Posted by The holiday season is that time of the year when eCommerce store owners like you have the potential to increase sales by more than 40%. People all around the world enjoy holidays with buying stuff for themselves as well as gifting Others.
Those days are now gone when people used to line up to their favourite retail shop. Now people are using online stores more usual for all kinds of shopping.
The holiday season is the best time for people and the eCommerce store owners like you to grab a piece of the pie. Various promotional and lucrative offers encourage and drive people to your online shop to catch the latest deal you offer.
To make your holiday season the best you have seen, we have come up with the ultimate guide to preparing your eCommerce store for the upcoming holiday season.
Below is the list of things you should do and take care of to make the holiday season a great and wonderful success for your eCommerce store.
1. Make perfectly executable sales plan with your USP
The most important thing that goes into a successful holiday season is making a plan that is unique and easy to execute. Don’t overcomplicate things, make plans with all the dates for the start and end of an activity.
Define the Unique Selling Point (USP) of your eCommerce store and focus on that. Integrate your USP in sales plans and leverage new and old customers to your store. Plan your holiday season goals such as inventory management, promotional offers, and marketing strategy.
2. Take care of your inventory
It is never wrong to take physical stock of your products, and in holiday seasons, it becomes the essential thing to do. Take up an inventory survey and order the necessary units required in advance. Because it will give a wrong impression of your store when your customers want to order a product, and it is showing out of stock. So, communicate with your suppliers and vendors to stock-up the products.
Take past season’s data into consideration when ordering the products. Identify what products are selling in high numbers. But don’t limit to that only, you also need to pay attention to the current market trends, and things that customers are more likely to engage with and concentrate on those things as well.
3. Design your eCommerce store for the holiday season
The first thing your customer will notice is your eCommerce store’s home page design. It is better that you make some changes to your website as per the upcoming holiday season. You don’t need to redesign the whole site, pick out a theme or template for the specific holiday season and make your site as creative as you can.
Whatever you do, make sure that navigating in your site is as easy as before also highlight promotional offers, and add a call to action buttons. You can also avail of store optimization service that will help to bring down your page load time and better user experience.
4. Plan out the holiday promotional offers
Promotional offers significantly boost sales of your eCommerce store. Make it easy to understand offers for customers to choose from. The first thing you want to do is to research and Identify the top-selling products of your store and then run promotional offers on those products. Highlight them when a customer visits your store so they can quickly locate and purchase them. If you are using Magento as an eCommerce platform, you can choose the best Magento booster extensions during festive seasons.
Offer services like gift cards, gift wraps with a personal message, etc. that add significant value to the products when customers purchase them. With offers like this, you have an opportunity to increase sales in a considerable amount because people are more encouraged to buy products when offered promotional services.
5. Keep your marketing campaigns up to date
To make other people and your loyal customers buy from your eCommerce store, you need to get the word out of your promotional offers using Email marketing, social media marketing, SMS marketing, and paid ads.
Email marketing: Come up with perfectly crafted Emails that contain your promo offers, sales info, coupon codes, which lead receivers of the Email directly to the sales page. You can also market certain products by segmenting the customer’s need and target those segments.
Social media marketing: Social media has become a great platform to market your products. Since the introduction, social media has changed the game for the better. You can automate posts on different channels with your promotional offers, which can lead the users into your sales funnel.
SMS marketing: In the last few years, SMS marketing has been picked up by the store owners to promote their products and business. With its high open rate and link click rate than other marketing strategies, it has become the most reliable marketing strategy for any business. So, take advantage of this great channel as much as you can to boost your conversion.
6. Paid Advertisements
Running paid ads on social media and search engines can also help increase sales of your eCommerce store. Perfectly crafted ads can increase the ROI of your whole campaign.
Your store policies more flexible Most of the shoppers who end upon your The eCommerce store around the holiday season is gift shoppers. One of the things that hesitate them from purchasing is going from the hassle of returning or replacing the products if something wrong happens.
So, implementing more liberal and user-friendly policies specifically around the holiday seasons can make your eCommerce store perform well.
7. Take good care of your customers
The holiday season means that your store will have more traffic than usual and the sales are also going to rise. With that, the customer queries are also going to be high.
A happy customer is a key to success for your eCommerce store. So, think about hiring some customer representatives only during the holiday season that can handle that load.
See that your visitors and customers don’t have to go through the whole store to find the best offers. Make sure that the best promotional offers of the holiday season should appear as soon as someone visits your website.
8. Make your site mobile responsive
More than half of the population of the world now has access to mobile phones. The major part of the online sales now comes only from mobile devices. So, your website must also be working fine on all types of mobile devices.
Check your eCommerce website’s mobile responsiveness regularly during the holiday season.
9. Customize the store for faster checkout with added payment methods
One thing that you should also take care of is that your store makes the whole purchase process easy and fast. Minimize the time from the product page-load time to checkout time.
Add more customers favourable payment methods and gateways so that the customers can pay at ease.
Conclusion
Craft stunning sales and marketing strategy for the holiday season and pay attention to small to significant details for the success of the whole campaign. Remember that a happy customer is key for a well-performing eCommerce store. So, make your store policies better and more flexible than ever. People Are likely to shop from the eCommerce store with the best mobile responsive website and faster checkout process integrated with their preferred payment option. So, keep these things in mind, and you are good to go.
This is a guest post by Nathan McKinley. He is a Business Development Manager at Cerdonis Technologies LLC – Mobile App Development Company developing chatbots with better user experience and easy functionality to use in routine. He loves to write on various tech updates like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things, ChatBots and its impacts, Big Data & Blockchain which are his core specialities as a technical writer with developing business.