How to increase eCommerce holiday sales

The holiday season represents an unmatched opportunity for growth in both revenue and profit. This is especially true if you know how to sell your services online. The real question is how to increase eCommerce holiday sales to its maximum potential.

The truth is there are countless ways to utilise the holiday shopping season to your business’ advantage. The tricky part is knowing which are worth pursuing and which will only have a negligible effect.

Have no fear, though. Not only will you learn about the 10-holiday selling eCommerce tips that will set you up for unrivalled success, but you will also learn five ways to prevent your holiday season sale from being a disaster.

However, before you dive into those juicy holiday-selling tips, you should learn how to identify the holiday retail sales tactics that will work for you.

Use it or lose it, 4 ways to see if your holiday eCommerce strategy is up to snuff

Before you can pick and choose which of the upcoming tips and tricks will serve your business best, you will need to know how to suss them out. Not all holiday eCommerce strategies are equally as useful for all companies.

So, how do you know if a particular trick will fit with your business? You could rely on trial and error, but that takes time and can be very expensive in the long run. Not to mention, the biggest issue with this method of trying out new strategies is it can and will limit your earning potential over the lucrative holiday season.

Luckily, there are four easy questions you can ask yourself before implementing an expensive new strategy to help you gauge if it is worth pitching or ditching. These are simple questions you can add to a checklist while going over strategies for any marketing campaign, such as advertising with Google shopping ads or, more applicably, your next holiday season.

Does it make sense for your target audience?

Understanding your core target market is half of the battle when executing a successful eCommerce strategy. For example, there is no point in advertising in printed media and traditional media if your target market is millennials or younger. In the same vein, it would not make sense to advertise on TikTok if your target audience is Gen X or older.

It is vitally important for you to understand who your target audience is and what the most important pain points are when deciding to purchase a product or gift. Below, you will find a list of the most important points you can excavate from your customer’s past data.

• Are your customers price or discount-driven?
• Do they prefer free or fast shipping?
• How well do they respond to personalised offers?
• What kind of marketing campaigns do they respond most positively to?

Have you tried it in the past?

One of the best ways you can prevent a future disaster is by checking your past marketing campaigns and busy seasons. You can look for the strategies that had the highest return on investment (ROI) and double down on them.

What do you do with the ones that didn’t work so great? Now is the time to throw on your white lab coat and do some dissecting. Were there any particular complaints during that campaign, maybe slow shipping or a stock shortage? Finding the individual issues and ironing them out can turn a once-failed campaign into your next sales boom.

Do you have the tools to implement it?

There are many tools and apps for eCommerce to help grow your business and evolve your store into the top-tier, cutting-edge shopping destination you want it to be. The problem comes in when you want to utilise a specific kind of strategy but do not have the accompanying resources to execute your goal.

For instance, you may want to implement an influencer marketing campaign but only have a limited marketing budget. This would be problematic as many influencer marketplaces have joining fees on top of the fees that influencers may charge. In this case, it would perhaps suit your business better to run and write a solo ad campaign as they are far more cost-effective.

Does the tactic cost you money?

This question goes hand in hand with our previous one. As you evaluate whether you have the resources to implement a new strategy or campaign, you should also check how much it will cost you to accomplish.

In many cases, you may already have the tools, personnel, and other resources to do a task without having to dig into your budget. Taking our previous example a step further, instead of hiring or buying an email list from a solo ad vendor, you could use your marketing team to write and send internal ads to your existing newsletter list.

Bear in mind that there is no such thing as completely free marketing, as this will take time and personnel away from other, possibly more important, tasks. So, weigh your options and decide accordingly.

5 ways to prevent your online holiday shopping season from being a disaster

Prevention is always better than a cure. These are words to live by, and in this case, they are words to run your business by. Applying these five checkpoints to your eCommerce store can save you from putting out fires for your entire holiday online shopping season.

Test your communications infrastructure

Any eCommerce business should be absolutely bulletproof when it comes to customer experience. However, the most common place where businesses drop the ball is in their lines of communication with customers.

If you regularly check your lines of communication for weaknesses and breaking points and strengthen those avenues, your business will stand out from the crowd. This will also prevent them from going down during peak hours and causing unnecessary frustration to you, your customers, and your employees.

Test all avenues of breakage

Your lines of customer communication are not the only systems you should test for breakages. Before any busy period, you should put all of your systems through their paces. One way you can do this is by trying to overload your website.

Additionally, you can pack your cart chock full of items and make notes on when things start to act in unwanted ways. You can also be proactive by increasing your cart’s holding potential and beefing up your site for the excessive traffic that it will encounter during the online holiday sales frenzy.

Build Up Your Staffing Levels

Being understaffed during the holiday eCommerce sales spike can lead to lost sales and, even worse, unhappy customers that will spread bad word of mouth. Hiring some temporary, casual staff will help increase productivity and ensure all of your orders go out on time.

Ensure Your Platform Is Scalable

This goes hand in hand with checking your site and procedures for weaknesses. A good platform, such as the innovative eCommerce platform from Netcash, will scale with your site’s needs during the ebb and flow of a retail year.

It will ensure you deliver the same high-quality service to your customers. Especially during the crunch times of the holiday season, all without you having to think about it.

Have a disaster recovery plan in place

Having well-laid-out plans will do wonders for preventing disasters, but the thing about disasters is that they are inevitable. There will be something that was overlooked or slipped through the cracks during the busy season.

So, having a flexible and clear step-by-step process to follow when these instances occur is vitally important. It will minimise damages to both your sales losses and business reputation.

10 holiday eCommerce tips to boost your sales through the roof

You have learnt the essentials of how to tell which tips may work for you and which ones won’t. More importantly, you have uncovered how to avoid disaster before it strikes. Now is the time to dive into the 10 best ways to increase holiday sales beyond your expectations.

Get into the spirit of the season on social media

The holiday season is at its best when everyone is taking part in the festivities. The best way to do this as a business is to get in the holiday spirit on social media. Online holiday shopping statistics gathered by statista.com show that in some countries, up to 41% of consumers will make a purchase after seeing a product on social media.

This means knowing how to sell on Facebook and capitalising on holiday-themed giveaways, competitions, and promotions can make your sales skyrocket. If you do not want to do giveaways or competitions, you can do daily or weekly product highlights with limited-time holiday discounts linked to them.

Take the stress out of the holidays by creating helpful gift guides

For some shoppers, the holiday season can be a stressful time as they twist themselves into knots trying to find the perfect gift for their loved ones. This is your business’ opportunity to take the weight off of their shoulders by having helpful gift guides. The vanilla version of this is for him or for her product sections.

Be that as it may, you can separate your business from the herd by going the extra distance. Categorise your products with more unique and personalised classifications. You can have pages such as “Gifts for Gamers”,  “Toys for Techies”, or “Tools for Adventurers”. These will speak to the personalities of their loved ones instead of broad and generic titles. This will in turn, help shoppers narrow in on that perfect gift.

Don’t let payment wreck the vibe

Everyone wants to spoil their loved ones, and on some occasions, that means buying something that outweighs your bank account balance. Although, this is not the only thing that can prevent shoppers from paying for a gift.

Imagine them spending hours looking for that perfect gift for their loved one and finding it on your site just to be blocked by limited payment options. Having a robust checkout service such as the Netcash eCommerce Payment Gateway (Pay Now) can literally save Christmas for your clients.

Tip: Accepting a wide variety of payment options such as Ozow Instant EFT and Scan to Pay will only serve to dwarf your previous best holiday sales numbers.

Create a sense of urgency with limited-time discounts

It has been long believed in the world of retail that scarcity can drive sales as well as a sense of urgency. Creating an artificial sense of urgency with countdown timers and banners might just be the slight push a customer needs to pull the trigger on a purchase.

There is a fine line to be walked here, as you do not want to come across as overly pushy or dishonest. Some online stores may have counters that reset when clients use alternative browsers or privacy tools.

You can avoid this by including the timers in the previously mentioned email marketing strategy. Alternatively, you can have a small selection of items on timed discounts that periodically rotate on your home page. These can be highlighted by some eye-catching product ribbons.

Make sure customers can easily find your eCommerce site

SEO is one of, if not the most important aspects of your online store. If your store doesn’t show up in search results, it is as if the store doesn’t exist. Luckily, there are easy ways for you to bolster your SEO strategy.

The easiest is allowing customers to leave reviews on the products they buy as they naturally use keywords that will help you rank on Google’s results page. However, if your store is hosted by the Netcash Shop Instant Site platform, then SEO will be super easy. Especially if combined with the other tactics mentioned here.

Create easy gifting options

How your products are shipped can have a huge influence on whether or not customers will return to your store. No one wants boring brown boxes under their tree or in their stockings.

Offering interesting, fun and unique gifting options to your shoppers will help you stand out from the crowd. Over and above that, it will also save your clients time on looking for wrapping paper and fighting with sticky tape.

A secondary but still incredibly powerful and potentially lucrative side effect of this is that the moment the gift is opened, it may be captured and uploaded to social media. This can result in a viral moment that can and will overshadow any paid marketing or brand expansion campaigns.

Launch a new product or run a special promotion

There is a reason that all of the biggest brands in the world usually release their new products near the end of the calendar year. It is not merely a coincidence that Sony, Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft wait until October/November to release their phones and gaming consoles.

Launching a product alongside the holiday season creates a massive spike in sales as everyone clammers for that unforgettable gift. What if you don’t manufacture products, how can you get in on this action?

As a retailer, you can create the same hype by touting your next big holiday sale. Letting your customers know that your big holiday sales are coming up will generate buzz and allow shoppers to get excited and in that buying mood.

Generate some product reviews

As discussed earlier, product reviews can massively help out your SEO rankings on search engines. The easier your store is to find, the more sales you can generate. However, this is not the only purpose of product reviews.

The fundamental purpose of these reviews is to inspire peace of mind for future buyers of a product. That being said, it can be hard to get customers to leave reviews to begin with. There is nothing wrong with generating in-house reviews.

These can be as simple as “Staff’s Choice” product labels or as in-depth as full-on reviews posted under the products. If you are worried about transparency, then you can highlight these as staff reviews or hire outside reviewers to provide initial reviews for products.

Optimise Using Last Year’s Data

Data from sales gone by is not only good for discovering who your target audience is. It is a virtual treasure trove of valuable information. Sifting through your last year’s numbers can uncover items that underperformed and aren’t worth purchasing again. Alternatively, you may find items that sold better than expected and need to have higher quantities ordered.

Update your product photos

Humans are visual creatures. Having old, outdated photos of products can have a negative effect on a product’s sellability. You can greatly increase your holiday season sales by sprucing up your inventory’s photos. You can also use your product photos to spread the holiday cheer as you do not have a physical store to decorate. So, don’t be scared to infuse some holiday magic into your updated pictures.

Final thoughts on boosting your online holiday sales

Now you have all of the tools you need to make your next holiday sale your best holiday sale. Combining these tips and tricks has the potential to set your business up for a remarkably successful holiday season.

Implementing all of these tips and tricks may be overwhelming. So, remember, if you ever need to simplify your eCommerce strategy, you can always subscribe to Netcash shop’s innovative eCommerce features.