“Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies. To make people feel like crap.”
Joel, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
What’s common between Halloween, Valentine’s Day and Christmas? For some it may be the joy, but for the market it’s the buoyant holiday sales. Much like offline outlets, online market shines with every color known to man. But wait, what do you back up these surface changes with? Where’s your solid plan?
Here are 7 great tips to arm your online store to the teeth for any holiday sale:
Tip #1. Carefully Select Representative Offers
Everybody is ready to catch up with the holiday sales express train. Of course you think you’re too, but what can you offer your customers?
Any kind of advertising campaign is doomed to crumble upon itself without adequately selected assortment.
Let’s say it’s Christmas and you’re selling office supplies. Planning a successful sales storm you are sure you’re gonna nail in with a simple price drop. But instead you’re getting an average customer response when you could have been doing great if you chose the right items to represent each sub-category: Christmas bells paperclips, Santa stickers, Christmas-patterned sticky notes, snowman erasers, etc. And jokingly said you sell the best punch (hole punch).
Tip #2. Think What Items Sell the Best
Each holiday trends up different items. Think what could be your fast selling products!
Right before Christmas holidays, electronic devices go just as fast as Christmas cards.
If you are in doubt, Santa hid a good advice for you in his Christmas sack.
Analyze your options and maybe allot a whole separate category to your holiday offers.
Tip #3. Wisely Start Beforehand
Any kind of big holiday spells a lot of preparation — costumes, decorations, gifts. Statistics show the peak in sales falls on the month before the event.
But don’t forget about late shoppers, who are going to come the last moment for hasty purchasing. To cover this hectic audience, send a second wave of marketing emails, and display ads 4-5 days before the celebration.
Tip #4. Looks Matter (Be Unique)
Everybody expects the “magic in the air” every holiday: White magic for Christmas, eggs and rabbits for Easter, pumpkins and Dracula for Halloween.
Online looks matter just as much, if not more.
Be unique with your design and texts — when everybody’s hitting on the customers, it’s easy to scare them away.
Differentiate to keep your leads number raising. Christmas theme – yes. Santa banners – you can be more creative!
Tip #5. Grant People a Public Wishlist
A holiday is a pretext to get the things you wanted. Grant people an ability to express what gifts they dream of and share this to public — they will take care of advertising your store themselves, mentioning you’re featuring a wishlist to draw friends and family to see what’s inside.
Tip #6. “Buy It Later” Button
Secure yourself a superior position in the list of the sellers for each customer.
Christmas is a controversial period for online retailers:
- Consumers spend the most on gifts close to the Christmas eve and don’t have funds for heavy shopping the next month
- Stores sell the most close to the Christmas eve and have a lull the next month
It means that even if consumer wants to buy something for herself, it’s not likely to happen around Christmas.
There is a nice solution to this problem — a “Buy it later” button on the product detail page.
A click and the future patron gets a “Leave us your email and we’ll remind you later.” form. You gain a customer and the customer later gains a appealing triggered email with a reminder about the product.
A win-win situation where you also show you care about your audience.
Tip #7. Correctly Targeted Remarketing
Holidays are a Clone Wars time when everybody’s fighting for the customer.
Tens of sites a customer has to jump around to finally come to a decision make the purchasing journey confusing.
What is correctly targeted? For one, display ads that don’t show the products that this person has already bought somewhere else or stop showing these the moment this purchase has been done in any store.
But how do you know if the purchase has already happened? Marketing tools that have access to gigantic databases can do it for you the right way.
A propos, even Google still doesn’t have this kind of functionality.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays!
Get ready to go full action and don’t worry if you missed this Christmas — there are many more holidays coming this new 2017 year. If you’re waiting on a good companion, remember there is REES46!