It’s finally that time when people are enthusiastically scrambling to finish their shopping lists, and why wouldn’t they? The lure of getting more gifts, coupled with the holiday spirit, is enough to get anyone going.
You want to take advantage of this feverishly elevated emotion and turn it into sales, right? If you’re nodding your head vigorously in agreement, it’s time to dig up some ideas on how you can accomplish that.
There’s no magic pill or formula that guarantees an incredible uptick in holiday sales, but there are some tried-and-tested techniques that work every single year.
Along those lines, here are eight simple hacks to help you build a killer holiday sales campaign and generate more revenue.
Optimize your holiday landing page
Make sure your landing page has a compelling holiday design, offers something clear and attractive to your visitors, and includes a CTA button that’s super-easy to spot.
A host of surveys have revealed that sleek and simple landing pages have the highest conversion rates — 11.45% on average, which is impressive, considering that 10% is considered the benchmark for a successful marketing campaign.
To create effective holiday landing pages, you can use one of the best landing page builders to facilitate end-to-end customizations and personalized CTAs. Furthermore, consider adding popups. Elementor, for example, boasts a popup builder that can be triggered at opportune moments (e.g. 10 seconds after a visitor lands on a page) for effective lead capturing.
Prepare your prospects for the holiday sales
It’s fairly straightforward to get a shopper hooked on your holiday sales campaign but not so much when you come charging in out of the left field. You want to be predictable as well as surprising, and it’s all about knowing how to plan and pre-pitch what you’re going to do and when. Here’s how you can help realize the same:
- Offer holiday-themed content: For example, you can consider using witty and cheery holiday imagery or festive designs to “set the tone” for the season.
- Pass out seasonal cards and gift tags: Include a few cards with holiday sayings and gift tags to help your customers get excited.
- Throw in a subtle mention here and there: Don’t go on a full-blown marketing blitz; give a sneak peek into the holiday sales once in a while through your content, with phrases like “Holiday Deals” and “Sale Season Has Arrived!”
Make sure your site is mobile-friendly
Mobile eCommerce dominantly fairs against desktop with more than 65% traffic share and 79% transactional share. Indeed, mobile and online retail is a hot marriage right now, so make sure your site’s UI is optimized to work just as well on these devices too.
Even from the search engine perspective, it’s essential that responsive web design is a part of your overall strategy. The reason is simple – Google’s algorithm prefers adaptable sites.
To that end, the following are some of the ways to ensure your site is made mobile-friendly (or else, you risk losing out on a portion of your holiday traffic):
- Make use of the appropriate font size for your mobile visitors
- Avoid adding clutter to your site via unnecessary sidebars, etc.
- Avoid adding superfluous content – fewer pages, more relevant content
- Utilize a responsive alternative to your navigation if you want
- Most importantly, do all the above using a mobile-friendly CMS like WordPress
- Add SSL certificate as a security for CMS to secure it against malware infection and also ensure it’s GDPR compliant.
Give your site some festive elements
Ever visited a holiday store or a department store that has a huge new window display and decorations all over? How enchanting is that? The prevailing mood of the season can be leaped upon and transformed into an enticing emotion through some simple additions.
Research reveals that festive decorations help encourage curiosity, exploration alongside manifesting happiness and escalated levels of sociability. As far as eCommerce is concerned, all these factors should ideally go into making the consumer feel more positive about your holiday sales campaign.
Just add a splash of red and green, or maybe some Christmas lights around the website for a pop of color. You could also consider adding a short seasonal metaphor to your sales page, like “End of Season SALE” or “Happy Holidays.” In addition to this, you could also use some themed stock images — just a few — to support the overall theme.
Flash sales countdown to create a sense of urgency
When one spends, they want something to feel exclusive, and that’s exactly what a flash sale can do for you. You have a limited amount of time to get them to buy, so make it feel like a win-win situation for everyone.
A countdown clock is essential for any sales campaign as it helps set up a sense of urgency and indicates that availability is limited. For instance, the Black Friday countdown is widely used by many to build hype and finally push sales to the next level.
Amidst the festive rush, a countdown clock is a perfect addition to your campaign. It will help generate more conversions by inciting consumers to purchase before it’s too late.
Provide a smooth checkout process
More than 85% of mobile users abandon their cart, significantly contributing to the loss of $18 billion that eCommerce sites suffer every year. Why? Reasons are multi-faceted, with high costs and account creation requirements topping the list.
With the diversity of individuals making transactions throughout the festive season, it’s challenging to implement a one-size-fits-all strategy. However, one can surely make the end-to-end process seamless, especially for first-timers.
The Dos:
- Ensure your site is easy to navigate
- Include only necessary marketing materials that are required for checkout
- Show shipping timeline and payment modes accepted upfront
- Make use of a single-page checkout process to avoid multiple steps
- Use the right sales funnel messaging to support your CTAs
The Don’ts
- Avoid making the consumer re-enter their email or shipping address
- Don’t make them wait for the page to load
Host giveaway
A genuine giveaway is a great way to get people talking about your brand, especially if you have a popular social media account or newsletter. It’s a solid way to establish your followers as well.
Perhaps you could consider giving out free merchandise or gift cards to loyal customers who purchase during the holiday season. You can also incentivize the announcement of your holiday sales by giving away gift cards.
Another way is to organize contests similar to Amazon’s gamification tactic by tying rewards to daily deals’ events. Indeed, these are clever tactics that you can use to support your holiday sales.
Give them a reason to come back
ServiceNow outlines that earning repeated purchases via customer retention is 5 to 25 times less expensive than finding new customers. So, you want to make sure your loyal customers can continue to buy from you year-round, right?
You’ll need the following to keep them coming back:
- Give them something to look forward to: For instance, you could give the customer a discount for purchasing during the holiday period.
- Make it easy for them to get the latest updates: This step requires a simple, friendly news feed or newsletter on your site to keep things fresh.
- Have an easy return policy in place: If your customers have a problem with the items you sell, then make sure they can get a refund or exchange within a specific timeframe.
- Have the right terms and conditions in place: This is extremely important, so it would be prudent to follow these steps without fail. You can simply use a terms and conditions generator instead of writing it from scratch.
- Provide omnichannel support for a seamless holiday shopping experience: You want to ensure your customers are satisfied, don’t you? Omnichannel support is an integral element of high-grade customer experience (CX).
Conclusion
So there you have it – eight ways to drive holiday sales. The holidays can be lucrative yet restless, especially if this is your first time selling online.
And therefore, it’s always best to begin with a plan. This will help you create the sales funnels and streamline the process to get your customers to buy from you.
