Last year’s 2017 holiday sales saw these stunning numbers:
- 2017 total holiday sales exceed $1 trillion, presenting a 5.5% increase over 2016.
- 70% of internet users in the US and 65% of that in EU are shopping online
- 76% of American consumers used their mobile devices to do online shopping.
For the 2018 holiday season, eMarketer expects eCommerce to climb 15.3%. As an online business owner, you should be seeing great opportunities and challenges for this year 2018 holiday season, which is coming pretty close.
PERHAPS: more internet users all over the world will shop online, half of online shoppers will start shopping as soon as mid-October, and your holiday sales will account for even more percentage of total sales in the year. Oh well, we think these trends are CERTAIN instead, looking at how e-Commerce has been growing in the last decade.
This year’s holiday season is going to promise big sales to entrepreneurs who put great efforts into curating brilliant and impactful holiday promotions ideas on their store.
Let’s discover our 07 brilliant ideas to boost holiday sales this 2018, and how to implement them with Beeketing Apps.
7 Ways to increase holiday sales for online stores:
1. Capture 85% paid visitors into subscribers with holiday-themed coupon pop-ups
Holidays are best of all the best times for advertising platforms like Google, Facebook or Instagram because online sellers probably spend most of their budget on ads to attract shoppers on these days. We bet you intend to do the same.
Sadly, 80% of paid visitors might abandon an eCommerce site right within the first 15 seconds on it, without making a purchase. Do a quick calculation now: how much money would you lose if there’s no solution to this?
One simple but provenly effective solution is using popups to capture visitors into your leads by offering a discount coupon as a reward.
Source: Better Coupon Box app
When a new visitor clicks to your site, a nice coupon popup will appear to catch their attention. The offer is simple and enticing: take 1 second to subscribe email for future newsletters, or follow a social profile of the store to receive a big exclusive discount coupon on their first order with you.
What’s special is, this holiday-themed pop-up welcomes new customers with a joyous holiday feeling, conveyed by the image and messages on it.
What to expect:
- Different from a normal popup that asks for customer’s email, giving away a rewarding coupon makes it a win-win offer that motivates your visitors to subscribe or become your social followers
- Don’t be as commonplace as other pop-ups on millions of websites out there! Be creative and inspiring instead, by impressing your first-time visitors with holiday-themed coupon pop-ups that put them in the holiday shopping mood.
- Offering coupons to holiday shoppers will magnificently raise your checkout rate, as this is the time they’ve been saving the whole year for, and hunting discounts and best value deals.
Tools: Better Coupon Box app, with Holiday Themes Collection
2. Sell in bundles, Upsell & Cross-sell to the max!
On holiday season, discount bundle is one of the most popular deals online shoppers look for. This is the perfect time to bundle items and upsell & cross-sell to online shoppers, because they are in the right holiday-shopping mood.
Amazon once revealed that 35% of their total revenue comes from upsell and cross-sell deals. Why so? Selling more to current customers is always easier than selling to new ones. When customers buy a product, chances are that they may need complementary items to complete the package.
A woman who buys a dress might be interested in accessories. She might need to buy a bag or a pair of shoes later, so why don’t you cross-sell those items to her right now?
Source: Boost Sales app
What to expect:
- By upselling & cross-selling more items to current customers, you can upsize the order value per customer and see a big increase in total sales.
- Customers become your loyal fans when they know they can receive the best value deals from you.
Tools: Boost Sales app
3. Prevent cart abandonment with exit-intent offers
Of 3 shoppers who reach cart page, on average 2 will drop orders and leave the store. You have put in so many efforts to remove as many frictions as possible to bring customers to the end of the conversion funnel, but 67% of them just leave right before checkout.
This is where exit-intent technology can do the trick: detect customers who are about to leave the store at cart page (by following their mouse’s movement) and show a last-minute offer (which can be discount code, free gift, or free shipping), like this:
Source: Checkout Boost app
What to expect:
- Exiting shoppers are elastic to price and promotions, especially on holidays. A last-minute deal that offers lower prices or free shipping will make them seriously re-consider, and actually convert into paying.
- If you’re growing your social media channels: ask customers to share their carts on Facebook or Twitter accounts to receive your special deals, which are just 1 more click away.
- Social Word-of-mouth is beyond our expectations. One share can generate lots of visits to your site by the power of social network sharings. Prepare for endless social referral traffic with this awesome idea!
Tools: Checkout Boost app
4. Motivate spontaneous purchasing: countdown & social proof tricks
People usually shop in a rush on the holiday season. Discount deals are flash sales, many people look at the same items, best sellers run out of stock in the blink of an eye,… That makes people act quickly to grab what they need, or miss it. Sometimes, holiday shoppers have to quickly buy products they might not need, for fear that there will be no more chance.
That’s the effect of urgency, scarcity, and social proof. How can you take advantage of these mind tricks to drive spontaneous purchasing from your customers during the holiday season?
- Limit time for your discount offer, and present a live countdown clock right in front of customers (countdown timer)
- Create a scarcity by showing a low stock quantity (stock countdown)
- Display how many people have viewed and bought an item (social proofs)
Tools: Countdown Cart app
- Notify when an item has just been bought so people will feel confident to buy from you:
Tools:Sales Pop app
What to expect:
- Create the sense of urgency and scarcity to push people to add an item to cart.
- Build brand trust, authenticity, and popularity
- Use crowd effect to influence people’s confidence to buy
5. Send personalized follow-up emails triggered by customers’ behaviors
Of all channels that you can actively reach out to customers in large-scale, email marketing, no matter how old it might be, still works great and is the most low-cost channel.
However, how to do email marketing right and effectively is the big question. The answer is, Email Automation is how you should do email marketing now, not simply creating a promotional email and sending mass to all customers. How so?
New visitors to the store are different from those who have bought a jacket last week, or those who used to buy a lot but haven’t come back to your store for 30 days. If you send them the same email campaign, let’s say its subject is “Interested in our new Jeans collection that matches with your jacket?”, do you think it works the same for all those 3 groups?
Now’s the time to really think about personalization in the way you communicate with your customers: follow up using appropriate messages based on their personal actions on your store.
This works perfectly well on the holiday season if you know your customers well enough to curate proper email campaigns.
For example:
- For customers who purchased from your store a few times but haven’t come back for 1-2 months: send them a Reward Coupon email so they will come back on holidays and purchase again with an exclusive discount
- For those who abandoned their cart in the past: send them a cart recovery email to remind them of items they were interested in but didn’t buy, and offer a discount if purchased on holiday season
Source: MailBot app
What to expect:
- Customers are more engaged with your brand when they feel your emails are personal and offer what they really need just in time.
- A very low-cost channel to take care of all customers in large-scale
- Easy to measure the performance of each campaign by statistics on open, click and conversion rates, thus easy to optimize.
Tools: MailBot app
6. Mobile is no more future shopping trend, it is today.
Shopping searches via mobile are up over 30%, according to Think With Google’s latest reports on holiday shopping trends to watch.
When online shoppers are ready to buy, tapping the screen is now as important as touching real products. Mobile shopping is truly rising in 2016. If your GA report is telling you that your customers are flowing from mobile, now is the time to make mobile shopping as easy and pleasant as shopping on a desktop.
Before thinking about building a mobile app (which is quite costly to build and maintain for small businesses), you can make some little but impactful tweaks to the mobile web version to increase mobile conversion rates.
- Set a fixed CTA bar on top or bottom of the screen while customers scroll up and down. Customers can choose different size or color, or click to buy instantly, right on the bar.
- The mobile screen is so small that viewing product images is quite inconvenient. Make it just like they are swiping images from their photo gallery:
What to expect:
- Better user experience on your mobile we, that leads to higher mobile customer return rate
- Higher add-to-cart and checkout conversion rates, increase in mobile sales
Tools: Mobile Web Boost app
7. Quick chat on Facebook – the next tier of Customer Support
78% of customers believe that social media will be the next tier of customer service and 46% expect brands to provide customer support on Facebook.
On holiday seasons when people shop in a rush and have so many options available, brands that provide instant responses in time to any queries from rushing shoppers definitely have a competitive advantage.
Live chat popup, emails, voice calls are behind social media in this era. Today, it’s Facebook messenger where you can deliver a wow experience to your customers.
Source: Quick Facebook Chat app
What to expect:
- Facebook Messenger is the most instant, simple and cost-saving channel to answer quick questions from shoppers and convert them into paying
- Customers love to connect with real people. Chatting with you on inbox messenger gives them a special feeling that they are talking with real staff from the store
- When you have history conversation with customers, you can easily catch up anytime to introduce new items or promote promotion campaigns. People tend to ignore a lot of emails, but they’ll check 99% of Facebook messages.
Tools: Quick Facebook Chat app
Conclusion
If you’ve come to this part, congratulations on being well-prepared for the upcoming holiday season.
No sales come easily without investing efforts into the work, from preparation to execution. A marketing plan ahead will make or break your holiday sales.
We hope this blog post will give you a bunch of great ideas to maximize your sales in the last 3 months of the year. With ready tools to execute these ideas on your own store, you have no excuses to lay back and wait for the miracle. Create your own dream year now!
Wanna master Beeketing apps and get your store ready before the holiday season comes?
Get any Beeketing apps at 10% OFF, using code BEEHOLIDAY10 – valid until Oct 30, 2018.
Or line up to receive our exclusive craziest deals for Beeketing apps on each holiday! We have different special deals from Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, through to Valentines!
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