Industry Tips

5 Helpful Tips for a Winning Holiday Sales Season

Holiday season plays a pivotal role in the fiscal success of most eSellers. Thus, it’s not too early to start developing your holiday sales strategy.

The following are some proactive tips for getting ahead on your sales and marketing efforts for the holiday season.

Use eCommerce Automation Tools

If you try to manage your entire eCommerce business manually, the holiday season becomes overwhelming. Instead, evaluate and acquire tools that allow you to automate certain aspects of your operation.

If you’re a Shopify Plus seller, for instance, you have access to automation tools that could save you countless hours of tedious activity. Flash sales and new product launches are just a couple of the key features that you can facilitate through automation and save valuable time.

Emphasize Social Ads and Email Communication

Getting in early on social media conversations is critical for the holiday season. Social interaction is what creates a buzz around providers, brands and products that become trendy for the upcoming holidays.

Take the time now to develop visual, creative social media ads that target particular segments of your audience. Include short videos, product demonstrations and colorful images that attract attention in a cluttered social feed.

Email is another central digital communication channel. As people visit your site, make email acquisition through account setup or newsletter distribution a priority.

Leverage Influencers

In addition to exceptionally creative ads, identify influencers that you can partner with to build your campaigns. A lot of product-oriented influencers look for hot products to feature in their holiday guides on their blogs. You can review published guides from last year to get a sense for the influencers that best match your business.

Top influencers are also active on social media. Thus, getting them to share the story about your business and products can carry a lot of weight in generating early holiday excitement.

Prepare Retargeting Campaigns

Remember that the vast majority of online shoppers don’t make a purchase the first time they visit your site. Therefore, retargeting campaigns are to holiday sales success.

Plan your campaigns early to develop the most sensible strategy. Retarget people on Google AdWords and other online ad platforms based on specific pages or products they viewed on your site. Combine retargeting via digital ads with email campaigns to lure intrigued visitors into making purchases.

Offer Gift Card Deals

You may notice a lot of brick-and-mortar retailers heavily promote gift cards ahead of the holidays. They do so to generate revenue ahead of the rush and to take advantage of consumers contemplating a budget-conscious strategy.

Offer gift cards or discount codes with an incentive, such as a 10 or 20 percent value over what the shopper spends. You can capture holiday revenue in advance with savvy marketing.

Conclusion

These are some of the most effective things eSellers can do now to prepare for the upcoming holiday season. Take these steps to get your share of the massive consumer holiday spending budget!

As you prep for the holidays, include a plan for efficiently receiving online payments via a top global platform like Payoneer!

Neil Kokemuller

Neil Kokemuller has been a college marketing professor since 2004. He has also been an active business, marketing and education writer and content media website developer since 2007. Kokemuller has additional professional experience in retail and small business, and holds a Master of Business Administration from Iowa State University.