Make Christmas 2015 Generate the Highest Ever Sales for Your eCommerce Website

Strategy

First, you’ll need to remind everybody that you exist and that you are an option. Hit up previous customers and spread the word on social media. Internet marketing could also be an option. This is great for brand awareness, and for driving relevant traffic to your website.

Direct Marketing

If you have a direct mail procedure in place already, consider sending your customers some snail mail, perhaps a catalogue or an offer code. As post is few and far between nowadays, this strategy is quite novel for the customer, meaning they are more likely to give it more attention than an email, for example. Some studies have found that customers who have browsed a print catalogue spend 1.5 times longer shopping on the website than those who don’t and as a result, spend more money.

email marketing

email marketing can be an extremely effective way of reminding users that you are still open for business and are still offering great products. Be sure to study open rates of previous campaigns and work off of the success of these. Pay close attention to times of open rate and be sure to include clear call to actions that incentivise users to visit your website such as ‘Claim exclusive offer now’ or ‘10% off holiday items until midnight’.

Social Media

Be sure to make the most of channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but don’t be too salesy as this will put users off and could result in unsubscribes. Your goal should be to show off your products but not with the aim to sell, but to show customers what’s on offer and how much fun or use that they could have with it. Let customers know when popular products are back in stock, retweet happy customers and notify users of special offers to encourage people back to the website.

Your Website

It is very important that your website is optimised for Christmas traffic. Try to make sure that it has the following:

A Christmas call to action on the homepage. Use contrasting colours to make it stand out and make sure that is above the fold and ideally in the most important part of the website, the top right. Toxicfox.co.uk do this on their website and by ensuring that the link to Christmas in the prime real estate for clicks it will maximise the volume of traffic directed to the page and should help result in more sales.
Offer a sense of urgency to the website, a countdown to Christmas is an effective way to remind users that they only have a limited to time to purchase the products.
Make your USPs clear on every page of the website to remind the user why they should purchase from you. These don’t necessarily have to be Christmas themed, from exclusive products to free shipping these are all extra selling points to encourage the user to use your ecommerce website.
Appeal to your target audience’s pain points, whether it’s choice, cost or the unknown make sure you address it in the call to action. For example, ‘Don’t know what to buy? Try our online gift finder now’.
The ‘add to basket’ or ‘buy’ button should be visible and featured above the fold and again at bottom of the page to make it as easy as possible for the user to click on it and complete the transaction.
It’s imperative that the users feel secure making online payments on your website. Increase their confidence by including credit card logos and security seals, increasing this trust will lead to higher conversions.

While your website will benefit from this strategy all year round, it’s important to make sure that you maximise the website traffic over the Christmas period to get the most sales possible. Simply increasing the website’s conversion rate by 1% can improve the sales significantly for the long term.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chloe Hashemi is a marketing consultant at Fountain. She is an English graduate and enjoys writing about social media, business and music.