Christmas season is just around the corner and many people have already started looking for Christmas gifts 🎁 this is the biggest shopping season of the year, and the whole world will be ready to spend money on gifts for their families, friends, and why not? themselves.
During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there is a huge increase in website visitors and their buying frenzy. And this trend will not disappear until Christmas, in fact, it will only keep growing! 📈
At Customily, we always want your business to succeed, so we compiled 20 TIPS to help you through this crazy time of year! Read them carefully, make sure everything is perfect for your customers on this special time, and you will end the year breaking sales records 🚀
Let's take a deeper look at them one by one!! 👇🏻👇🏻
1. Strengthen the stock of your products
First of all, let's start with the basics: the stock of your products. You can review how many sales you made last December and analyze whether you should boost your inventory levels to make it through the month. You do not want to miss out on sales!
It is also a great opportunity to launch new themed products, but we'll cover this later 😉
2. Make sure your e-commerce is up to date
Chances are the traffic of your store will increase during the last months of the year, so make sure your website is working well and everything is up to date.
Check that all your products have the corresponding photo, description, variations, and prices. Make sure you're not missing any key details and that you don't have broken links.
3. Adjust the look of your store for Christmas sales
You can tailor your website for Christmas sales with just a few small changes, this doesn't mean that you need to completely redesign your website.
For example, you can add a countdown timer in the header to show how many days are left for Christmas Eve. Or you can upload some nice banners in the headers to announce your Christmas sales, which is always a good practice and easy to implement.
If you have more resources available, you can dress your entire website in a holiday theme. Remember that just by changing some elements in your store to make it clear that it's "holiday time", you can significantly increase your visitors' willingness to continue shopping and stay in the Christmas spirit 🎄
4. Create category pages focused on holidays
Creating category pages focused on the holidays increases usability, gets users in the holiday spirit 🎅 and makes it easier for them to find your discounts, deals, and gift packages.
Here are a few examples of the categories you can add:
Black Friday Deals
Cyber Monday Deals
Christmas Deals
Gifts for Men
Gifts for Women
Gifts for Mom
Gifts for Dad
And so on!! ✨
5. Put your complementary products together to increase your sales
If you have a physical store, place complementary products nearby so that your customer is compelled to see them and remember to buy them as well. For example, if you sell cell phones, place screen protectors and headphones nearby to entice your customers.
And you can do the same in your e-commerce store just as easily! Configure your website to display "recommended products" under the product that is being viewed or was added to the cart to tempt users to buy something else! 🎁
6. Get special Christmas items
Offering custom products is a trend that many stores are adopting. Not only you can sell evergreen products throughout the year, but you can also work on special collections for those dates when you know people tend to do impulsive purchases. One of them is, of course, Christmas. With some creativity and imagination, you can easily adapt some of the products that you already sell to match this festivity, for example, by doing red or green versions of it, or by adding Santa or some Christmas lights to your designs 🎅🏻
7. Highlight your customer service
During the holiday season, visitors are much more likely to contact you. They may want to check if the product will arrive on time, or they may want to know more about the product.
Therefore, you should highlight your customer service and make sure that you are always available for any customer inquiries. Make different channels available to be sure everyone can easily contact you, even if they are in different places or time zones.
8. Integrate live chat
That takes us to the next point: the famous live chat. Millennials prefer it, it's a fact.
And during the holiday season, everybody is more stressed out than normal and will want a faster response to their questions. That's why you should consider integrating live chat on your website. It will mean more work for you, yes, but you can't risk missing sales just because you didn't answer fast enough! 📲
9. Plan your advertising and budget in advance
We're sure you'll want to run PPC ads on Facebook and Google, or maybe even other platforms. Well, plan your ads and ad copy ahead of time ⏰ otherwise, you'll just be rough and not take enough time to be creative.
Also, you may need to increase the budget for the holiday season because the competition will do the same. On Google Ads, bid prices for certain keywords may increase slightly.
10. Make sure your website can handle the traffic
You don't want your website to crash during peak season! Unfortunately, too many visits at the same time, especially on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, can cause this.
If you haven't experienced peak traffic yet, you should check directly with your website host and make sure that your website can handle high traffic. You may also want to create a strategic staffing plan to keep employees and customer service representatives ready before the holiday season begins, so you're prepared for a larger-than-usual ticket volume.
11. Make sure you have the right staff and systems in place to handle all your requests
Hire additional staff as needed because you need to deliver all of your orders on time. Remember, you should never promise delivery dates that are not realistic, especially at this time of year. Your customers will appreciate knowing exactly what day their order will arrive.
Make sure to have enough people to prepare the orders, and deliver everything as smoothly as possible. Take the time to talk with your shipping supplier to make sure they are prepared for the season and will be able to handle all your deliveries. Every link of your sales chain must be ready 💪🏻
12. Stay in touch with your loyal customers
Even if Christmas is the best time to get new leads and future customers, don't ever forget about the loyal ones that have been buying from you for years!
Send them a personalized mailing reminding them of your most popular products for these holidays, and, if possible, offer them a discount coupon! 🧧
13. Try an early bird offer
Don’t wait until the last minute, encourage your customers to start buying now by offering them early attractive discounts. The earlier you start selling Christmas presents, the more sales you will make 😉
14. Take advantage of the sense of urgency
We named it before, at this time of the year everybody is more stressed out than normal and willing to delete items from their lists. Focus your campaigns using a sense of urgency to people make their purchases in advance. You can remind them of how many days are left to Christmas Eve, or show low stock inventories on your website to make them believe it will be over soon.
If you are planning a promotion or giving away discount coupons, always include deadlines to add urgency ⏰
15. Be active on social media
During the holiday season, it's important to increase your social media presence 🤳
Post as many holiday-themed posts as you want. Share your holiday deals with your followers, give them gift ideas to buy, ask questions about this time of the year, and make them participate and feel part of your company.
The holidays are also a good time to run a contest on Facebook or Instagram. You can even offer an exclusive gift to your followers to drive more business through your social channels.
16. Invest more energy in email marketing
Just like on social media, you should be more active on email 💌 this holiday season. If you have a large email list of past buyers and prospects, communicate with them as soon as possible. Remind them that they can buy their Christmas gifts now without standing in long lines or fighting for a spot in the parking lot 🅿
When developing your email strategy, remember that transactional emails are just as important as promotional emails. Order confirmation and shipping emails are great opportunities to upsell products 💸
17. Offer free shipping
Free shipping 🚚 is a great way to encourage more purchases during the holiday season - and throughout the year. You should consider offering free shipping at least a few days before Christmas🎄
You can also set free shipping after a certain price to increase the average order value and ensure the offer is profitable for you.
18. Offer gift cards
To avoid someone buying a gift they don't like, many people buy gift cards at Christmas. You shouldn't scare these buyers away just because you don't offer this option.
Gift cards also help increase sales because people are likely to spend more than the value of the card 😉
19. Offer gift-wrapping services
The holiday season offers you many opportunities for upselling. Visitors are more open to additional services, especially if they add to the overall value of the purchase or save them time.
You can offer your customers the option to add wrapping paper, a Christmas card with a special message, bows, or whatever you may think will help decorate your products to match this special season 🎀
20. Add exclusive personalization options
Whether you're already selling personalized products or not, pay attention to this: people LOVE to receive special and unique gifts, and what better season to offer that kinds of products than now?
With a robust product personalizer like Customily you can easily add personalization options to any kind of product. But that's not all 💝 Customily also offers complete design templates for you to sell freely in your store, including a Christmas collection! So you could have a lot of designs for free to turn your static products into customizable ones in just a couple of minutes!
Another important thing to keep in mind is that a good order fulfillment system is also beneficial, especially if you are working with personalized products 💪 you do not want to mix up customizations and deliver the wrong product!
With Customily you will have ready-to-print, engrave or embroider files to avoid this from happening. You can download it, or have your fulfillment provider receive it and make sure ALL of your orders will be fulfilled and delivered exactly as the customer wanted 💞
If you are not using Customily yet, you can TRY IT FOR FREE on Shopify and Etsy. And if you are selling on any other platform, you can request a FREE DEMO here!
BONUS TIP 📣 Set up heat maps!
As you prepare for this holiday season, you should also start planning for next year by setting up heatmaps on your website.
Heatmaps go a step further than typical website statistics - such as the number of visitors and pages they visited - and show you exactly where your visitors click on each web page. This can help you optimize the layout and elements on your homepage, product pages, and category pages to place them in the best spot to increase conversions.
This might sound difficult to achieve, but next year when you have this useful information to improve your store you will be glad you did it 😉
Conclusion
It's really important that you start preparing your online shop for the holiday season in time. We hope this article helps you to be successful! 🚀
Even if you don't get to apply all of the previous tips, working on a few of them will make the difference. Start with slow steps but try to invest your maximum efforts now, this is the perfect time to take your business to the next level!
And remember that the best strategy, the best marketing, and a budget as big as a mansion are of no use if your products don't stand out from the crowd. If you're looking for fresh ideas for your products, here are some very interesting ones.
Merry Christmas and Happy Selling! 🎄🎅🏻
What would you add to this list? How are you preparing for the holiday season? Let us know in the comments below!
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Customily Product Personalizer is the best solution to sell personalized products, both in the e-commerce and the print-on-demand market. With the widest range of personalization tools, free clipart designs, realistic live previews that increase conversions, and printing files that help you automate your printing business; Customily is the ally you need to boost your profit margins in a high-competitive market.
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