The holiday season is undoubtedly the busiest time of year for e-commerce businesses. The Christmas season will arrive at a different time of year depending on where you live, but it will always be the period when you need to be attracting customers and gaining conversions. The good news is that an e-commerce website may drive traffic and conversions in a variety of methods. Some of them are year-round practices that should be implemented on your e-commerce website regardless of the season; they frequently include honing in on specific features and elements of your website. Some are more seasonally dependent and will only function during the Christmas season. So, let’s get started.
Find Out What Mobile Buyers Are Spending
Compared to 2014, a whopping 70% more Christmas buyers in 2015 completed their seasonal shopping on mobile devices. According to Amazon, 25% of its customers make purchases using mobile devices. Put another way, you can’t ignore mobile buyers. If you have been doing so for any reason, this Christmas season is the ideal opportunity to make the necessary corrections.
Make every effort to launch a mobile version of your e-commerce website, and ensure that it serves as more than simply a placeholder. It must be completely operational and enable users to conduct some shopping on their devices. Since explaining everything would take up far too much time and space, I’ll just refer you to this excellent post on creating mobile-friendly e-commerce websites.
It is imperative that you give mobile shoppers a safe and secure mobile purchasing experience this Christmas season—you cannot afford to ignore them.
Make Changes to Your Website
During the holidays, your website really needs a makeover. It should be designed to give your visitors the impression that the season is here and encourage them to be more frugal with their spending.
Reminding children that the holidays are a time for gift-giving is one approach to accomplish this. To accomplish this, label some things as “perfect gifts for X,” where X can be any person you can think of, including your father, mother, sibling, friend, lover, or any other person. Perhaps it’s a pet. Remember all the individuals who buy their dogs gifts during the holidays?
You can also rearrange your categories to better fit the festive mood. Once more, you will need to choose which things are appropriate as gifts for which set of recipients before classifying them into the relevant groupings. This can be a great strategy to increase sales, believe it or not.
Naturally, a few design changes will also help to put people in the spirit of the holidays and serve as a constant reminder that these are the good times, and they will only be enhanced by spending money on their loved ones.
Give Away Discounts Graciously
When discussing how to draw clients and sell to them through e-commerce websites, it’s common for one very basic and harsh reality to be overlooked: consumers want to spend as little money as possible. People are on the lookout for the best deals over the holidays, and Deloitte claims that the main attraction of a new e-commerce store is its low prices.
Naturally, this does not imply that you will begin to lose money as a result of the discounts you offer. This would negate the entire goal of managing an online store. Having said that, there is a very straightforward reason why you should provide as many fantastic bargains as you can: doing so attracts new clients. Because of this, you will be able to sell them things that aren’t on sale as well. With a few more cunning moves, you may also make them into recurring clients that come in for more than just the holidays.
Employ Accurate Targeting
Visitors to your website are not all the same. While some of them are repeat consumers, others have never visited your website before. Additionally, there are some that are about to abandon your website without buying anything. In order to persuade each and every one of them to buy something, you must ensure that you are acting appropriately.
You need to build a compelling landing page that introduces yourself and highlights your areas of expertise to visitors who are not familiar with your business. You need to win over visitors to your new e-commerce website as soon as possible, since on average, more than half of them depart in 15 seconds. Present them with your finest discounts and offerings. Inform them of all the incentives you have in place for the upcoming holidays. Teach them to linger and peruse.
It’s important to let your loyal consumers know how much you value their continued business. Simply by giving them a discount for being a repeat customer, you may make the purchase much sweeter. Treating them well will demonstrate to them that you care about your repeat business—because you should, at the very least.
Regarding the users who are departing from your website, particularly those who are leaving a full cart behind, you ought to make every effort to persuade them otherwise. Get rid of this for consumers who leave your promo code unanswered if it asks them to provide their email. Simply provide them with the promo code in the hopes that it would motivate them to finish the transaction. Nothing is more annoying than a customer who abruptly withdraws.
Unleash Email’s Potential
The harsh reality is that email marketing remains effective, despite being criticized in recent years in favor of other “fancier” and “more exciting” internet marketing strategies. Particularly for e-commerce websites, this is accurate.
The good news is that email marketing over the holidays is the ideal opportunity to fully express your inventiveness and lighthearted nature. Always make sure that your Christmas emails are offering your customers the finest greetings along with that festive cheer. Put otherwise, it shouldn’t be solely focused on selling. Make an effort to inform prospective clients that your e-commerce website offers a fun and exciting holiday shopping experience.
Attempting to convince customers who abandoned their carts in spite of your best efforts to persuade them otherwise is another approach to use emails in the context of holiday e-commerce. These are known as cart abandonment emails, and they present a great chance for your online store.
Think Before You Ship
Unbelievably, the majority of online shoppers—more than 70%—state that the availability of free shipping is what influences their decision to make a purchase. This is what over 75% of internet shoppers will consider when making a choice. Free delivery is, therefore, one of the best things you can do, if you can afford it, to increase sales over the holiday season.
Giving free shipping to everyone, though, is not just costly but sometimes ineffective as well. Specifically, you can encourage your visitors to shop more by offering free shipping. You provide free shipping, for example, on all orders above $50.
Not only should your shipment be inexpensive (or free), but it also need to be as quick as possible. When it’s Christmas season, people become increasingly angrier and less patient as they wait for their orders.
Last but not least, if you have the financial means, providing free returns would be a terrific method to truly close a lot of business with clients.
The Key is Customer Service
Finally, but just as importantly, now is the perfect opportunity to deliver the highest caliber of customer care to both current and prospective clients. Smaller e-commerce businesses will find it challenging to compete with the large companies in the industry and their hordes of customer care representatives.
Nevertheless, bear in mind that around the holidays, people have more inquiries and requirements. For this reason, throughout the holidays, you should give your customer service the highest attention. Numerous inquiries concerning different offers, shipping and return policies, and everything else you may think of will be made by people. Conversions will increase for sure if those questions are answered.
It’s possible that you’ll need to hire more staff members to assist you with this, or you might need to contract out the work for a few weeks. You might even want to consider adding live chat to your website. This requires that you be ready to perform it.
Rather than a Final Word – After-Holiday Sales
E-commerce websites often experience a sharp decline in traffic following the major holidays, coupled with an almost pitifully low volume of purchases. This does not need to be the case. As long as you are aware of it and prepare a few strategies, this phase need not be this slow. Offering specials related to Christmas shopping, sending out follow-up emails with perhaps further deals and offers, and holding some post-holiday contests are some of the things we would emphasize among these.
What matters is that you realize you have the ability to make this post-holiday period of time successful or unsuccessful.
