As a ecommerce owner - the best way to lift your spirits during the holidays is by boosting your eCommerce sales.
Fortunately, there are quite a few marketing opportunities that you can capitalize on during this annual period of spending.
What probably springs to mind first is using social media to reach your potential customers. But how do you do it
In this guide, I’m going to go over some of the tactics and strategies that have already brought other ecommerce stores results in the past.
Every single idea on this list has the potential to increase your sales by a significant margin so be sure to read till the end. Let’s get right into it!
#1 Christmas-Themed Products
This may seem rather obvious but releasing products themed around Christmas itself is a great way to increase profits towards the end of the year. You can see this marketing tactic utilized every year when Starbucks releases its Christmas mugs.
I’ll be the first to admit that I spend a lot of time at Starbucks, but I’ll also admit that their mug prices are significantly higher than what you’d see at other retailers. This is true year-round but they take things to a whole new level every winter.
By theming their mugs with familiar Christmas designs such as Santa Claus, snowmen, polar bears, and even the gingerbread man, they justify the high price with the logic that these are limited edition holiday designs.
Of course, this strategy applies to all types of products, not just mugs. For instance, if you’re selling power banks then you could come out with Christmas designs of snowflakes or reindeers and announce the limited edition variants through your mailing list or social media channels.
The important thing is that you release them at the start of December and never repeat designs. If you release them too early then there’s no urgency for customers to buy them. In the same way, repeating designs destroys any sense of scarcity.
While this isn’t that crucial to the overall outcome of your campaign, it’s generally a good idea to get some Christmas-themed packaging to go with the holiday products as well. It won’t boost your profit by that much, but it will solidify your Christmas branding.
#2 Forge Partnerships
You’re not the only company that’s trying to boost eCommerce sales during this snowy season.
But you can turn this around and instead of competing - you can actually create partnerships with other eCommerce companies. Not only will this save you from undercutting each other, but it will also boost sales on both ends.
With all that being said, you can’t expect someone selling the same product to partner with you, so you’ll need to target eCommerce companies in a niche that’s related to yours but not directly overlapping.
If you’re selling wireless earphones then you could partner with a merchant who sells phone cases. You both target the same industry but the products are different enough to ensure there’s no conflict.
All you need to do is bundle your products together or provide discount coupons for each other’s sites. For instance, you could say that anyone who buys two pairs of earphones from your website will get 30% off on their phone case from your partnered store and vice versa.
This applies to other niches beyond tech. If you sell premium coffee then partner up with a merchant who sells custom mugs. It’s actually very easy to reap the benefits of this strategy if you have an eye for good potential partnerships.
#3 Support Nonprofits
The holidays are a very emotional season for most people. It’s not hard to become a stone-faced robot throughout the first 11 months of the year when work and bills are the only things on your mind, but spending time with family can really restore the humanity in us.
All that Christmas spirit means that people are more conscious of others’ suffering and thus more likely to do something about it. This makes it a perfect time to support a nonprofit through your store. Not only will it boost sales, but you’ll also be changing things for the better.
Death Wish Coffee is a great example of this. They received a lot of media attention by organizing a fundraiser for the Special Olympics. The total amount raised was under $20,000, but the sales that the company made due to the attention greatly exceeded that.
The positive PR also lasted long after the fundraiser had ended, making it a good long-term investment in the branding context as well. Today, Death Wish Coffee is making millions of dollars every year through their website and Amazon sales.
Another great example is Blake Mycoskie who walked away with $300 million after selling half of Toms — a company built on the One for One® business model. The efficacy of this model has been the subject of some debate, but the sales speak for themselves.
You don’t need to create a large-scale charity department within your company, nor do you need to come to an agreement with a multi-million dollar nonprofit. Even something simple like giving 10% of sales to St. Jude Children’s hospital can establish an extra incentive for people to buy.
#4 Establish Scarcity
Don’t get us wrong here, we’re not saying that you should intentionally limit stocks of your product during the holiday season since that’d actually be financial suicide. The key is to portray scarcity but stock abundantly.
Most successful eCommerce companies will agree that their customers tend to buy products faster when they’re faced with elements of scarcity such as real-time stock counters or cutoff dates.
In reality, you should have more stock on December than any other month of the year to ensure that you don’t sell out. Not only will selling out lead to you missing out on more sales, but you’ll also waste time by having to email users to inform them that you can’t ship their product.
Giving out refunds is time-consuming, painful, and a big waste overall. A fine balance should be maintained though as you don’t want to overstock your inventory and struggle to offload the excess when January comes around.
Looking at your December sales in previous years is the easiest way to figure out how many units you’ll need to stockpile. Always leave some wiggle room though since you could (and should) make more sales this December than you did last year.
When your stocks start running low, you should announce that units are running out through your mailing list. This final knockout punch will ensure that you get rid of most of your inventory before Christmas passes.
#5 Optimize Checkout
When people are Christmas shopping, they’re in a rush to get something for everyone in their family and circle of friends before time runs out. This means that they’re more likely to abandon a cart due to convoluted checkout processes.
Simplifying the checkout on your website is always a good idea, but it’s even more important during the holidays. First of all, you should make signing up optional. If shoppers need to create an account just to buy your products then they’ll go on Amazon or Walmart instead.
Secondly, you need to ensure that you support all the main payment methods. PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard are the top three that you need to have on your site. Google Pay is nice to have too and, really, the more the merrier.
You can also use heatmaps to see if there are any distracting elements on your website that may be increasing the frequency of abandoned carts. Heatmaps are invaluable when it comes to tweaking the user experience as it shows you where your customers’ attention is drawn to.
It’s important that you minimize the total number of clicks needed to go from cart to checkout. If I were you, I’d take a page out of Amazon’s book and implement a “buy now” button on hot items to forego the cart entirely.
Lastly, ensure that you have an SSL on your website. It may sound silly, but having a green padlock on your website is one of the best ways to reduce the volume of abandoned carts. Your job as a merchant is to remove any obstacles that stand in the way of profit.
#6 Free Shipping
We know that offering free shipping can seem like a costly endeavor, but at this point, it’s a must if you want to stay competitive in the eCommerce world. People are already spending a small fortune during the holidays when buying gifts for all their close family and friends.
The last thing they want to do is torture their bank account even more by paying for shipping fees. That being said, you can actually get them to pay for it without knowing. All you need to do is raise your prices to compensate for the shipping costs.
You might think that raising prices will reduce sales, but customers will actually still feel like they’re getting a bargain when they see that your product ships free worldwide. Sometimes the obstacle isn’t the cost itself but the way it’s presented, so make every sale look like a good deal.
Customers are also willing to spend more on products if you offer free shipping since, in their mind, they already saved money by not having to cover the postage costs. This will increase the average size of each order and enlarge your yuletide bottom line.
You’ll also get more returning customers since free shipping tends to cultivate brand loyalty. Just keep the packaging small to minimize shipping costs so that you don’t break the bank because the dimensions of your boxes were too gargantuan.
Ultimately, your customers will feel like you’re doing them a favor by shouldering the shipping costs, and this indebted mindset increases the odds of them going to you the next time they need to make a purchase.
#7 Holiday Bundles
As consumers buy more and more gifts in preparation for Christmas, they go into “spending mode.” This makes it inherently easier to upsell them on bundles. A combo deal that may have seemed too pricey back in June is now a no-brainer in their eyes.
The key thing to note here is that most of the products people buy are for someone else rather than themselves. In light of that, you should make the bundled items appear necessary. If you’re a console reseller then offer an Xbox bundle with wireless controllers and new games.
Not only will this increase the average purchase price of your customers but it will also make them feel happier about the deal since they feel like they’ve gotten a bargain. You need to be very elaborate on which items you bundle though.
First of all, you should focus on items that are already selling well so that you don’t waste your energy on bundling products that aren’t even going to generate sales. Remember, you only have so much time until Christmas passes, so stick to hot items.
Secondly, you need to ensure that the items you bundle together are relevant. If people see you bundling shaving cream with their phone charger then they’ll think you’re just trying to nickel-and-dime them into spending all their money.
The third and final thing that you should pay attention to when bundling items is the price. It’s a rule of thumb that when upselling customers into purchasing additional products, the items you bundle should be cheaper than their initial purchase — otherwise they won’t bite.
Christmas by the Numbers
Sometimes the easiest way to grasp a social construct as complex as Christmas is to look at the numbers. Here’s a number: $1 trillion — that’s how much American shoppers spend every year during the holidays.
Members of Gen X have the highest spending average out of all the demographics at $782. You should consider marketing to this generation directly, assuming that your product is something that would appeal to them.
Research also shows that 29% of American shoppers buy their gifts in November while 62% shop during the week before Christmas. Knowing when these spikes come around is imperative to timing your offers properly.
Holiday spending has also been increasing every year for the past decade so the benefits to reap will only become more plentiful in the future. In fact, people are now spending more than double the amount they did back in 2008.
The average person spends over two and a half hours on social media. This makes it one of the most visible advertising platforms. That being the case, you should use apps like Postfity to schedule your posts in advance across all channels, optimizing the results of your campaigns. Postfity is offering -20% discount this Christmas (24/12 - 02/01) with the code 'christmas19'.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are quite a few things you can do to get some jolly good sales during the most wonderful time of the year. It all comes down to understanding seasonal consumer habits so that you can create targeted marketing campaigns that are specific to the holidays.
The statistics alone are a clear demonstration of why it’s so important to get ahead of the Christmas shopping sprees. With nearly eight billion currently alive, there’s no shortage of people to market to, it’s just a matter of doing so in an effective manner.
If you feel like you’ve learned anything in this article then I encourage you to share it with a friend or two who might benefit from it as well. That’s all for now but we hope that you have a happy (and profitable) holiday!
