Boost Your Holiday Sales with These E-commerce Marketing Tips

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Creating Special Landing Pages
3. Offering Something for Free
4. Email Marketing
5. Referral Marketing
6. Instagram Marketing
7. Conclusion

Boosting Your Online Store Sales During the Holiday Season

The holiday season is a time when consumers become extra excited about shopping, and this is actually a great opportunity to boost your online store sales and revenue. In fact, in 2020, consumers spent around 789 billion USD during the holiday season in November and December in the United States alone, so you can imagine the potential of the entire holiday season. In this article, we are going to talk about and share different proven tips that will help you to plan out and execute a successful holiday strategy and promotions so you can give your revenue that boost.

Creating Special Landing Pages

Many businesses make the mistake of not creating special landing pages for their products and service offerings. But not only campaign-specific landing pages are actually a must for a store during any time of the year, they can be very helpful to give your store that holiday feel and cheer. So make it clear that you're offering something special for a specific time, maybe even throw in a countdown timer. With a landing page for each product or service, you can actually provide customers with a clear picture of each of your special offers, and since they will have all of the details in a single call to action on a one-page, you're most likely to increase that conversion rate on your website.

There are many different landing page builder tools that you can actually use to create beautiful landing pages for your website. Use reliable and feature-rich landing page builder tools that are actually pocket-friendly and can provide you with everything that you need to create a landing page for your sale. You can use different tools such as Page Fly or Gem Pages. Here are some important tips that you can use to create high converting landing pages for your sales:

• Your landing page must be well thought through in terms of the user experience.
• Don't add too much text, just provide the most essential details and make sure that the page is scannable by the customer so they can easily understand what's in the offer for them.
• Don't forget to use a suitable call to action strategically placed on the landing page and make it crystal clear on how exactly customers can actually buy and apply discounts.
• Clear the path for your customers so they can easily complete the desired action in a few simple steps that will take them closer to the purchase stage.
• Use countdown timers to create that excitement and add a little bit of the scarcity effect and FOMO.
• Make sure that your landing page is mobile-optimized.

Offering Something for Free

Offering something free is actually a great strategy to boost your sales because customers love getting things for free, and during the holiday season, people are in the shopping and money-spending mode, so offering something for free can actually provide them with that breath of fresh air and might even encourage them to actually shop from you. If you include a free gift, you can give different things, for example, free gift cards or free products or even free shipping to your customers. In terms of free shipping, it is almost a must for a holiday sale. Consumers are attracted to such kind of deals, and chances are that because your competitors are already offering it, so don't give them that chance to steal your customers from you.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is among the best channels to actually nurture your leads into the customers and also maintain customer relationships. So you have been already building your customer list throughout the year and maybe years before that, so that will be an asset during the holiday email marketing campaigns. You can announce your holiday promotions and events and include links to your SEO posts. Just be sure to follow best practices such as segmenting and personalizing your customers to get the most success, and don't forget to write effective holiday email subject lines so that emails have a good open rate.

Don't forget to reactivate your last year's holiday shoppers. Since you're looking into the last whole last year's records, why not directly engage people who already have bought something from you last Christmas? You know that they are a ready group that has proven the ability to purchase from you and are interested in holiday shopping, and you also know what they actually got last year. Simply filter them into separate customer segments and don't forget to email them with specific early bird discount sales for old friends, and this is how you can do it in Shopify admin panel.

If you had some successful email campaigns last year, you can easily replicate them. Just look through what kind of emails got you the best results, like what kind of offers did you use, what discount it was, did you use some specific CTAs, or maybe it was the targeting. Don't forget to analyze the data to retarget those customers again, and you can reuse those old seasonal email campaigns and only update maybe design and the products to make sure that your customers don't catch you using the reusing the same templates again for the season.

Also, don't forget to automate the engagement to meet shipping deadlines because that is quite important when it comes to communication with customers to allow enough time for delivery. Don't forget to use automated emails to get order fulfillment on time. Those can be actually done through different shipping services such as UPS or FedEx, or you can use different shipping apps such as Shipping Chip, for example. And there is nothing wrong with giving your customers that little extra nudge when it comes to guaranteeing customer satisfaction with the time delivery, and all you need to do is to time your holiday email campaign properly and have clear deadlines for the orders.

Referral Marketing

Referral marketing is always a successful strategy, but it is actually especially useful during the holiday season. You can encourage your customers to refer their friends, family members, maybe even colleagues by simply offering them a small discount. For example, you can give 10% extra off if the customer refers somebody else to your website to complete the purchase, and this can actually help you grow your customer base as well as the sales and revenue without costing much. And the best point about it is that your customers are promoting your business for you.

Instagram Marketing

Instagram users are actually very highly engaged, and the platform has shown the ability to generate 10 times more engagement compared to any other social network, and with the proper Instagram holiday strategy, you can actually see success very easily. Here are a few tips that can help you to do that:

• Make sure that your Instagram account is actually a business account because business accounts on Instagram come together with analytics that can actually help you to make right decisions based on data.
• You need to find influencers from the same target audience to collaborate with because they will help you to get more customers and more exposure and sales during the sale season.
• You can also share customer success stories, different positive reviews, pictures of happy customers. Trust factor plays a really important role in the purchasing journey of each customer, so don't forget to use that.
• Don't forget to take advantage of your Instagram posts and UGC. If you are showcasing your merchandise on social media, then you need to make sure that those pictures are actually shoppable and make it easy for your customers to go from being like a passive browser to actually a paying customer by simplifying that process for them so they can easily complete the purchase in a few clicks.
• Remember that the way to accomplish that might vary depending on the social media that you're going to use. So for example, if you're on Facebook, there are several shopping cart solutions in the market, for example, the one from Shopify. Instagram, on the other hand, actually allows you to tag products directly in your posts and stories, and Instagram shoppable galleries and UGC from Grove actually allows you to do the same directly on your website.

Conclusion

In conclusion, boosting your online store sales during the holiday season is not an easy task, but it is definitely doable. By following the tips mentioned in this article, you can actually increase your sales and revenue and make the most out of the holiday season. Remember to create special landing pages, offer something for free, use email marketing, referral marketing, and Instagram marketing to your advantage. And don't forget to automate the engagement to meet shipping deadlines and guarantee customer satisfaction with the time delivery.