By creating blog content that is suitable for the holiday season, it will not only help you bring visitors to your site, it will also provide you the opportunity to link to some of your products and drive direct sales. However, be careful or else your content might be a bit overly promotional (unless that’s the goal of the blog post). Be objective to link all together and you are good to go.
Reward consumer loyalty
The holiday season is also a time when you should think about maintaining consumer retention by rewarding consumer loyalty. Nurture your email subscribers and former customers by offering them specific promotions to make them feel special. It can be understood as in this time of the year, competition gets more serious, and many other brands try to steal your consumer. If you are able to make them feel special, they will likely buy from you again. Additionally, your current customers are more likely to organically spread the word if they feel like they’re getting a lot of value from your site.
Offer free shipping
Free shipping is the number-one way to convert conversations to sales. Lots of research from Nielsen showed that even when you increase your product price a little bit, but you offer free shipping, then consumers will still likely buy. This can be explained by people’s feelings for value. Once a shop offers free shipping, consumers feel that they are paying for the product itself, not the service of sending the product.
Offer free gift wrapping
This can be considered as an added value to your consumer, as when you get them free gifts. It is the holiday season, products are bought mostly as a gift, while wrapping can take people lots of time, free wrapping from shops will be a total life savior.
Simple return policy
If retailers, though offer free shipping but build a complicated and stressful return policy, shoppers might still forgo their order in favor of another merchant with a more simple return policy. As a matter of fact, the important part is that the process be effortless for consumers, to provoke sales.
Conclusion
Above are the top 10 holiday eCommerce strategies to boost sales this holiday season, you might not be able to apply them all at once. So the solution is to consider each method, based on the real situation of your business.
