Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year — for your online business! Everyone is scrambling to find the perfect, unique gifts for their loved ones so you should be looking at Christmas as your no. 1 annual opportunity to make bank.
1 — Get into the Spirit of Christmas
Christmas brings out warm feelings in people; strong emotions concerning peace, love, family, warmth, community, and togetherness. The best way to reap the benefits of Christmas at your online business is to tap into this feeling.
Instead of thinking about how you can maximize sales, first think of ways you can associate your business with the emotions of Christmas. Ultimately, this will mean people will see your brand as supplying the Christmas cheer they crave as opposed to being a cheap materialistic cash grab.
Find ways to delight your audience with Christmas fun and the sales will fall into place on their own.
2 — Spruce up Your Store with Festive Theming
It doesn’t take long to change your theme on your store, particularly if you use a platform like Shopify. Don’t forget to also change your social media banners and profile pics to more festive variants. You can put Santa hats on all your profiles.
Use a preset Christmas theme with presents, a Christmas tree, snowflakes, etc. if you’re in a rush, but even better is to include Christmas-themed images and videos showing people using your products as part of their Christmas celebration. This can position your brand as being pivotal to the Christmas experience.
3 — Gift Guides
Finding the right gift for the most important people in your life (and everyone else you might have forgotten) is legitimately stressful. Your store can make things easier for your customers by offering a gift guide that helps them choose the perfect gifts.
This has a number of key benefits that shows your company is the “good guy.” You’re:
- Helping them choose a unique gift
- Lowering holiday stress
- Offering value to the customer
- Highlighting all of the strengths of your product
- Creating a shareable guide that’s great for SEO and SMM
- Making choosing your product easy
- Driving sales with a time-limited discount
4 — Community is Important at Christmas
To further foster the Christmas spirit in your subscribers, your social media game needs to be strong. At this time of year, every online company is gearing up to run a Christmas marketing campaign, so yours needs to be strong, authentic, and fun.
Besides promoting your products, consider just starting discussions about Christmas. Ask followers about their favorite Christmas movies. Share recipes that make Christmas great and ask for their favorite home-cooked suggestions. Offer prizes for the best Christmas story, or run a Christmas-themed competition that preferably includes your products as part of the theme.
It’s a good time to highlight the community efforts your company has been involved in throughout the year.
All of these things show you and your company to really understand what Christmas is all about. In the end, this authenticity drives sales.
5 — Cater to Last-Minute Shoppers
Some e-commerce stores lose out as they’re not able to promise delivery by Christmas on the last few days running up to the day itself. Get your delivery network in order, offer free, fast delivery, and make the details of delivery clear and easy to understand.
Include options that don’t require delivery so they can be bought at any time, such as an e-voucher gift card.
Last-minute shoppers are some of the most motivated buyers out there, so it pays to do all you can to cater to them.
6 — Countdowns
Countdowns work especially well at Christmas as shoppers are already being held to the clock. They need to get their gifts in time for Christmas, and you should be reminding them at every opportunity!
Countdowns can also be used as part of your marketing campaign, highlighting how long a sales event has left before it expires, how many days are left before shipping might be too late, and showing how little stock of an item you have left — better buy now!
7 — Free Gifts
For Christmas, consider throwing in free shipping, free gift wrapping, or a free gift if the customer purchases the more expensive option or if they meet a certain purchase threshold. This is essentially just another form of upselling, but instead of looking pushy your company will come across as getting into the festive spirit.
8 — UpselI Items
Pockets tend to be deeper when Christmas rolls around, as even Scrooges find themselves looking for the best presents for their loved ones with a time limit to act. Highlighting the benefits of a more premium product over cheaper variants can result in the customer choosing the pricier model.
9 — Cross-Sell Complementary Items
Cross-selling items that pair well with a gift choice can get the customer to spend more at your store than they had initially planned. Carefully curated gift pairing can take a lot of the stress out of Christmas gift shopping for customers so you’re doing them a service as well as increasing your sales per order.
10 — Cross-Sell Other Items
It’s easy to think of complementary items to cross-sell in some cases (gloves to go with scarves, a monitor stand with a monitor, for example), but it also pays to offer other items that don’t immediately fit the mold. Studies have shown that people often need some relatively diverse products at the same time.
Systems like DataCue monitor the behaviors of all website visitors and purchasers to find correlations between the items they buy. Showing that “People who bought that item also bought this item” is a powerful way to increase sales. Using an automatic system like DataCue works wonders as interesting correlations between products are found and displayed to the consumer in an optimal manner.
Christmas is a fun time for all, and with smart, authentic, community-driven marketing, your e-commerce sales and conversion will never have been higher. Ho, ho, ho!
Cover photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash
