How To Use Holiday Shopping To Boost Your E-Commerce Sales

For any online store, the holiday season is the best time of the year to drive more sales and conversions.

According to research, the trend of holiday spending is on the rise. Customers are now embracing the idea of holiday shopping. In fact, 61% of buyers are even willing to shop from new online stores during the holidays. 

It not only provides you with an opportunity to generate new leads, but you can also offer a seamless customer experience to retain your loyal customer base. 

However, with the constantly evolving e-commerce market, it has become challenging for e-commerce stores to benefit from the full potential of the holiday season and boost e-commerce sales. 

Here are some of the best holiday marketing ideas that will help you prepare your store for the upcoming holiday season and skyrocket e-commerce sales.

How To Use Holiday Shopping To Boost Your E-Commerce Sales?

According to Statista, the average holiday season sales accounted for approximately $135.35 billion in 2019. Also, this figure is expected to increase to $4.89 trillion by the end of 2021.

With the holiday season just around the corner, it's the perfect time for e-commerce business owners to put creative holiday marketing ideas into practice to boost e-commerce sales.

Leverage Print On Demand

For every business, there comes a time when offering the same range of products starts to have diminishing returns. Here, it is important to understand that your chances of success significantly reduce every time your business confronts a decline in sales.

Launching new product types helps re-engage your target audience and give your online business the push it requires. 

But not every business affords to introduce the new product range without planning. That is where print on demand comes to your rescue. 

Print-on-demand technology enables you to experiment with hundreds of different products without needing to make a hefty upfront investment.

Personalization Is The Key

Present-day customers prefer personalized texts and promotional messages over anything else. Research suggests that 63% of B2B buyers see personalization as an integral element of a standard service from online businesses.

The idea of product personalization is quite creative and unique. It gives your buyers an opportunity to design their products online. Nike is one of the biggest examples that let their customers design their own pair.

83% of customers are willing to share their personal data with companies that offer them personalized experiences. Allowing your customers to design their own products also gives companies an opportunity to get access to customer's data.

Upsells/Downsells Are Essential

Upselling is a proven technique that helps your business have more e-commerce conversions. This approach works best after the buyer has made the purchase. 

Let's suppose a customer purchases a cellphone from your dropshipping store. At checkout point, you can offer bundle offers, including CDs, cell phone cover, external memory, etc. What upsells do is they encourage customers to spend more money on your website by getting discounts and value-added offers and deals. 

Here, the most important thing is to offer upsells when the customer has already decided to buy. Trying to upsell before that may result in unreliability.

The upselling technique enables B2B e-commerce business owners to build lasting relationships with their customers and also increase holiday e-commerce sales. 

Downsells, on the other hand, are relatively tough to implement. If a buyer decides not to buy anything despite adding a few things into their cart, then you can show them something affordable. The idea is not letting your customer go with an empty cart. 

Using upselling and down selling strategies at the right time during the holiday season will increase your ROI, and you would be able to establish a long-term relationship with your customer.

Use Eye-Catching Banners

One of the best ways to engage your customers during the holiday season is by changing the look of your online store. Try to include as many colorful discount banners and stickers as possible so that your website visitors can easily find discount info on specific products.

Offer Fast & Free Shipping

Delivery costs are one of the biggest reasons for cart abandonment. A survey conducted a few days back revealed that the sales ratio increased by a massive 49% after an e-commerce store offered free shipping to its buyers. 

If you can not offer a free shipping deal at the moment, you can create rules by which a buyer can get a free delivery offer if their order value exceeds the specified amount. 

In addition, timely shipping is another crucial factor that needs your consideration during the holiday season.

Many customers do last-minute shopping, and they usually choose a store that offers a 24-hours shipping facility.

Customers are also less willing to pay extra for fast shipping. So it could be a great opportunity for your business to capitalize on this by offering Fast & Free Shipping during the holiday season.

Pay Attention To Social Media Outreach

The holiday season is the best time to improve your social media outreach. The idea is to increase your store's visibility in front of as many potential customers as possible. 

Encourage buyers to click through your posts by offering them value-added holiday deals and discounts. Create an all-inclusive holiday selling strategy that includes a backup plan to recover abandoned carts by sending follow-up emails and personalized texts.

Use Gift Card Strategy

We all love receiving gifts. The holiday season is the perfect time to build a loyal customer base by leveraging the gift card marketing strategy. For instance, you can offer your customers gift cards that they can use on their next purchase.

Retarget

You may have to reconsider your approach if you think that all people who visit your website will make a purchase. 

Online selling is a long and tedious process. Your job as a B2B e-commerce store owner is to identify visitors that have visited your website just once and those people who're regular visitors to your online store. By doing so will help you retarget visitors who've shown interest in your products but haven't completed the checkout process due to some reason. 

You can easily retarget those customers by sending them follow-up emails and text reminders.

Make Your Customers Feel Valued

"Satisfied customers are the best source of advertisement" 

Since customers can not touch and feel products as they do in the real-time shopping experience, they tend to believe reviews and testimonials already listed on the website or also ask their friends and relatives to provide them with genuine feedback about the brand. 

That is why it's crucial to make your customers feel special and valued as they remain loyal and committed to your brand.

Use Actionable CTAs

With the holiday season approaching fast, more and more businesses will try to capture the buyer's attention. 

There are different ways to entice customers and persuade them to visit your store and purchase things from you. 

If you have already figured out your discount strategy for the upcoming holiday season, the next thing you may want to do is to promote it successfully. Promotional ads can be your safest bid as they can help you market your offers in front of the target audience in a short amount of time.  

Make sure you include actionable CTAs with each ad to encourage your store visitors for shopping. 

Check our guide on “How To Create Powerful Calls To Action (CTAs) That Can Boost Your Ecommerce Conversions" to learn how to create actionable CTAs and increase your conversions.

Conduct Competitive Analysis

Conduct a competitive analysis to determine what your competitors are doing to increase holiday e-commerce sales. Pay close attention to prices as it is the key driver of making buying decisions. 

According to one of the surveys conducted by Adobe, customers will visit four to five websites to compare quality, variety, and prices before they settle for one.

Optimize For Better Performance

The holiday season is the high-traffic period in which you have to deliver better than usual.

If you're running a sale in your Shopify store, you have to ensure that your e-commerce store is perfectly optimized for pricing and other key factors. 

There are multiple ways you can enhance optimization for your online store. For instance, you can add relevant and keyword-focused articles and buying guides to your blog section. Similarly, content on your landing pages and category pages should also be optimized for the right keywords.

Integrate The Live Chat Option

Maintaining effective communication with your customers during the holiday season is of the utmost importance.  If you don't have this feature part of your e-commerce strategy yet, you can consider adding it before the actual season begins. 

Adding the human touch to your e-commerce store will make the entire buying process personal and customer friendly. Also, it enables customers to get quick answers to their queries.

Find The Right Price Points

When it comes to online selling, knowing your customers is the key. Find the right price points for your buyers using data from previous transactions and offer deals they simply can't refuse. 

Customers usually have a rough estimate of how much money they're willing to spend on certain items. Segmenting your consumers for targeted offers will increase your chances of having more conversions.

Urgent Flash Sale

Create a sense of urgency by having flash sales in your store during the holiday season. Flash sales bring more conversions and also improve customer engagement.

Build Trust

The biggest challenge for you as a B2B business owner is to build trust. One of the ways you can build credibility is by offering your customers flexible returns and refunds during the holiday season.

Check out our article on headless commerce to learn more about flexibility.

Engage With Mobile Customers

According to Statista, the number of cell phone users globally stood at a whopping  6.95 billion, which is expected to rise to 7.1 billion by 2021. 

Many customers use their mobile phones to shop for their desired products during the holiday season. So if your website isn't optimized for mobile phones yet, you'll lose a chance of winning more sales during holidays.

Offer Quick Support

Present-day customers are more aware and well-informed than ever. They have many questions before or after making a purchase. 

While the live chat option is great to add a human touch to your store, you should look for other ways to maintain flawless communication if you’re not able to provide answers to all customer queries in time. 

As the holiday season can be a crucial time, it's essential to invest in a chatbot that can disperse timely info and answer to all customer queries.

Final Words

There you have it. As an online business owner, your ultimate objective should be to keep your buyers happy. It would be much easier for you to attain your earning goals if you successfully maintain good relationships with your customers. 

Have questions? Drop them in the comments section below. We'll get back to you as soon as possible.