Quick and Easy Ways to Boost Sales During the Holiday Season

As I discussed previously, the holiday season is a great time to bump up your sales. We have already gone over how to target your existing or email-based customers with various promotions and specials, as well as the ways to make sure you keep customers signed up and invested in your business; now we will take a step back into various methods behind the scenes that can help you determine what your holiday goals are, and how to meet them.

Two Crucial Goals

First, there are two goals to keep in mind:

1. Email acquisitions (for future promotions and updates)
2. Sale goals (how much do you want to make?)

Set a stretch goal for both of these that forces you to aim high and get creative! Some like to set a few goals – ‘Must reach’ goal, ‘Happy to achieve’ goal, and ‘Made it to the moon’. You can use these to reverse-engineer your sales and marketing techniques.

Planning is Everything

Secondly, I cannot stress this enough, plan ahead! Know your holidays: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the last sat before Christmas, Christmas Eve and Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve. Note that it is best to stagger your promotions throughout the season, rather than focus on one day. Think of this in terms of both being able to start small and ramp up – which is better for your bottom line – as well as the idea that it is easier to finally get your audience’s attention if you try several times, rather than throw everything at them on one day.

#1 Email Acquisition

Easy Ways to Increase Email Acquisition:

Update your email sign up form with text regarding upcoming sales, such as “Sign up now for Cyber Monday deal updates!”, as well as pepper your social media with hints about upcoming promotions that they can only receive via the email list. People love deals – they want to sign up.

Launch holiday retargeted banners. You lose click-troughs and conversions every month; this is a great time and way to turn those into customers.

Update your creative on the site and on the newsletter to attract new customers:

• Use high quality images
• Create a consistent story, from your promotional newsletters to your website
• Keep item text short and clean

If you have not already, make sure any purchase automatically opts-in to your newsletter.

#2 Boosting Sales

Quick Ways to Increase Sales:

Bid on Cyber Monday terms in AdWords & Bing. People only know they want a deal, not necessarily what or where, so they will search for it.

Make sure your website is mobile friendly! Mobile traffic accounted for over 50 percent of all internet traffic during Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2014, and mobile transactions counted for about 30 percent of all online orders. If you have an app, you may want to emphasize your iOS platforms: according to Apple Insider, Apple devices drove almost 78 percent of mobile e-commerce orders. Long story short, if your site does not function on a smartphone, you are losing business.

Keep an eye on your bestsellers; running out of popular items costs you money on the item, and might send customers searching for it elsewhere.

Streamline your online checkout. The less information they have to input, the better. One mistake commonly made by online retailers is requiring the customer to create an account before they check out. Always let them have the option to check out as a guest!

Theme your landing page to optimize your SEO. This will need to be planned out ahead of time, but it is worth it to create clean, well-designed pages that are as attractive as they are useful.

Lastly, do not forget follow up emails! How often have you bought an item simply because you received a coupon or discount from the online store after browsing? Follow up emails after a purchase encourage previous customers to come back and shop with you again.

Also, do not make the mistake of forgetting about abandoned cart customers, who may place items in their cart and then navigate away from the page. Follow up emails to them should compel customers to come back and complete their purchases. They should be sent within 24 hours of a cart being abandoned, and can offer things like free shipping, a small discount, or a free item with purchase. Do not forget to be creative!

It All Pays Off

This all may sound like a lot of work, but planning ahead and getting things ready will pay off in the long run. Above all, know your customers, or use this as an opportunity to get to know them better. The more you try and learn during this season, the better your marketing techniques will be all year round!