Tis’ the season for cheer and joy not only for consumers but also for merchants due to the surge in holiday sales. Tis’ the season where e-commerce brands face a lot of competition and unprecedented challenges. Tis’ the same season when the business becomes very lucrative. Tis’ the reason why you want to concentrate on handling the holiday rush and increasing sales.
Here are 7 ways in which you can increase sales.
7 Quick and Effective ways to increase holiday sales
1. Get your website holiday ready
The holiday season is when people open their wallets and they are ready to make purchases. Normally, e-commerce brands would experience a surge in orders during the holiday season. It is essential that you keep your site ready for that spike in order volumes and traffic volumes. The streets are going to have festive cheers during the holiday season, the physical retail stores will be decorated, and even the USPS delivery office will be decorated with Christmas trees. Why not add festive cheers to your site to encourage customers to bring in joy?
Create a sense of urgency: You can add various limited-time offers and create floaters for those deals creating a sense of urgency.
Add customized holiday pop-ups: You can customize pop-ups or spin-the-wheel elements representing the holiday season and can offer special coupon codes to encourage purchases and increase holiday sales.
Test your site speed: As mentioned earlier, more traffic can be expected and it’s important that your website loads quickly in order to not lose your customers.
2. Improve SEO for holiday traffic
Optimize your product pages descriptions and copies and create holiday specific landing pages. Include more holiday specific keywords. Get found when people are searching.
It takes time for the SEO to actually drive results. If you haven’t started yet, it is high time that you start improving your ranking now and drive holiday sales.
Bonus tip: If you can offer express delivery to the customer;’s location, target them through local SEO. This would very much appeal to the last minute shoppers.
3. Optimize your website for mobile to increase holiday sales
Experts always recommend e-commerce websites to optimize for mobile, keeping it mobile first. This is stated while keeping several reasons in mind.
One, with the rise of social commerce, people tend to find stores through social platforms. Right from the discovery phase to the checkout phase, everything is taken care of on the social media platform itself. In this case, social media is mostly viewed through the mobile device and it’s better if your website gets optimized first on a mobile device.
With 6.4 billion users using a smartphone and the internet to discover various e-commerce brands, it would be a shame not to optimize for your mobile and convert most of the customers coming to your website.
Second, Google has created a mobile-first indexing policy, where the mobile version of the website is first crawled and ranked in Google. And Google being google, it’s vital that you optimize for mobile and get ranked in Google first. Here are some tips to improve mobile conversion rates
4. Display UGC
UGC is HIGHLY STILL RELEVANT. And it’s going nowhere. During the holiday season, people trust the opinions of others. Online reviews are as good as personal recommendations. Websites displaying UGC content have resulted in 29% high conversion rates. [websell.io]
Be transparent, display honest reviews and set the customer expectations right so that you don’t experience a lot of returns post holiday season.
5. Concentrate on Abandoned cart recovery
Statistics show that only 3 out of 10 people who add products to their cart actually checkout.
You can employ various techniques to re-market to these people, to those who have abandoned carts. You can send gentle reminders through email notifications, SMS and push notifications, urging them to finish their transaction. Sometimes a special coupon code can be sent to encourage those customers to convert them. Again, this creates a sense of urgency. You can enhance the urgency by saying
- That only one product is left in the category that they were browsing
- That ‘X’ many people have viewed this product recently
This would also create a sense of FOMO in them and encourage them to convert.
6. Offer multiple shipping options
It is always a good option to offer diversified shipping options to customers who are checking out. The customers get to choose when they want this product to be delivered. You can expect people to shop earlier during the holiday season and you can expect last-minute shoppers as well browsing through your website. You can’t take the risk of offering very limited shipping options that might potentially affect the bottom line of your store. By offering shipping optionality, your brand can cater to a diverse range of customer needs and preferences.
For example, when a last-minute shopper is looking for same-day delivery, shipping optionality would be the differentiator here. It might be easier for the customer to choose your website to buy their holiday gifts from. Multiple shipping options that people expect e-commerce brands to have are as follows:
- Same day delivery
- Free shipping
- Expedited shipping
- Overnight delivery
- Overnight delivery,
- Two-day delivery, and
- International shipping.
A survey says that most people who opt for same-day delivery and two-day delivery often choose to pay more for shipping. This might be a relevant choice to consider. Amazon has set the bar very high for delivery and brands need to come up with a variety of options to meet customer expectations.
7. Turn your post-purchase customer journey into a holiday sales channel
The buy button is not the end of the customer journey, it’s rather the beginning of a relationship with a brand. It’s important for brands to acknowledge that the post-purchase customer journey plays a very big part in determining whether the customer returns back to the brand or not.
91% of customers say that they won’t return to a brand after a poor shipping experience and return experience.
The order tracking page is one of the most viewed pages. An average person visits the order tracking page 6-8 times after purchase. There are a number of ways with which you can turn your post-purchase customer journey into a sales funnel and increase your holiday sales.
- Display personalized product recommendations: Leverage user data and provide personalized product recommendations to convert them again into a repeat user.
- Cross-sell and Upsell:When people visit the order tracking pages, you can show them the related products or products that are of high value, which people might convert for and they might get to know that this particular product is available.
- Display product reviews:Product reviews are a great social proof of showing that your brand and the products that you offer are very reliable. So it is always advisable to display relevant reviews of your products.
- Bring in the holiday cheers to your tracking page: Why shouldn’t your order tracking page have a little holiday touch to it? People get in the holiday mood and the brand should also hop in with them to bring in the mood
- Build trust and confidence through proactive communication: . The holiday season is known for its notorious shipping delays. Customers tend to get anxious and they might not shop with you again. By proactively communicating the status of their order, you can assure them that their package would reach them on time.
The post-purchase part of the custom journey is often overlooked. You can kill two birds with one stone by displaying a branded tracking page increasing brand recall and communicating the order status proactively, thus promoting holiday sales.
Final word
High Holiday Traffic Volume = High Holiday sales = Possible increase in the return rate.
As an e-commerce business, you should prepare for the holiday surge in sales and the post-holiday surge in returns. Don’t look at returns as a burden for your business, look at it as an additional opportunity to build a relationship with your customers. Turn your return process also into a sales funnel by giving a great customer experience.
