4 Ways to Boost E-Commerce Sales in the 2022 Holiday Season
Published November 24, 2021.
The holiday season always brings in a huge influx of sales activity across all major e-commerce platforms. With this in mind, e-commerce retailers should start building an action plan to improve sales performance while also thinking about how they can boost e-commerce holiday revenue.
Here are some ways to boost your e-commerce sales during the 2021 holiday season.
1. Optimize Your Website for PC and Mobile
Optimizing the customer experience on your website will be sure to keep them happy and entice their return, while a poorly optimized website can scare customers off before they even reach the checkout.
Some things to consider when optimizing your site are discussed below.
Increase Page Loading Speeds
To assess your website’s loading speeds, use a tool called PageSpeed Insights. Unlike other speed testing tools, PageSpeed delivers a website speed analysis for both mobile and PC devices simultaneously.
The best part: PageSpeed Insights also breaks down any components on your website that could use improvement.
Offer a Fast Checkout
As consumers have become more accustomed to the benefits of online shopping, the importance of a quick and efficient checkout process has become apparent. In fact, it’s a well-known fact that the faster a website’s checkout process, the higher conversion rates are likely to be.
One of the best examples of a super-efficient and high-converting checkout process is Amazon. The rollout of their one-click checkout process has been a tremendous success.
To emulate the success that Amazon has had, try out these fast checkout tips:
- Add multiple checkout or shopping cart buttons to your website.
- Minimize the number of forms your customers have to fill out to complete their transactions.
- Offer a guest checkout option.
- Offer multiple payment gateways.
Optimize Pop-Ups and CTAs
Getting the timing right for pop-ups and calls to action (CTAs) is crucial. If you annoy or distract your users with too many pop-ups or CTAs, you risk losing their trust and conversions. And, if you don’t include any pop-ups or CTAs, you risk people not finding what they were looking for on your site at all and leaving disappointed.
To strike the right balance between these two extremes, try out these pop-up and CTA optimization tips:
- Make sure your CTA is clear and visible.
- Make your pop-ups more relevant to the user.
- Use your pop-ups to highlight products or services they’ve previously browsed.
- Make sure your pop-ups and CTAs are mobile-friendly.
- A/B test everything to help you determine what works and what doesn’t.
2. Use Cross-Selling, Upselling, and Buy Now, Pay Later Apps
Another e-commerce holiday marketing strategy is to use cross-selling, upselling, and buy now, pay later apps. If you haven’t heard of these strategies to increase online sales in your store, here’s a quick breakdown of each:
- Cross-selling is a sales technique where a retailer encourages a customer to buy an additional product or service at the same time as the original purchase.
- Up-selling is a sales technique where a retailer encourages a customer to buy a more expensive or more profitable version of a product or service.
- Buy Now, Pay Later is an online payment feature that lets customers buy online by paying nothing upfront.
As an e-commerce seller, you are always looking for ways to improve your business sales results. With the help of these tools and tactics, you can do just that.
Are you using Shopify? If so, why not check out our post on the Best Shopify Apps to Increase Sales.
3. Run Holiday Promotions
Some popular promotion strategies to increase company sales are discussed below.
Bundles
Product bundling involves offering a group of products together at a single discounted price. This is a very popular sales strategy that can increase sales and profit margins significantly while also helping your customers create a more well-rounded purchase.
Discounts
The goal of holiday promotions is to encourage users to purchase more. Offering a discount is a very effective way to do this. You can send discounts to all customers or, if you are looking for a more effective strategy, you can use targeted discounts based on your customers' previous purchasing history. Our post on the best Shopify apps lists a few that can help you do this.
A perfect time to use holiday-promoted discounts is during Black Friday sales. If you want to learn more about the best ways to do this, check out our Black Friday Marketing Strategy post.
Giveaways
A giveaway is a promotional strategy that involves distributing gifts to your customers. The purpose of a giveaway is to boost sales by encouraging people to buy a specified product or service.
4. Expand Your Sales Channels
One of the most effective ways of boosting your sales during the holiday period is to expand your social media presence. Here are a few tips to help your e-commerce store achieve this:
- Grow your audience through appealing offers and incentives.
- Use influencers to your advantage.
- A/B test your social media adverts.
- Leverage Facebook audience optimization.
Where Should You Start?
Knowing where to start will largely depend on how big your e-commerce store is, how much exposure it already has, as well as how big of a budget you have to play with.
If you’re new, start with the basics. Be sure your website is running optimally and you’re focusing on building your site traffic and conversions.
For larger, more established sites looking to increase website sales and profits, try optimizing your checkout process, focusing on CRO, and expanding your exposure through social media.