The holiday season is fast approaching, and there’s never been a better time for eCommerce! So seize this prime opportunity to skyrocket your sales with a robust eCommerce marketing strategy and tried-and-tested eCommerce marketing tips tailored to the holidays.
If there is any good to come out of the health crisis in 2020, it’s that consumers adjusted to purchasing online, and brands embraced eCommerce digital marketing. As a result, the 2020 holidays saw an astounding 32.2 percent increase in online purchases from 2019 (CNBC). What’s more, we saw an early start to the holiday shopping season – three out of every ten shoppers started as early as October (Coresight Research) instead of the usual Black Friday at the end of November.
While the global pandemic pushed people online specifically as a way to avoid crowds, eCommerce franchise experts (and even Black Friday organizers) predict similar spending habits and steady eCommerce growth in the coming years. Still, the holidays are the best time for sales, and competition is tough, so you have everything to gain from positioning your eCommerce marketing strategy ahead of the holiday rush.
Read on to discover what is eCommerce marketing, expert-approved eCommerce marketing tips and some of the best eCommerce marketing strategies to boost your holiday sales. Find eCommerce site marketing tips that are useful for everyone, from mom-and-pop store owners to eCommerce franchisees.
10 Practical eCommerce Marketing Tips To Skyrocket Your Holiday Sales
While the holidays can provide excellent eCommerce digital marketing results, finding success doesn’t come without challenges. For instance, a mom-and-pop store might not have the eCommerce site marketing knowledge to pivot quickly, while an eCommerce franchise might have logistics-focused priorities during peak sales seasons.
Not to worry – we’ve put together a list of simple and actionable eCommerce marketing tips any business owner can implement to capitalize on the increased consumer spending during the holiday season. This list covers eCommerce marketing strategy tips to carry out before, during and after the holiday season for the best results.
Get started on these eCommerce marketing strategy tips ahead of the holiday rush:
1. Decorate!
People decorate their homes to get into the holiday spirit, and sprucing up your website can get customers into the buying mood. Have a holiday-themed web design, create festive social media posts and offer gift-wrapping or holiday packaging. For multi-location businesses, ensure your franchise online store has a consistent look and feel across all website versions and put the same effort into decorating your physical locations.
2. Release a Holiday Marketing Video
After your static elements are in place, you can increase your impact with a unique and emotional holiday video ad. Nothing kicks off the holidays quite like a heartwarming video. What’s more, videos steal attention, engage and get shared 1,200 percent more than links and text combined, so consider including various video types in your social media content as well.
3. Create Helpful Content
The holidays are hectic, and since your customers are focused on holiday preparations, you might as well be there with them. For example, you can create a blog post about preparing your home for Christmas to promote your scented candles or make a social media post on what to check in your house before hardware stores close up for the holidays to promote your home repair services.
This way, you stay relevant and valuable to your target audience and use keywords that help your eCommerce search engine optimization (SEO) efforts behind the scenes. It’s going to take time for your holiday content to pick up on search results, so get started on your content marketing as soon as possible.
4. Offer Limited-Time Promotions
Everyone knows that discounts and deals are abundant during the holidays, but setting a time limit is particularly important for eCommerce product marketing. Countdown timers instill a sense of urgency, make your potential customers prioritize you over your competitors and increase revenue by as much as 9 percent (Whichtestwon).
5. Give Your Customers a Gift
Aside from special offers to encourage purchases, consider giving your customers a gift – it’s the season of giving, after all. The gift can come in the form of a free shipping voucher, giveaways or even the gift of gratitude. The simplest gestures and thank yous mean a lot to your customers – and can surprisingly improve your eCommerce product marketing by helping them remember your brand.
6. Design an Email Marketing Campaign
When you invest in great content and come up with enticing promotions, you want to ensure that your potential customers know about them. Email takes you straight to your target audience’s inbox, giving you a great chance of being noticed. Consider designing a drip campaign to send out more targeted and personalized emails.
7. Leverage Retargeting
Especially at a time when your customers are easily swayed, you should invest in people already inclined to purchase from you. For instance, someone might have added your product to their cart after seeing it in an email but did not proceed to checkout. You can retarget them through eCommerce pay-per-click (PPC) ads and paid social media campaigns for them to see the product again and consider purchasing.
8. Level Up Your Website
Setting up your website analytics ensures you can monitor and improve your site’s technical performance, which is crucial to eCommerce optimization. Fast-loading website pages should be your top priority to avoid users exiting your site – it’s important to have high-quality product images, but not at the expense of your site speed. To offer a better user experience (UX), experts recommend highlighting your best-selling products.
Also, retargeting your customers and sending personalized emails can only happen when you collect accurate data on your customers. Make sure your website analytics is set up correctly to track website visitor behavior and sales.
9. Tap Influencers
Keeping up your engagement on social media is vital to stand out from the crowd during the busy holiday season. Influencer marketing is undoubtedly one of the best eCommerce marketing strategies today. Influencers speak directly to your target audience (instead of trying to chase them), and general social media engagement is necessary to amplify your online presence. It’s also important to feature your influencer or customer testimonials and online reviews to add credibility and make purchase decisions easier.
10. Optimize the Experience for Local Shoppers
With all that you know about marketing during the holidays, it’s a conscious effort to cater your communications to your customer’s specific location. For instance, there is no use in offering a product or service that isn’t available in a customer’s region. Personalizing the shopping experience through local SEO tactics plays into an overarching franchise SEO strategy that drives profitable results for your multi-location business.
General eCommerce Marketing Tactics for the Holidays
eCommerce and marketing strategies don’t change during the holidays – you just pivot them to meet the market’s needs better. So, apart from the specific eCommerce marketing strategy tips, you should also consider a broader eCommerce campaign strategy to maximize the peak sales season.
General tips for a well-rounded holiday eCommerce campaign strategy:
• Stock Up and Staff Up
Is your franchise online store well-stocked on your best-selling products? Do you have enough people to accommodate your upcoming bookings? Keep up with the increase in demand to avoid hindering your eCommerce and marketing strategies. This also means providing reliable customer service.
• Know Your Customer
Do your customers like the same products? Do they need new services? Are they active on the same social platforms? What worked last year won’t necessarily work again, so refreshing your understanding of your target audience is central to a good eCommerce marketing strategy.
• Make It Personal
It’s going to take next-level eCommerce marketing tactics to be noticed during a hectic shopping season, and generic communications won’t cut it. Effective eCommerce marketing strategies are data-driven and personalized according to where your customer is in the buying journey.
Get Started on a Holistic eCommerce Digital Marketing Strategy
If your business isn’t already equipped with eCommerce and marketing strategies, it’s absolutely time to get moving. Nurturing an excellent overall customer experience puts you leaps ahead of your competitors, especially during the holiday season. But you can only reap the benefits if you start now, build momentum and position yourself uniquely.
Working with industry professionals on an overarching holiday eCommerce marketing strategy is precisely how to market eCommerce the right way.
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency is a full-service eCommerce marketing company growing businesses of all sizes since 2005. We customize a holistic eCommerce marketing strategy to boost your holiday sales according to your specific objectives. We also use analytics data to help you discover the most effective eCommerce marketing strategies for your franchise online store. Contact us today to position your business for record-high holiday sales.
