Top 12 tips for E-Commerce companies during Festive season

1^st December: Offer special coupons or promotions on your landing pages

Landing pages are the life blood of any e-commerce store. By using well designed landing pages showcasing the festive promotions or coupon codes for specific products in your store, customers are likely to follow through the entire journey and eventually convert. Make sure to have Call to Action (CTA) buttons to increase user engagement. As most of your customers arrive on your landing pages through different paid advertising formats, it is important to get your landing pages up and running by 1^st of December.

To increase customer loyalty, you can also include a message to the cart or during the checkout process to prompt the user to claim their coupon to raise awareness about the promotion and ensure that customers are not missing out on the offers. Remember word of mouth marketing is still king! If your customers are happy, they are likely to tell others about your store.

2^nd December: Optimise your homepage and user experience for festive shoppers

No one likes to look at a website that does not look nice and is slow to load. This is also true for festive shoppers who are likely to leave your website if it does not resonate the Christmas spirit and takes forever to load. To avoid any pitfalls, makes sure to add festive designs and have clearly labelled offers to entice customers to stay longer in your site. Your homepage could have a ‘promoted gifts’ section with images of products on a slider to catch the customer’s eye and draw them in to eventually make the sale. You could reuse a lot of the designs from your landing pages that you already made, so that your messaging is consistent and saves you time. This should also help you to get your site ready by 2^nd December.

A great way to increase Click Through Rates (CTR) is to clearly have discount codes with on your homepage banners or specific promoted sections, which can be added at the checkout. By ensuring that the image sizes are optimised for each device, your site loading speed will improve ensuring a seamless experience for your customers.

3^rd December: Get your PPC and Search Campaigns ready

With 3 billion searches per day, most shoppers start their purchase journey through a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. Google search ads drives almost 50% of all e-commerce sales. It is therefore vital to have a good proportion of your advertising budget allocated for your PPC and Search engine campaigns.

By increasing bids for targeted commercial intent keywords and using keywords that are specific to the festive season such as “gifts for men”, “festive gift ideas for couples” or “Christmas gift ideas”, you can ensure that your ads are appearing on top of the search engine results page. You can optimise these campaigns further by trimming keywords, ad groups, campaigns that are underperforming, so that you are only spending money on the campaigns that actually convert.

4^th December: Plan a solid social media advertising campaign

If you have been selling through your e-commerce store, chances are that you are already well accustomed to social media marketing. Social platforms like Facebook, Instragram and recently TikTok are becoming the main channels for driving revenues.

When building your social media advertising campaigns, keep your messaging and branding consistent in all channels. To ensure that your ads stand out, use headlines for promo codes and discount percentages. You can also drive sales by injecting urgency and social proofing your messaging. It is human nature to trust the decisions and opinions of consumers more than their own.  By displaying message such as ‘selling fast’ alongside your product or displaying a live feed of what other users have just bought, builds the desire to also purchase a specific product. As your social media campaigns are part of your entire marketing strategy, we recommend that this should be done when you are planning the entire campaign. Having optimised your site, and prepped your landing page and search engine campaigns, the social media marketing campaigns should all be ready to go live on 4^th December.

5^th December: Create well designed Display Ad campaigns

Display ads are a good place to use your creativity and build stunning and eye-catching display banners with a festive theme. However, it is important to keep it simple and not go overboard with your designs so that it does not overlap with promotional messages. This is also a great place to add discounts to entice shoppers who are on a budget or looking for special offers. To convey even greater information, you could use animations of GIFs on your banners which are likely to get higher CTR.

In order to make the most use of your display ads, your campaigns should go live in the first week of December. By collecting performance data, you can keep optimising your campaigns and increase conversion throughout the entire month.

6^th December: Use multiple marketing channels to increase your reach and buyer touchpoints

Apart from social media and search engine marketing, blogs posts and email can also be used to maximise the channels you reach your customers in. For instance, you can create an email newsletter which showcases the bestselling gifts for Christmas and have a CTA leading to a landing page with a promo code. By using tools such as Zapier or Klaviyo, you can even plan your email marketing campaigns, so that they are ready to go live on 6^th December.

Blog posts are another great way to increase sales. Create newsletters such as ‘Top Festive Gifts under £10’ linking your products under one post. These types of articles are great for lazy shoppers who usually leave all their shopping for the last minute.

7^th December: Have a clearly defined Shipping policy during the festive period

Your sales are starting to skyrocket, and all the preparation and hard work have paid. The last thing you need now are angry customer emails telling you that their products haven’t arrived on time.

With so many shoppers leaving their shopping till the last week before Christmas, it is vital to have shipping dates and last order dates clearly labelled and shown on your homepage and products. If you have already done this on day one, great! If not, we recommend getting this highlighted on your site by the end of the first week of December.

People also generally have an expectation to receive free shipping. However, if you cannot offer free shipping during the holidays, you could offer discounted or reduced shipping rates to help with conversion. Shipping costs are one of the main reasons for cart abandonment.

8^th December: Gamify your offers through a virtual Christmas calendar

Now that the main bulk of the work is done, you can use the remaining time to tweak and make your customers journey on your site even better. Gamification is one the best ways to boost user engagement and help drive sales. By creating a virtual advent calendar on your homepage that offers a new gift every day leading to the day before Christmas, can be used to increase product discovery. Virtual calendars greatly improve customer interaction and helps promote a more user-friendly site experience which usually leads more sales.

Use the assets that you have already created so far for your landing pages, social media campaigns and display ads to save time on creating the background visuals. Without complicating it too much, you could use a simple slider option on your home page which shows the main product of the day.

9^th December: Group products together for multi-buy deals

How many of us have received countless Lynx gift-sets for Christmas over the years? But every year we still end up buying it for others or receiving them ourselves yet again.

By bundling items together and offering special festive discounts, the chances of sales going up is very high. This is also a great way to group generic products and items that are low-value, and together increase their perceived value. Offers such as ‘3 for 2’ deals work well with products such as make-up sets, brushes, bath bombs, and candles. With a solid social media marketing campaign, targeting shoppers who usually leave their Christmas shopping till the last week, this is a wonderful way to boost sales amongst last minute shoppers.

11^th December: Upsell gift wrapping on your site

With Christmas less than two weeks away, upselling gift wrapping is the perfect strategy for lazy shoppers who doesn’t like to wrap their own gifts. You can significantly improve your sales by offering this service, as last-minute shoppers are willing to pay for the convenience.

12^th December: Entice customers through pop-up banner discounts

Platforms such as Shopify have a great deal of different pop-up banner APIs to choose from. Remember, people want to save as much as possible on their Christmas shopping.  By using a variation of traditional pop-ups to show festive discounts can significantly boost and increase your sales performance.

The same techniques can be used for post-Christmas discounts when retailers try to get rid of excess stock. For high value items, you can also consider having flexible payment options to ensure conversion.

14^th December: Have a good retargeting strategy to convert potential customers

Around 68% of carts are usually abandoned and 25% of those customers have no intention of returning back to your store. Hence, it is vital to setup retargeting ads and emails campaigns to increase the chances of converting those customers in the future.

Assuming you have gone through the previous steps, you should have a solid sales system in place now. You would also have picked up a lot of customer data and trends. All you need to do now is to keep tweaking your campaigns for the remainder of the festive period and segment them further based on your different audiences. Your retargeting ads and emails should do the rest and increase the chances of winning back a potential customer to buy your products.

To sum up, the festive period is the best time to increase your sales. By preparing early on, any e-commerce brand can greatly increase their brand awareness and boost their sales. Through consistent messaging, branding and a well thought out plan for paid and organic advertising formats, Christmas period can be an incredible opportunity for your e-commerce store!