Holiday season is here and online shoppers must have started dropping by your website and app. While you’re fixing those final glitches and tracking the initial sale metrics, here’s something that’s worth a read. We bring seven last-minute holiday season tips that you must try this season. We’ve put together some tried and true strategies that can place your brand in front of the right audience all through the holiday season. And the best part, these are quick to implement so you’re still not too late.
If you’re swamped with to-do’s right now, go ahead and save a copy for later.
7 last-minute E-Commerce Marketing Tips to Grow Your Holiday Sales
They say no two people are the same, and by that logic neither are two shoppers. Hyper-personalization is not straightforward in the slightest and has to be carefully tailored to unique use cases and shopper personalities. Users at various stages of their shopping life cycle, and indeed their customer/subscriber life-
1. Engage New Users – Make that lasting first impression
A plethora of brand new users are going to descend on your site this time of the year looking for a good holiday deal. The second a user installs your app or lands on your home page, it’s time to start building engagements that tie him down to a purchase. People are notoriously in a hurry during holiday shopping, so the conversations have to be super-personal and relevant.
Solution: Float ads of your best selling products, drop-off categories – the ones that will make an attention grabbing statement and persuade them to part with their cash.
Recommended Channels: Browser Notifications or Rich Media Push Notifications
2. Retarget Drop-offs – Reach them when it matters most
Users that regularly frequent your site are definitely your most important demographic, and their activity is only going to heighten during the holiday season. You’ll get a lot of them chancing upon something they like but ultimately ditching the transaction and dropping off midway for a variety of reasons. As the competition to garner sales grows fiercer around the holiday season, instant follow up with proper channel optimization is crucial to prod these users over the line.
Solution:
- Identify the channel of communication they’re most likely to encourage
- Personalization plays a really key role here. Serve them a well crafted, well-timed notification and they will be back completing their order in no time.
Recommended Channels: Browser Push Notifications, Email, Display Ads
3. Re-engage the Inactive – While you get busy adding new users, don’t forget the existing ones
Some of your holiday strategy needs to be devoted to bringing back users both long gone and those still on your website or app but not doing much. This tactic should also be extended to buyers from your previous year’s holiday sale, as they have already shown an inclination to buy from you. There’s not a great deal of difference in the content you serve the wider audience and your own inactive users, although identifying the right channel to interact on is easier in the latter scenario.
Solution: The curated content of the ads/emails you serve them should focus on updated offers and latest products you’ve added to the site, giving them a solid reason to consider giving it a second chance. Don’t forget to engage inactive app users and prevent uninstalls.
Recommended Channels: Browser Push Notifications, Display ads for lapsed subscribers on your website, and Rich Media Push for the mobile app equivalent.
4. Price Drop – Send alerts and notifications to your price-sensitive audience segment
When your users are spoilt for choice of offers, they would settle for nothing but the best deal. A typical user will compare multiple E-Commerce websites/apps before he can complete the purchase. How do you let interested users know about the drop in prices on products they were so keen on buying? And how do you reach your audience wherever they might be to tell them about the price drop?
Solution: You can’t wait for emails to be read. Look at options that are instant and can be trusted upon to reach the right set of audience.
Recommended Channels: Rich Media Push Notifications are the perfect channel for App users. And the web equivalent, Browser Push Notifications can be used for website users.
5. Promote Re-installs – Bring back lost app users this holiday, prompt re-installs
Holiday sale is a good time to bring back users who had uninstalled your app. These users will no doubt be looking for a cool deal. With some super-personalized offers you can entice these users to come back to your app.
Solution: Use past behavior data and identify high-value customers from your uninstalled user pool. Run collaborative filtering to determine their shopping intent. Also find out the channels where they have engaged with you in the past.
Recommended Channels: Emails, Display and Facebook ads
6. Reward Loyalty – Give them a reason to love you more
Loyalty tweaks are another aspect that will give part of your campaign a clever uplift in the user retention category. Holiday offers and discounts are almost routine now, and offering them to your long-term and frequent buyers is nothing less than a must-have in your holiday marketing itinerary. Make your loyal shoppers feel special this holiday with tailored loyalty offers on their favorite products/categories.
Solution: Rather than discounts, go with loyalty benefits. Remind users to make good use of the loyalty points that they have accumulated. And if you really love them, double those loyalty points and encourage them to shop more. Go ahead, spread some holiday cheer.
Recommended Channels: Go cross-channel and tap into Browser Push Notifications, Emails and App Push Notifications as these are all ideal platforms to put this into practice.
7. Time-sensitive deals/offers
Speaking of well-timed, the holiday sale is the best place to promote time-sensitive offers, introducing countdowns and generating a feeling of hastiness and urgency in your customers to complete the process. They will also appeal to the wider demographic in general, subtly forcing them to make a quicker call.
Solution: These should be served to drop-off users, both in the form of a Browser or native app push notifications, encouraging them to come back quickly. This, coupled with a good offer that accounts for competitor prices and a well-chosen marketing channel based on the user’s personal preferences, makes for a compelling and powerful strategy.
Recommended Channels: Browser Push Notifications, Display Ads, Rich Media Push Notifications
Put these tips into practice and watch your holiday sales boom.
1. Timely Tweaks
Spend a few hours every week tweaking and updating your marketing strategy. With so many different holidays coming up quickly, the theme of your campaigns should resonate with the latest one, while also staying true to the hyper-personalization essentials.
2. Holistic Approach
A healthy, holistic approach is the way to go while prepping for the holiday season. While it may sound appealing to consider just a couple of the methods discussed above most pertaining to your business and go big on maximizing the sales in those brackets, that is ultimately a skewed and risky way to go about it.
3. Execute
Take some time to neatly segment your users, identify appropriate channels specific to each segment and then launch your holiday campaign to gain a priceless head start over your closest competitors.
If you’ve found these tips helpful, save a copy for later.
And if you’ve got questions or would like to know more, drop a line at marketing@vizury.com
