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There is more than just the sound of bells jingling in the air as the holiday season approaches. It is also the sweet melody of business opportunities. In the fast-paced e-commerce world, taking advantage of holiday sales is a move that can make or break your year. Suppose your online store is decked out in digital tinsel, your products are wrapped in digital bows, and your sales are going through the roof like a New Year's Eve rocket.
How can you make your ecommerce dream come true? We have unwrapped a guide that goes beyond generic advice and gives you nine effective tips/strategies. It will boost your holiday sales and send them to heights never seen before in 2023.
Key Ecommerce Marketing Dates
We will give you some useful tips that will help you get people to your online store and turn them into customers. Start by quickly going over the most important holiday dates in 2023. This way, you will know what to do in November 2023 and December 2023.
- 9 October 2023- Canadian Thanksgiving/Columbus Day
- 1-30 November 2023- Holiday promotions kick-off
- 11 November 2023- Singles Day
- 23 November 2023- Thanksgiving (U.S.)
- 24 November 2023- Black Friday
- 25 November 2023- Small Business Saturday (North America)
- 27 November 2023- Cyber Monday
- 28 November 2023- Giving Tuesday
- 23 December 2023- Super Saturday
- 26 December 2023- Boxing Day (AUS/CAN/NZ/UK)
- 31 December 2023 to 1 January 2024- New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day
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Maximize 2023 Holiday Sales: 9 Effective Tips & Strategies
The holiday season is a great time for you to make more money and get into the holiday spirit. As the competition grows, it is important to stay ahead and come up with new ways to boost holiday sales.
1. Create A Plan
The best way to do well during the holiday season is to make an operational strategy. During holiday sales, it will help you be as efficient as possible, avoid problems as much as possible, and take advantage of revenue opportunities. Take a moment to think about what your brand could do. What are the specific things that will help your business grow and make this season a huge success? You will have a strong base for the 2023 holiday season sale once you have named your goals.
2. Identify Success Metrics
You can use metrics to judge how well the team met each goal from the last activity. If possible, you should compare these to past holiday sale seasons and months that are not holidays to see how things are going. So, if your holiday goals were to increase sales, bring in new customers, and promote a healthy work environment, your evaluation criteria might look like this:
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Boost Sales:
- Income compared to non-holiday months and holiday seasons in the past
- Amount spent on ads, rate of clicks, and cost per click (CPC) are advertising metrics.
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Get New Customers:
- How many new customers were brought in during the holidays?
- Compared to past holiday seasons and monthly averages, the number of new customers
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Promote Healthy Company Culture:
- How many extra hours workers put in (if any)?
- How stressed your team members are during holiday sale seasons?
3. Great Communication
Setting up a high-level and detailed timeline will help your team meet deadlines and organise tasks, which is important for the success of your strategy. You can use the Gantt Chart to make a schedule. Discuss all the possible assignments and deadlines with your team and choose who will be in charge of each one.
Give your timeline to other people who need to see it and ask them to add their tasks and due dates. Based on your business and team, you may want to split this into one or two planning meetings. You can change the Gantt Chart template in any way you like. Use a program like Google Sheets so that everyone can work together on it. When you get the Gantt chart, ensure to change it to fit your needs.
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4. Estimate Inventory Projections
Most businesses are still having a hard time with their supply chains because of delays, problems, and rising costs. What are you going to do? How do you know what to order and how much stock to get? If your supplier is late or shut down, you should be ready to change direction by keeping inventory in more than one place. You can also suggest other products to your customers to replace items that are out of stock. Look at the trends from last year's data to get an idea of how your business usually does during the holidays.
You can use that data to help you make predictions about your inventory for 2023. You will need to look at past data along with customer demand, market trends, and other important factors to make estimates. This prediction will help you get the most out of your inventory management by letting you align your strategies for buying or making products to meet expected demand.
5. Discounting
It can be very helpful for you to offer discounts to attract and keep customers, especially during busy times like BFCM and all year long. Customers like 0% APR deals because they make them feel like discounts, but you do not have to lower the price of your product. For the customer, this helps free up cash flow right away. Because Shopify's discount features let you combine discounts, the platform itself gives you more freedom. AOV can go up by up to 50% with Shop Pay Instalments, and checkout time can go up by 30%.
6. Checkout Extensibility, BOGO and Bundles
With Checkout Extensibility, you can add more offers right to the checkout process. A customer might be shown a different offer (like 50% off product X) during checkout if they did not take advantage of the first offer earlier in their journey. Many Shopify merchants have found that "buy one, get one (BOGO)" deals work really well during long sales periods. You could use bundles to raise the AOV (average order value), spread out losses in the profit margin (for old stock), or get customers to try a new product.
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7. Tiered and Timed Discounting
One effective way for you to boost AOV during sales is through tiered discounting, which is also known as "Spend and Save." Let us say you spend $150 and get 15% off. You might want to combine tiered discounts with activities that keep customers coming back. Let us say you spend $100. You will get 10% off right now and another $10 off your next purchase. You can keep your profit margins and deal with rising acquisition costs by making an offer that increases the value of the shopping cart.
By timing discounts within a specific window, you can add a sense of scarcity and game-like play. The discount could be 25% for the first hour of the sale, and then it would go down by 1% every hour for 24 hours. There is a 5-minute delay between events in Launchpad, so this has to be set up manually.
8. GWP and Flash Sales
Offering GWP (Gift with Purchase) deals can be motivating for customers and is a great option to sitewide discounts because it makes customers feel like they are "scoring a great deal" while keeping your profit margins high. The difference in advertising between "Spend $100 and get a $30 product for free" and "30% off purchases of $100+" may not seem like much to customers, but it is a big deal for you.
Based on how much a customer buys, the free gifts might even get better. It could be a free sample of makeup if the store sells them, or it could be a donation to a good cause or charity. To take the GWP idea a step further, you could offer a limited-edition item that can only be bought by buying certain products or placing a certain order value.
You might want to keep the supply of an exciting and new product below what people are likely to want to create buzz and make it seem exclusive. You can also set up a flash sale and time how fast your store can sell out of an item.
9. Daily Online Offers and Ethical Promotions
To keep people coming back to your store to see what the deal of the day is, you can advertise different daily deals. Posts on social media can help get this message out there. Discounting can be a good way to get people to buy something, but not discounting can also have an effect. Here are some ideas for ways to promote your business that do not involve discounts during BFCM and all year long. You could offer discounts like "choose your own discount," "pay what you can," or "donate to a charity with your order." It is an effort to make customers happy with their purchase and a nod to the rough times we have all been through these past few years.
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The Bottom Line
Your business is ready for success as the holidays get closer thanks to our guide, which gives you nine important tips to improve your sales in 2023. If you plan strategically and run your business efficiently, you can think of your online store as a digital vacation spot. This guide talks about everything: how to set clear success metrics, communicate clearly, estimate inventory needs, and use smart discounting strategies.
To raise the average value of your orders, explore the world of timed and tiered discounts, tempting BOGO deals, and irresistible bundles. Checkout Extensibility and flash sales can also be very useful. To keep customers coming back, you can run daily online deals and ethical promotions. This detailed plan not only guarantees a successful holiday season, but also sets the stage for a successful year ahead for your business. Get ready for success, and make 2023 your best year ever for holiday sales!