Holiday Season creates excitement, yet stress among retailers as this is the only one time when shoppers actually spends more. But, retailers have to work extra from their normal business days. Lots of pressure in mind and fears of coping in holiday rush makes them tense.
Here are few sales and marketing strategies to get ready for this holiday season:
Sales Strategies
Plan: So, holiday season is approaching. Right? Do you have any plan in mind? If not, then you are in trouble. Foremost step towards holiday is to create a plan of all offers that you are willing to give to customers.
Types of Discounts:
- Percent: Percentage discount offered on a purchase. Ex: 20% OFF.
- Single: Amount discount offered on an order. Ex: $15% OFF on all orders.
- Fixed: Fixed amount of discount on a product. Ex: $10 OFF
- Multiple Units: Discounts offered on purchasing more than one product. Ex: Buy 2 and get 15% OFF.
- Repeat: Buy one and get one free.
Showing on Right Time
Even you enter holiday game early doesn’t guarantee you success. Starting broadcasting your promotion too early may wind up your customers. Keep your customers engaged and excited during holidays by bombarding offers well ahead of holidays. Also, there are last minute shoppers who visits your stores for offer, so keep special sales for them.
Mobile Friendliness
Mobiles are not left during holiday season. Increased traffic have been observed which means shoppers are going to search, review, buy and share using their mobiles. So, if your site is not yet optimized, its high time to get it done right away. Mobile shoppers have been increasingly using their device out of desktop to reach their product destination. Use responsive or mobile friendly website on your mobile to provide information access as required by potential buyers.
Readying your App
Get your app ready to perform the best this holiday season. Track your audience behavior to understand how they respond to App deals. Prepare App to bear the high traffic this holiday season to prevent facing crash that may divert your traffic to other sites. Test App before launching offers to ensure its smooth working. Involve complete secure payment methods to prevent compromising users credit information.
Broadcasting Offers
Since, market is accommodated with competition and shoppers couldn’t resist in fetching the right deals, make them relax by offering simple buy options. Send customized promotional emails having discount codes and product recommendation according to their likes while shopping from App.
Take maximum advantage this holiday season, securing maximum customers.
Marketing Strategies
Today’s era plants latest technologies to allow retailers connect with their customers nationally and globally. With the impact of holiday season on sales number and worldwide competition jumping for this season, demand retailers to prepare well ahead for this holiday season. Keeping your brand ahead and achieve maximum sales is followed by the effective marketing strategies that would make this year a success for your business.
Following are few marketing strategies to ensure better marketing of your store:
Optimize Website
With shoppers experiencing endless shopping options, its uttermost important to offer scalable and fast website to shoppers. Stats shows, 57% shoppers switch to other websites on finding webpage load time exceeding 3 seconds. During festive season, no eCommerce Store bear loosing potential customer, therefore, prepare well ahead, perform testing and check performance issues to stay alive during high traffic.
Using Data Analytics tools may help in tracking website traffic. Investing in SEO will benefit in using the common terminology by shoppers while searching products.
Serving Omni-Channel Experience
Giving freedom to customers to shop wherever they want, however they want and whenever they want provides with the consistent shopping experience leads to maximum customer satisfaction. Possibility arises by adopting OmniChannel solutions. Since years, innovations and latest technologies has changed customer common shopping behavior. Merchants required different marketing strategies to adopt ability to interact with customers. Contributing mobiles, mobile payments, App, mPOS, beacon technology and much more tops the list.
Videos
With maximum customers diverting to product videos to view product reviews have resulted the consumption to over 400%. Videos being dominating the market by involving in content marketing strategy offer benefits to customers knowing what the product actually offers. Videos being shared across multiple channels gain customers attention to stay ahead in competition. 47% retailers are likely to invest in video marketing.
Mobile
Google update focus on mobile optimized websites. Check your eCommerce website implements Google trends to rank ahead competition. Get maximum notification from buyers on getting top rankings. Involving mobiles during sales widens opportunity to interact with customers globally due to considerable high number of shoppers going mobile year after year to purchase. While you remain busy with website design, don’t forget mobile as more number of shoppers buy goods from mobiles and tablets. Business may also customize offers based on the particular location or region of buyers by tracking mobile sales data.
Email Marketing
In this holiday season, reach potential customers by blasting promotional emails in their inbox. Increased opportunity to communicate with the customers as more like 57% of customers subscribe to promotional email to know about the latest offers. Add this in your to-do-list to make most this holiday season. Create right email marketing strategy to gain potential customers.
Keep email and newsletters template festive, including, small content as your customers don’t have much time to go through each and every line. Choose a right time to send emails, and avoid sending in morning as customers remain busy with other chores. Incorporating relevant videos and pictures adhering creativity and simplicity will better market your products.
Painless Shipping
With eCommerce giants exploring new ways to ship products with same day or next day delivery, shoppers have raised their expectation much more than before. Now, eCommerce stores keep their customers intact by providing fast delivery. Since, customer drives more during this season, retailers also offers placing order online and pick-up from store. If you have prepared well ahead, then there are no chances to loss the last minute buyers.
Most customers turned out on getting delayed delivery. Henceforth, ensure next day shipping to send products reaching customer’s door on time. The fast shipping you execute, less will be backlog. Don’t forget to send tracking number to make easier for customers to know where their product has reached.
Secure Payment Methods
With holiday season buzzing this month, hackers have alarmed retailers. As online sales are an important factor to gain maximum customers, its also widens opportunities for the hackers to compromise private data. Ecommerce websites should be kept updated with the security systems to handle potential treats. Comprehending anti-fraud activities ensures merchants to automatically identify potential treats. Integrate new payment methods using latest technologies will help customers to making payment flawlessly.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media is a boon to eCommerce Store retailers to experience maximum sales this holiday season. Creating right marketing strategies and implementing on social media marketing campaign gains traffic attention. Customized messages to display right products for right customers plays vital role in converting traffic to buyers. As users belongs to specific region or location, so you would be able to gather their likes and interest data that would be effective for holiday season.
Today, shoppers eagerly waits for holiday season to make maximum purchase and earn huge savings on various products. Tremendous online sales leading significant increase in sales figures and consumer demands hits new record every year. For many retailers, holiday seasons seems to be the big days to earn more unlike rest of the years. It became the good reason to seek growth in sales and more customers. Keeping the eCommerce Store ready for the holiday season results in maximum ROI.
I like the strategies described in this blog. I am also working on readying my store for this festive season. This time I have focused on autoresponder emails activity so that my customer get an idea about the products available on sale during the festive. Well we can find so many solutions in internet, it is a must to choose the right one for the store.