7 Vital Tips for Boosting Your Holiday Online Sales

by    |    Dec 2, 2016    |       7 min read

Every holiday season e-retailers unleash their creative potential to maximize sales and customer retention.  Here are 7 e-commerce tips that will help you gain your customers’ undivided attention during the festive period.

 Simplify the Shopping Experience on Your Site

 The holiday season can be overwhelming and cluttered with confusing product offerings. Hence, the more simple and pleasant your website shopping experience is, the higher the chances your customers will make a purchase. This is how it’s done!

Use holiday colors or imagery that invokes the special Christmas feeling to draw your customers’ attention to the main category. Provide your customers with holiday gift ideas. The gift ideas should be presented based on categories or segments such as price, interests, gender or age. That way, your customers can quickly find what they are looking, increasing your chances to close a sale. For example, “Gifts under $50”, “Men’s gifts”, “Gifts for sports enthusiasts”.

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Catch the Millennials

Accounting for the largest consumer cross-section, millennials are known to set the pace, especially during the holiday season. So be where Millennials are. According to a Dynatrace Survey, this holiday season 60% of millennials will increase their mobile shopping compared to last year.

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Go Mobile

For retailers who do things right, mobile is poised to become a massive chunk of their revenues.  In order to maximize sales opportunities, retailers should either create a dedicated mobile version or use a responsive design. And don’t forget that ALL shoppers use mobile to find best deals, promo codes, read reviews or compare prices.

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Source: http://marketingland.com/stat-backed-holiday-advertising-tips-know-2016-190716

Offer Holiday Coupons & Gift Cards 

Offering coupons & gift cards is always a good idea.  Surveys show that 74% of shoppers say they are influenced by coupons and offers online. That nearly 65% of people who buy gifts at the last minute perceive gift cards as the ideal “can’t go wrong” solution. When offering gift cards, make sure that they are attractively designed and packaged in line with the holiday spirit, with easy access from any connected device.

Include Free Shipping as a Strategy 

This Holiday, Free Shipping will become the norm, not the exception.  Shipping costs are considered to be the
greatest contributor to shopping cart abandonment. Free shipping was deemed the 2nd most important factor for shoppers when purchasing online 93% of shoppers take action for free shipping. This means if you’re charging for shipping, you’re going to be losing business. It’s likely that in this year’s holiday season.

Freshen Your Email Marketing

Did you Know that Email marketing drove 27.3% of orders on Black Friday last year? This holiday season, try to freshen up your email marketing. Change up your email blast template. Add to your presentation some winter scenes instead of the common holiday photos. Prefer bright colors as opposed to the red. Send over a holiday promotional video.   In your email marketing offer, use holiday-themed colors to accent important words and phrases.

Here’s an idea: Customers love exclusive deals. By hosting secret sales to your email subscribers, you can generate more impressions than you normally get from regular campaigns. Host a secret Christmas sale for only your email list. Being exclusive creates curiosity, which may lead to higher impression than your normal promotion campaigns. Consider sending your email at either 10 am or 2 pm. These two-time frames seem to prove the most successful in getting consumers’ attention by email blasts.

Lastly, don’t forget to add social media tabs to all of your email blasts. This will help you increase your overall following.

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 Create New Packages and Holiday Gift Boxes

It’s widely known that product packaging strongly affects our buying decisions. This is especially true during the busy holiday season. To simplify things, you can pre-package your best-selling items in attractively designed boxes and wraps, as long as the packaging is compelling enough for shoppers to want to buy. You can pre-package best-selling items ready to gift in beautifully designed cases, gift wrap, and boxes. The key here is to make sure the packaging is exciting enough for the shopper to want to gift as is. Product packaging has a strong influence on how we feel about products and should be valued even more strongly during the holiday season.