The holidays can be a lucrative time of year for ecommerce-based businesses, but unless you’re really prepared to make the most of the season and generate interest, then you might miss out. Here are 11 unique tips that you can use to help increase your holiday sales and perhaps even gain a bigger following, too.
Make Your Holiday Sale Visible
No matter how many emails you send, people aren’t going to be interested in shopping at your store unless they know you’re offering holiday sales. For this reason, promote your sale ahead of time, tell people how long it’ll last, and include the coupon code along with the percentage off or the savings on your homepage’s header. This is the most visible area of your entire site, so it’s perfect for advertising.
Filter Items by Price
One of the absolute best ways to help your visitors out and give them the perfect catalog involves filtering items by price and giving them segmented categories from which to choose. Gifts under $25, Gifts under $50, and Gifts under $100 are great options for holiday sales categories because they save your visitors time and hassle. You’ve already helped them find things within their budget, and they will appreciate it.
Create a Holiday Page
Another great way to get your visitors excited about the holidays involves creating an entire shop page dedicated to your holiday sale. You can do this in a few different ways. For example, you could temporarily change your home page, or you could link your holiday page in a pop-up that customers see when they open your home page. Either way, make sure it’s prominent, and make sure that if visitors click away, it’s easy for them to find it later.
Help Visitors Choose Gifts
Choosing gifts is hard, but fortunately, you can help. After all, you’re the retail expert, and people are willing to take your advice. Write up a gifting guide or a blog post all about how to choose gifts and publish this several weeks before the actual holiday. In your writeup, be sure to plug your own products and your holiday sales – and be sure to provide links, too. It’s a great way to advertise yourself and provide some much-needed advice at the same time.
Sell Limited Edition Products
If you really want to generate a buzz, consider selling limited edition products or limited stock items in your holiday sales. These are fantastic when it comes to creating competition, and they’re a great way to get people interested. Whether you’re selling holiday chocolates or a handmade piece of jewelry, another way to boost buzz involves installing a product counter bar to tell visitors just how many you have left.
Make Returns Easy
People will be afraid to buy from you if they can’t return things that aren’t up to their expectations. As a result, check out your return policy and guarantee, and make sure they’re both well-written and easy to understand. Prove to visitors that their satisfaction is guaranteed, and all the new traffic you generate during the holidays is more likely to come back afterward, too.
Let Visitors Know if Delivery Before the Holiday is Still Possible
There’s nothing worse than shopping holiday sales at your favorite shops and then discovering several days later that the items you ordered won’t arrive in time to give as gifts. To prevent hassle and headaches, you can install extensions to your store that will show visitors the expected delivery date if they order today. This can help clear up confusion and entice people to buy.
Launch New Holiday Sales Regularly
By creating dynamic holiday sales that are always changing, you can generate more interest in your store and keep people shopping throughout the season. Add new items at least once a week, and in the countdown to the final days, add a few really phenomenal deals that people will find hard to resist. Some stores have run campaigns where they announce new deals every single hour for an entire day, and they’ve been incredibly successful, too.
Offer Free Shipping
Free shipping is a huge motivator to online shoppers, but there’s no law that says it has to apply to everything. You can offer free shipping on certain handpicked items only, then change these items every single day. You could offer free storewide shipping, but this should be a very limited-time event. If you choose free shipping, you should do this in lieu of discounts.
Send Free Gifts
With all of your visitors likely shopping your holiday sales to provide gifts to others, giving each of them a gift with every order is a great way to help them feel better about their purchases. It could be an awesome stocking stuffer, a gift for a member of the family, or something your visitors could keep for themselves as a token of your appreciation.
Create and Send a Holiday-Themed Email Series
Email marketing is by far the best way to let people know about your holiday sales, so rather than sending the same-old boring emails, consider a holiday theme (or modify your Divi theme) that will tickle the recipients pink and drive them to your store. Teasers for upcoming holiday sales are perfect, especially if you choose to interject a little empathy. Be sure to create these early and start sending them out about eight weeks before the holidays.
Holiday sales can be a tremendous portion of your annual revenue if you know how to make the most out of them. Your goals involve driving your customers to your site, convincing them to buy your products, and thanking them for their business. These 11 tips are some of the best of the best, so the more you incorporate, the better your sales will be.
