As the holiday season approaches, ecommerce businesses start making efforts to woo their audience and drive more sales. Although there are only a few months left for Christmas holidays, it is still the right time to develop strategies that bring you countless new customers and give your sales a massive boost during holidays.
This blog uncovers some of the proven and effective ecommerce holiday marketing strategies that help you drive killer sales and ensure that you have a happy and busy holiday season.
Give Your Website A Festive and Holiday Makeover
Get started with setting your holiday mood!
And your holiday mood should reflect on your website and other online channels, including your social networks and email newsletters, as well.
The idea is to tell everybody that you are also excited about the festivities and holidays. Plan and systemize a quick, holiday-themed makeover for your website. For this, you can consider adding new banners and other design- and development-related fixes.
For your social networks too, change the banners and talk about your preparations and ask for opinions from your followers. Like, comment and appreciate the comments you receive. This, in turn, will also boost your engagement rate, apart from establishing that you care for your customers.
Let’s take an example from WildlifeShowroom.com, an ecommerce website that trades duck decoys and a variety of collectibles and artistic decorative items online. Every holiday season, they modify not just the look and feel of their website, but also of their social networks.
Some businesses add a Santa Hat in their logo to set the holiday mood, which is a very common yet effective way to empathize with and convince the audience.
Streamline Mobile Experience
Since it is the age of mobile, it won’t be a surprise that most of your sales will come from mobile devices. So, it is high time you should check and increase the user-friendliness of your website (or app) on different mobile devices.
Use different mobile phones to browse through your ecommerce portal from a customer’s standpoint and try to place an order. Give the features, pages, and checkout process of your website/app a close look to find the potential distracters. The navigation should be clear and simple yet attractive.
You can also involve testing developers or some real customers in this exercise, and update or upgrade your website based on their review.
Keep a notebook open and note down the things that you don’t like and that seem flawed, you will need to get them all fixed before your holiday sales season begins.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
The cost per click is a bit expensive during holiday season, because there is a huge amount to traffic, search volume, and competition. But when implemented the right way, it enables you to steal traffic and buyers from your competitors.
So, revise your existing PPC strategies for the festive season, learn the new features, and implement the currently trending PPC best practices to drive traffic and sales.
Don’t forget to customize your campaigns for the mobile and voice searches.
PPC advertising is your last hope if your organic campaigns fail to fruit at the last moment. And if they don’t yield, it doesn’t mean you should stop your search engine and social media optimization activities.
Continue your efforts there, and as an addition, include PPC advertising in your holiday marketing strategies to generate more traffic and drive more sales.
Ecommerce businesses like TobaccoPipes.com use a mix of search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, influencer marketing and other traditional and new-age marketing techniques to get more sales during peak season every year. You need to make shift in existing ecommerce marketing strategy to make it suitable and work for the holiday season.
Send Greeting and Gift Cards
Greeting cards are an old way to send warm wishes to your loved ones. But, the fact is, they never went out of fashion.
You too can consider sending greeting cards to your loyal and repeat customers to make them feel special this holiday season.
Along with a lovely greeting card, you can send customized offers and gift cards with a coupon code inside, which the customers can use to avail festive discount you have customized for them.
When sent in bulk, sending cards does cost you much. Plus, it helps build a positive impression which leads to increased traffic and sales on your ecommerce website.
Bottom Line
There 7.8 billion people on this planet. Businesses are literally eyeing to win their attention and turn them into customers. The battle called competition you are dealing with is real tough.
So, your holiday marketing strategies need to be tougher. Develop a separate and more aggressive marketing strategy for the holiday season.
It should be based on the research and analysis of what your competitors are doing. However, it should not be missing out on the essence of your own branding and marketing strategy. You need to maintain your brand’s unique identity; at the same time, your strategies and holiday offers should be able to beat the offers of your competitors.
Start working on your holiday marketing strategy in advance. It is not an immediate and urgent fix.
Last but not the least, make your ecommerce website is ready for the traffic boost. Website load speed is another important factor you might want to consider before gearing your business up for the holiday season.
Make sure that it loads quickly even when there is a sudden rise in traffic. Speak to your hosting provider to choose a flexible or larger hosting space.