Whether you’re a new online retailer or you’ve been there for several seasons already, you know what the festive season means to your business. Nearly 2 to 4 dollars out of every 10 dollars you earn in a year comes from festive sales. It’s festival time again – gird up and get your store ready the right way!
1. Do Your Due Diligence Early
As early as August, evaluate your site, both desktop and mobile, with a fine-toothed comb. Is your site design outdated? How fast is your checkout? What items do you need to stock? What are the current shopping trends? What are your competitors up to? Start thinking and planning months ahead and you’ll rock the sales over the holidays.
2. Get Started On Those Email Campaigns
Don’t overload your subscribers’ inboxes. Plan early; review your emailing list and ready it by November. Carefully schedule and execute updates, pre-holiday sales, gift suggestions, last shopping day notices and other events. Watch the response and change tactics to get the most of your email campaign.
3. Plan Your Social Media Efforts
By October, you should have your social media announcements planned. Include discounts, campaigns, urgent offers, follower rewards and so on. Blog heavily on various gift ideas and suggestions. Up your email and RSS subscription. Host contests on social media and reward winners with gifts and discount codes. Use Pinterest boards to highlight gift ideas from your store.
4. Plan For A Possible Traffic Jam
Holiday season means extra traffic. Test your servers for additional load management. Keep your eyes peeled for server transaction errors during checkouts. Nothing puts people off like a 502 or a 404 error. Brush up your site, servers and all your internal business processes to handle maximum traffic.
5. Get On The PPC Research Wagon Early
Look up search terms that buyers will be using to track your site. Review last year’s keyword list and see which ones you can optimize. Watch out on the investment side – you don’t want to blow all your festival sales funding on buying keywords for your PPC campaign.
6. Fine-Tune Your Holiday Messaging
Design several landing pages in line with your traffic sources – newsletters, PPC Ads, search engine results, social media links, and blog links and so on. Avoid using the same landing page. Also ensure that your holiday messaging and product details are totally consistent in the pages.
7. Plan How To Handle Shopping Cart Abandonment
Analyze and segment cart failures. Try and capture the shopper’s email while exiting. Email with an enticing discount so they come back. If you don’t have their email, retarget through your Ad campaign. See where the cart failures are happening, and try and fix the issues.
8. Get Creative With Shipping
Plan your shipping schedules ahead and determine the last day of shopping. For last-minute shoppers, tie up with priority shipping. Present shipping as an offer too – for example, purchases for X amount qualifies for overnight shipping, free shipping or heavy discounts.
9. Stock Up
Keep an eye on your inventory as the sales begin. Review the previous years’ inventory needs and stock up on items that you know will not last. Keep your suppliers informed well in advance, and replenish your stock of popular items and suggested gift items.
10. Make Post-Holiday Plans
It’s not just festival shopping that people gear up for. Many of them wait for the post-festive sales as well. Make a plan to target those shoppers at least a week before Christmas. Promote your special post-holiday discounts and sales immediately after Christmas and keep the momentum going for a long while.
11. Offer Gift Vouchers
Not everyone knows exactly what to buy their loved ones, so they tend to stock up on gift vouchers. This is excellent for your business, because you can offer gift vouchers with attractive discounts. You can also entice more gift voucher shoppers by offering added value for bulk orders.
12. Offer Freebies
Another thing you can do is to promote the early bird and minimum cart value offers. Offer free gifts to people who shop early for the festive season and for those whose shopping exceeds a certain value. No one says no to a freebie, especially when they can gift that freebie to someone over Christmas!