The holiday season is upon us, and what a wonderful season it is! If you run an eCommerce store, then you know that it’s one of (if not the) most important time of the year. Your ultimate goal is to make sure that it is optimised above all to increase sales, and to get that abandonment rate as low as possible.
In this case: conversion is key. And how do we get the highest conversion rate? We’re here to tell you, in this guide below. We’ve got everything covered from e-store makeover to planning email marketing campaigns.
So, let’s get into it.
Give your ecommerce store a holiday makeover
Before every holiday (this includes Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Summer, Black Friday), you can give your homepage a simple redesign to fit with the holiday theme. A full website redesign isn’t necessary, but if you are willing to go that extra mile for all the pages – then even better!
A clock counting down until the holiday starts or until the sale starts is a great way to grab your customer’s attention. Also, displaying the holiday discount code or sale as soon as the website loads (as a pop-up) is another great attention-grabbing move.
These simple (yet effective) tactics will generate an urge to purchase your product.
Lastly, add a call to action button, and place it in a spot which grabs the customer’s eye.
Once you have adapted your homepage (or perhaps your whole website) to your holiday theme, a quick site audit would be useful. Here’s what to look out for:
- Does your homepage/website load quickly?
- What is your site’s checkout experience like? Do you have a “one-click checkout,” process or is it longer?
- Are you upfront about taxes and shipping costs?
- Do you offer different delivery options?
- Do you offer tracking updates, post-purchasing?
The answer to these questions should be yes. If you answered at least 4/5 of them with ‘yes’, then you’re on a good track. If not, you’ve got some work to do.
Eliminate steps with one-click checkout
We briefly mentioned one-click checkout above, but let’s dive into this a bit deeper.
We are all consumers, we all shop online, and we all prefer a one-click checkout process. The fewer hoops we need to jump through to get what we want, the better.
So, the less forms there are for people to fill out and the less details needed, the higher your conversion rate will be.
Consider getting rid of your lengthy account creation processes by adding in a google or facebook login option, or a ‘checkout as guest’ option to get higher sales, and lower abandonment rates.
Tip: once people are at checkout, make sure to offer flexible payment options.
Plan Email Marketing Campaigns
Planning is key when it comes to email marketing for the holidays, and holiday email marketing campaigns are an absolute must. Planning ahead gives you enough time to perfect them and really get them how you and your team envision them to be. Don’t leave it until the last minute – last minute ideas are always the most basic.
You have two target audiences: a) your existing customers and b) your new customers. Who is more important? Well, we don’t like to pick sides, but those who have already bought from you before are more likely to buy from you again. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also target new customers and turn them into recurring customers too.
One of the most effective ways to let these two sets of audiences know about your holiday promotions and sales, is by sending them emails about it. Get them onto your website, where they can then browse through a fully-audited and holiday-ready eCommerce website.
Bonus: if you have enough data, you can also send personalised items and offers to this audience. In fact, make them as personalised as possible with the data that you have.
Some special offers that you could offer?
- Special promo codes
- Discounts on certain items
- Special holiday-only products
- Free shopping
- Discount on shipping
Finally, make sure to create some urgency to the offers by including the deadline – not everything good can last forever!
Create Gift Guides
Never underestimate the power of gift guides, especially (but not only) if you are an accessories brand. Gift guides come as being extremely useful around the holidays for those who lack imagination and/or inspiration.
You can separate your gift guides into sections, making it easier for customers to browse through gift ideas without having to scroll too much!
If you have the time and the right website developer, you can create a landing page just for gift ideas, which can be linked to your Instagram & Facebook shop too, therefore bringing in more customers through social media.
Keep Re-marketing in Mind
Our final tip on getting your eCommerce store ready is: don’t forget about the power of remarketing.
To easily explain remarketing – ever visited a page and moments later seen their ads all over your socials? That’s it – that’s remarketing (also known as retargeting).
If you do this, others do it too. Sometimes people visit pages, add things to their saved items or even to their basket, get distracted by something else, and then don’t complete the order and forget about it. Going back to our point about email marketing campaigns, you can send a reminder email to people who have abandoned their carts. Reminder emails can do wonders.
Your goal is to make shoppers not forget about you – target them again. Remind them about that abandoned basket and remind them (or dare we say inspire them) to revisit their basket to go through with their order.
Wrap Up
Now that you have the big picture, you can take time to plan ahead and increase probabilities of a successful holiday sale season.
That starts with your website and your marketing efforts, and ends with your customer.