This 2017’s holiday shopping season, online shoppers are projected to spend more than $107 billion worth of products. Adobe already reported that the actual holiday figures for 2017 Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday amounted to 14.49 billion revenue. This accounted for 17.33% year on year growth.
With a great start of $61.12 billion actual holiday revenue from November 1 to December 3, you should still be able to achieve your holiday sales with a recordbreaking high if you leverage on the possible holiday opportunities you haven’t unearthed yet. So, how can your online store achieve historic holiday sales? We’ve put together 8-holiday practices that you probably haven’t thought of but surprisingly easy to put into play. Given the short period of time left to maximize your holiday success, let’s not waste another more minute. In time for Christmas, here’s a rundown of easy ways to be more profitable this holiday season:
1 - Host a live social media sale The popularity of social media as one of eCommerce’s go-to-marketing channels has been widespread over the past years. No wonder why the new social media
features of going live - Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, Youtube, Snapchat, Periscope - have been widely embraced by marketers and sellers to engage with their potential customers. A good evidence why live streaming works is that people spend 300% more time watching live videos compared to videos that are not broadcasted live. You may not have thought of hosting your holiday sales into a live streaming but this is a new level of engagement to reach your customers with the chance of increasing your holiday sales. A perfect example is how The Funky Fairy hosted three separate live stream sales using Facebook Live that ran for 20 minutes. The first live sale had 7.5k views, while the second had 7k views, and the last one got about 10k views.
2 - Partner up for a flash sale Flash sales can be tremendously helpful during the holiday season if you want to quickly sell products. In fact, eCommerce stores that used flash sales during a holiday season generated twice as fast sales growth compared to online stores that did not use flash sales. During the holiday season, utilize flash sale to propel your sales even further. Instead of doing it by yourself, why not partner up with other online stores or your suppliers? This way your brand can reach more audiences and will give you more chances to promote your holiday deals outside of your current customer base.
There are many active communities on Facebook, you can join them to find other business partners, we list some outstanding groups here: Shopify Newbies, eCommerce Mastermind (7 Figure),... Or simply asking your suppliers, just like how Snapdeal hosted a flash sale partnering with Maggi to re-launch its noodle kit. This partnered flash sale helped Snapdeal to sell out 60,000 products in just 5 minutes.
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3 - Retarget the ones who got away earlier in the holidays Up to $8.6 billion of sales will be lost due to cart abandonment this holiday season especially during the earliest days. There are plenty of reasons why holiday shoppers won’t push through the “Buy” button right away. Luckily, you can still reach back to the ones who got away earlier in the holidays to remind them of their abandoned holiday carts. While retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a helpful year-round tool, it is one tactic that should not overlook during the holiday season. With heightened holiday competition, you need an easy way to remind your shoppers that they’ve not completed their holiday purchase. And this is what retargeting does best. You can implement a holiday retargeting campaign using Dynamic Product Ads. This tool allows you to run ads that specifically target people who visited your website and added an item to their carts without making a purchase. So that the next time users log in Facebook, they’ll automatically be displayed with an ad reminding them of their abandoned carts.
4 - Capture emails and then nurture leads with automated emails Take advantage of the surge in traffic during the holiday season. Why not capture your holiday visitors’ email addresses to make sure that you can nurture them throughout the holiday season? Once a customer is part of your email subscribers, you can easily promote your holiday promotions. This will help you drive your sales as 20 percent of online holiday sales was propelled by email marketing. To multiply your email subscribers during the holiday season, strategically place a popup form asking your visitors to put their email addresses in exchange for holiday deals and discounts. Using Better Coupon Box, Chic Hair Extensions placed an entrance popup asking its website visitors to receive a special discount if they subscribe.
You can also use an email automation tool like Mailbot to swiftly send nurturing emails. During the holidays you can motivate your shoppers to visit your site by sending them with holiday reward coupons or cart abandonment reminders. Just like this one
Tool: MailBot
5 - Heighten anticipation to your holiday deals with countdown timers The holiday season is such a busy period for merchants and shoppers alike. This means that time is always of the essence for everyone. Why not leverage on the time-sensitivity factor during the holidays to boost your revenue? How? Create offers and deals that will expire at a specific time. Adding expiry to your holiday sales will push shoppers to purchase the products as soon as possible rather than to postpone them for a later purchase. A great way to influence urgency is to include countdown timers to your holiday deals. The logic is the countdown timers will serve as reminders to shoppers that in order for them to avail of the discounts and promos, they will have to purchase them immediately before they expire or else they’ll miss the chance of savings. You can add a beautifully designed countdown timer to your product deals with Checkout Boost to urge your customers buy faster.
Tool: Checkout Boost
6 - Increase conversion with limited supply triggers While time-sensitive factor can be amplified using countdown timers, you can also bolster the need for immediate purchase by using limited supply as your element of urgency. Especially during the holiday season, the fear of missing out a popular product might run out of stock is one of the things that shoppers want to avoid. Take this shoppers’ fear of missing out on your advantage. Create customized messaging to your popular holiday items by including call-to-actions such as “Hurry! Limited Stocks Only!”. The chance that they will leave without purchasing their holiday items will be slimmer. Using Countdown Cart, Sexy Cherry Lingerie places a stock countdown bar under the Add To Cart button to create a sense of urgency for their online shoppers.
Tool: Countdown Cart The stock countdown feature of Countdown Cart will allow you to notify potential customers that the product they are viewing only has a few products left in stock.
This will catch their attention and prevent them from leaving your site without purchasing.
7 - Get rid of old and unpopular inventory with a clearance sale The holiday season is not just about festivity and popular holiday items. It also signifies that the end of the year is fast-approaching. And what does this mean to you? You’ll worry about not clearing your inventory in time for 2018! There will be old inventory that’s still sitting around the corner. Plus, your unpopular products will definitely be overshadowed by hot and trending items during the holidays. To prevent this from happening, you need to lift the demand for your old and unpopular inventory by hosting a clearance sale. An additional discount to clearance sale is the number driver why shoppers purchase products during the holiday season. So, as early as now, segregate your inventories for clearance and get a benchmark of how much discount you can give to your customers without sacrificing your overall margin.
8 - Spotlight holiday reviews to signify demand and popularity Social proof is a principle that explains why people seek for other’s advice and recommendations before making a decision. This is why reviews play a significant role in the decision-making process of an individual. Shoppers look for guidance from other buyers because it gives them the confidence that the items they are going to buy are worth it or exactly what they are looking for. Reviews have been found out to increase sales by 18%. So, why not put an emphasis on your them during the holiday season? You can easily add product reviews on a product page to influence shoppers to buy. The more positive reviews a product gets, the more people will think that it has good quality. This signifies that a product is popular and highly demanded.
Holiday Selling Made Easy
Holiday shoppers around the world are ready to splurge just to find the perfect holiday items for their loved ones and to pamper themselves. With Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday already passed, you only have a limited time to leverage the richness of holiday shoppers. You can still make the most of the rest of the holiday season by implementing our 8 easy ways to break the charts and reach not just a profitable holiday season but your best-ever one. Happy selling!