9 Tips to Help Online Sellers Turn Up the Heat This Summer
Summer has finally arrived and as the sun shines and temperatures soar, you may have noticed that your online sales seem to be dropping.
As a result of high vaccination rates in certain parts of the world against the COVID-19 virus, consumers are currently preoccupied with traveling and enjoying leisure, meaning they’re spending less time shopping on your site.
With the summer season traditionally being the slower period for online shopping, now is an ideal time for sellers like you to try and engage with new customers, revamp your online store, create new marketing campaigns and much more.
To help you prepare your retail store for this upcoming season, we’ve compiled a list of several ways you can keep your eCommerce business churning and increase sales with new marketing strategies, even during a summer scorcher.
Grab some shades and get ready to explore 9 ways to help you get the (beach) ball rolling.
1. Give Your Website a Summer Spruce
First and foremost, before diving into new marketing campaigns, your first step should be taking care of the very first thing your shoppers see, your homepage! Giving your website a summer sprucing-up can really affect the way shoppers interact with your brand. Add a seasonal pop up that takes less time and effort than an entire website redesign, send out seasonal emails that include catchy and witty summer-related captions, limited-time promotions, or newsletters.
Try also updating products that are outdated, unclear, or too small, adding more descriptive or persuasive descriptions, and adding keywords when appropriate. These tweaks will provide a better user experience and boost sales.
In addition to adding that summer feel to your site, now’s a great time to make sure your site is responsive and looks and acts the way you want it to on all screens. Consider updating images and content in order to make it more relevant and reflect the latest inventory.
2. Diversify Your Products
Do you tend to focus only on one specific type of product? Now that shoppers are looking into summer items, consider branching out to include additional items related to your product. For example, if you sell winter boots exclusively, perhaps try bringing in a line of summer sandals, flip flops, or water clogs to help improve summer sales. Diversifying your offerings will help broaden your customer pool and give your products a longer sales reach.
3. Optimize for Mobile
Summer months are typically slower because people tend to be outdoors more (considering we just spent almost an entire year and a half in multiple lockdowns as a result of the pandemic) and more time on their mobile phones. In fact, over the last 6 months, 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online via their mobile device.
As temperatures increase, now’s the time to update your mobile experience for customers on the go. Make sure your store is user-friendly, easy to navigate and includes a simplified check-out process to avoid abandoned carts and encourage online sales. Furthermore, try offering special “mobile-only” deals via SMS or email to attract more mobile users.
4. Go Hard on Social Media
The slow summer season might just be the best time to boost your social media presence and connect with your customers. Engaging with your customers on social media allows you to cultivate relationships with your current customers and can also help bring in new ones.
Make sure you’re active and consistent throughout the summer with posts on exclusive deals, upcoming inventory, seasonal items, and giveaway contests.
5. Run a Facebook or Instagram Contest
Speaking of boosting your presence on social media, why not run a fun summer-themed contest to increase engagement and also bring in more sales?! Whether they’re wine-tasting in Italy or taking a local staycation, your customers are going to be all over social media this summer, so take advantage of it and run a fun contest or giveaway. For example, get your new and existing customers to send in fun summer shots with one of your products in the picture, and have them upload it to social media.
Then, use specific hashtags with a CTA to give out a prize to the best captions or snapshots of them using your product. Contests and giveaways are also a great way to curate user-generated content, increasing your brand’s visibility.
6. Kick Off Mid-Season Sales
Why only go for one summer sale if you can launch a mid-season sale attractive even more shoppers back to your store? In case you have left over inventory that you’re eager to get rid of, use a mid-season sale to push those items and even offer free shipping and promotions on larger purchases to increase chances of higher sale values.
Remind your customers that summer is anything but over and that they still have the chance to grab their favorite items…for great prices.
7. Focus on Email Marketing Funnels
Email is a great way to connect with past and potential customers, and with the increased competition for inbox space, it’s vital to create funnels that are focused on converting.
Use the off-season slump to split-test campaigns, try out new email designs and copy and test out subject lines to see which ones have the highest chance of driving conversions. Not only will email marketing boost your online sales, but it will also help you improve campaigns when the busy shopping season comes back around.
8. Build a Summer Shopping Guide
As the COVID-19 pandemic slowly subsides in many regions of the world, people are looking for some good summer content to read while under the sun, especially since the mood is at its as many lockdowns and strict social distancing measures have been lifted.
Enter content marketing. Create a summer shopping guide exclusively for your customers that features your best-selling summer products and which ones they should take on their trip to the beach, or even abroad. Promote your guide via an email marketing campaign, on social media and even create a specific section on your store’s homepage where shoppers could easily locate it.
9. Analyze Your Business
The summer is a long season to work through, so why not take an overall look at your eCommerce business and see which areas need improving? Check the status of your site’s current content and start working on new blogs, how-to videos, newsletter and other helpful advice for shoppers that can increase your appeal and your SEO standings.
If you’re selling on Amazon for example, now’s the time to go through your advertising costs and better understand how those ads performed. Furthermore, go through the rest of your business practices from return policies to customer service responses and more to see where you can improve and how.
Make Summer the Most Lucrative Season for Your Business
While the summer season can certainly feel like a slump for many eCommerce sellers, it shouldn’t discourage you from trying to improve and from creating new ideas to boost sales. In order to stay afloat during the slow period, you’ll need to really shift gears in order to see those sales coming in. Whether it’s some fine tuning on your site’s homepage or creating new and exciting marketing campaigns, anything can help, you just need to be proactive.
Don’t be afraid to try something new or to make adjustments to your current strategy. Start encouraging your shoppers to spend this summer!
As an online seller, it’s imperative that you have the right payments solution to manage your business, specifically international payments from overseas customers. With Payoneer’s cross-border payments solution online sellers like you can paid quickly and securely from leading global marketplaces like Amazon, Wish and more. We take the hassle out of international payments so that you can focus on growing your business globally.
Not yet a Payoneer user?