5 Strategies to Increase Holiday Sales

Holiday season, which in eCommerce starts even before Thanksgiving and often lasts until the end of December, is undoubtedly the most lucrative period of the year. What’s more, this year’s sales are expected to increase by another 15.5%. How to make sure you don’t miss out and boost your sales this holiday season? Here are 5 simple strategies.

1. Redesign Your Store for Holidays

Once Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over, you need to get your Christmas preparations in full gear. What’s one of the best ways to encourage your customers to open their wallets and spend even more money? Help them feel the Christmas atmosphere.

Make sure that your website design includes holiday elements. Sometimes, even changing the background image can do a lot to boost your sales. Naturally, make sure that what you add fits your overall design and brand.

Keep in mind that new elements and graphics may slow down your website. Even if you feel that your website works fine now, the seasonal traffic spikes might really affect your server. And poor website performance can drastically lower your conversion rates, leading to a loss in revenue.

One of the things you can do to prevent that is to utilize cloud hosting – especially one that’s scalable, secure, and comes with 24/7 support, what allows you to focus on your customers & coordinating holiday promotions.

2. Enhance Your Online Communication

On top of adding Christmas design elements to the site itself, you should take care about your marketing communication. The type of posts that you create will depend on your industry, products offered, as well as the channels that you use – sample communication could look like the below:

• Christmas email sequence warming your customers up and featuring the deals
• Instagram and Facebook posts & graphics, competitions and riddles
• YouTube series focused on Christmas gifts featuring your product

Keep in mind that this strategy is most effective if you start your preparations upfront and keep dripping those posts over a few weeks, instead of leaving everything for the last moment. Especially that, the earlier your customers make a decision, the lower the chance they go to your competitors.

3. Offer Holiday Personalization and Specials

Not surprisingly, you will find it hard to increase your sales if you just keep talking about the holidays, without giving your customers any incentive to take action. Quite probably, your competitors are already giving them special deals, and cutting their prices down as low as possible. While discounts are a viable promotional strategy during holidays, there are better things which you can do to avoid lowering your margins too much.

One of them is preparing special sets of Christmas gifts created specifically for this time of the year. This can be completely new products or just sets of existing ones that are combined together or simply repackaged into Christmas-themed packaging. By using this strategy, you can also create special sets of products targeting different segments of your audience – women, men, fathers, mothers, and so on.

Another interesting, although a bit more expensive idea requires you to go one step further and give your customers even more freedom – personalization. While allowing them to create their own sets of gifts or to customize certain products could drive up the costs, you can try experimenting with charging more for personalized gifts, to make up for the higher product and manpower expenses.

Lastly, don’t forget about the usual extras – gift wrapping, Christmas cards, wishes, and dedications. However, it’s best to keep them free of charge – or, even better, try setting a minimum purchase amount for free gift wrapping. Depending on your margins, the same rule could be successfully applied to personalization.

4. Carefully Select Products Based on Historical Data

The best way to find your top performers is to go over the historical data. Check which products had the highest conversion rate and which brought the highest profit (this may differ, especially if the top performers conversion-wise were boosted by special deals or discounts).

And what to do if you lack the data, either because you are a new store or because you haven’t run any special promotions last year? In this case, it’s a good idea to spy on your competitors. If you haven’t started yet, you can even see what types of promotions they are offering, and try to beat them. But, as said earlier, try to abstain from starting a pricing war. Instead, look at sample solutions in strategy #3.

Tip: You can take your spying one step further and use some of the popular marketing spying tools to see what types of ads your competitors are running. Some of them offer wealth of historical data, which might give you some great ideas for your own promotions.

5. Create a sense of urgency

This should go without saying – you want your store visitors to act now. Any delay increases the risk that they will purchase their gifts somewhere else. That’s why you should keep reminding them about the special offers ending soon.

You might even want to create short promos for each week before Christmas. This allows you to skyrocket the urgency and forces your customers to make their decision much quicker. Not to mention the chance of increasing your profits – especially that some people might want to take advantage of more than one promo.

One other way in which you can create a sense of urgency without using any discounts or special offers is to tell them about the delivery times. It’s estimated that about 30% of all customers are the so-called last-minute shoppers. And the last thing you want is your customers blaming you for not getting their presents on time.