The final quarter of the year is the most critical for the majority of ecommerce businesses.
But how can you ensure that your brand will outperform targets, generate revenue and beat the competition? We’ve gathered our top 10 tips for maximising your online sales this festive period. Whether you’re a beauty brand, fashion ecommerce site, department store or homeware retailer, these universal tips are sure to stand you in good stead for having your best final quarter yet. Without further ado, let’s jump straight in!
1. Create gift guides
When it comes to Christmas purchases, customers are often browsing for multiple recipients simultaneously, so creating in-depth gift guides that are tailored to various individuals is a sure-fire way to build trust and drive purchases. If you’re a beauty brand for example, a user may be browsing for a best friend, sister and mum, at the same time. By tailoring your gift guides to all of these individuals, you can make the ecommerce journey extremely easy and seamless for users. Don’t forget to have fun with it too, labelling your gift guides ‘for the colour lover’, ‘for the adventurer’ or ‘for the natural beauty’, you can cover a few bases within one guide. High street brand Boots do a fantastic job of covering everyone their customers are shopping for with their unique gift guides;
Boots Christmas Gift Guides
2. Add countdown timers
The quickest way to boost online sales during the festive period is by creating urgency. While there are numerous ways to do this, the most impactful and simplest way is to add countdown timers to your website. Whether your timer is highlighting the cut-off time for next-day delivery, the end of a flash sale or the time remaining on a limited-edition product, visual countdown timers are a proven way to increase sales during this time of the year. Be sure to use them wisely and don’t splatter your entire ecommerce website with timers as you’ll dilute their impact.
3. Offer valuable bundles
With so many people to shop for during the Christmas period, bundles are a fantastic way for customers to get more bang for their buck and for brands, it’s a chance to boost that all important average order value (AOV). Whether you offer bundles that include an exclusive discount or offer a free product when a customer purchases a particular item or order value, different bundles incentivise different types of customers so ensuring you’re catering for all shoppers is crucial to success during these months.
Charlotte Tilbury is a great example of how to do bundles well over the festive period; From exclusive advent calendars that are worth far more than their price point, to unique gifting bundles that come with a free makeup bag all the way to free full-sized products when you spend over a certain amount, the beauty brand clearly demonstrates how to successfully offer a variety of bundles to suit different shopping preferences.
Charlotte Tilbury Gift Bundles
4. Add an augmented reality (AR) tool
Whether you’re a fashion brand, toy shop website or beauty mogul, adding an AR tool to your ecommerce site can work wonders for driving conversions and boosting revenue during the festive months. AR tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated as the years roll on and as a result, consumers are adopting them faster than they ever have before. By allowing users to virtually try on makeup, or view a toy within their home, you are naturally going to increase conversions as customers feel a stronger sense of trust and belonging.
5. Automate personalised emails
If you haven’t already, it’s time to create some email automations that can drive sales for your brand, while you’re busy working on something else. Email automations are a fantastic way of nurturing your customers by offering personalised discounts, timely reminders and more, without your team having to lift a finger. Start by setting up an abandoned cart recovery email and build up from there. Post-purchase follow-up emails and product recommendation emails that are hyper-personalised and tailored to a customers previous purchases and browsing history are a great way to build trust and customer loyalty, just in time for the big day! If you haven’t already, check out platforms such as Klaviyo and MailChimp to start experimenting with email automations and drive sales for your brand.
6. Tweak your web design for the festivities
What’s Christmas without a bit of magic? Ensure that your website feels festive and sparkly by tweaking promotional banners, incorporating magical icons to your web designs and replacing product and lifestyle imagery with seasonal photographs. At this time of year, many purchases are led by emotion. By tapping into that with visual cues that make users feel warm and fuzzy inside, you’re sure to boost sales.
Menkind Festive Banners
7. Offer free delivery
Free delivery is an underestimated tool that can benefit your brand tenfold. You can offer free delivery on all orders to get users over the line but a more tactical way of utilising it is by setting a spend limit such as ‘free delivery over £50’. Encouraging users to build up their basket until they hit the limit and achieve free delivery.
8. Enable BNPL payment options
Buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) options are your secret weapon to boosting sales and increasing AOV. If a customer gets a discount based on how much they have in their cart, they’ll want to spend more. But sometimes, financial worries hold customers back from checking out. That’s where BNPL platforms come into their own. By offering users a variety of ways to pay such as over a year or over 3 months, you increase the likelihood of them committing to a purchase, even if it’s bigger than they are prepared to spend there and then.
Look Fantastic BNPL
9. Prepare for a surge in traffic
Your ecommerce site must be prepared for a surge in traffic during the festive period if you want to succeed. Robust infrastructure and a strong platform that can withstand surges in traffic without slowing down or worse, crashing, is absolutely essential to success. Considering site speed directly impacts conversion rates, ensuring your website is lightning-fast and won’t slow down with increased traffic is absolutely crucial for the festive period.
10. Enable express checkout
So you’ve added all of the promotional banners, offered BNPL options, created gift guides and bundles galore, but have you ensured your checkout is lightning-fast? By offering an express or guest checkout option for users, you remove friction points that give them time to dilly-dally and ponder whether or not they’ve made the right purchase decision. The quicker it is for a user to checkout, the better! So be sure that your website offers express checkout options before the Chrsitams period if you want to make the most of it this year.
Be sure to implement our top 10 tips for a successful festive season and ramp up those all-important Christmas sales! And if you want to ahead of the competition, don’t hesitate to get in touch to see how we can help.
