With the holiday season coming up, people are going to get very busy with their holiday shopping, and with the rise of online sales year after year, this is the time for you to vamp up your marketing strategy and capture a larger piece of the pie and boost holiday sales.
To take an advantage of these high traffic times, we’ve put together a list of 4 things that ecommerce businesses should consider to get as many customers as possible this holiday season.
- Free shipping
Who does not love free shipping? It is well known that offering free shipping increases cart conversions. Giving customers this great benefit will surely make them come to your business repeatedly while also suggesting you to their friends and family. As we all know, everyone loves to pay as low as possible and this might be the difference between you and the next ecommerce seller in getting the extra customer.
- Product video demonstrations
With so many online retailers to choose from and so many different products they can browse through, people will always prefer something that takes less effort and is served to them, rather than them having to work for information. As a result, ecommerce businesses that adopt a video demonstration of the product have seen a rise in conversions.
For example a large portion of people’s holiday shopping is done for children and it is a huge concern for buyers whether the product will be safe or not. Text descriptions often do not give a detailed enough explanation of how the product will operate. After viewing a video and all the motions and movements of the toy, parents will feel much safer buying their beloved sons and daughters that unique toy.
- In store pick-up
Sometimes, ecommerce businesses have a hard time offering free delivery while also providing other benefits such as discounts to their customers; or simply because of how much postal and courier services cost. Instead of pushing delivery charges a rise in merchants adopting a pick up service for local customers. Apart from benefiting the customer with giving him the option to pick up his order at his convenience, businesses also face two separate benefits if customers opt for this option:
- You can get even more sales through this service. It is a studied fact that customers that walk into a store to pick up their order often buy a few more items in the process that catches their eye.
- Although this is a unique service, allowing it gives you a different competitive advantage over all of your competitors who do not have this option. Aside from completely online ecommerce businesses that cannot provide it, this service is still faster than the average two-day delivery services generally offered. Customers can browse for products online, book it, pay for it at that moment and pick it up later.
- Packaged deals
Offering a ready-made bundle package for customers by selecting popular holiday gift items instead of having them pick up the things they want individually. Finding out what they want in the holidays is not that difficult. The simplest way will be to monitor the traffic on your ecommerce website before the holidays and find out what people are looking at the most, and then create a few sensible items that go well together while including an item or two that are not doing well or have a high inventory.
Similar to the benefits gained from in store pick-ups, customers might even make extra purchases when buying the bundles. For example, they might have gone into the website with the intention of buying one specific item when they stumble on to the bundle and find a few more products they can buy along with his original purchase at a much more reasonable cost.
There are a lot of things ecommerce businesses can do to boost their sales in the holiday season. If you think you can provide a few more beneficial tips and tricks, share them with everyone in the comments section below.
Image by: Rache P.
