Whether we are talking about Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter or any other holiday, these are probably the best times for your sales volume, for both online and online stores. While in theory we should definitely not rely only on holidays sales, in practice it happens many times that holidays sales can balance your financial situation with a blink of an eye, which is perfect natural.
With careful planning and smart marketing your online store can have a significant increase in sales during these periods, so here are some ideas to get maximum results with minimum resources invested :
1. Store “decoration”
If all offline stores are decorated for Christmas/Easter etc, you should definitely decorate your online store as well. Add thematic banners on your site and use them to direct your customers to promotional offers for example.
2. Social media “decoration”
Change your background theme on Twitter/Facebook with a seasonal one (this in case you already have an account on social media sites, if not, you should definitely get some social media channels accounts and use them).
3. Sketch your discounts strategy
There are two ways you can do this: targeting for a high volume of sales for products that have proven to be best sellers throughout the year or trying to sell products that face poor sales levels and generate smaller profit margins. Whatever direction you would head for, first of all you should check your inventory and decide whether you have enough products or not. Tip: you could try to achieve both goals in the same time by offering a substantial discount on a poor-seller when a customer buys a best-seller product. Keep in mind that you are going for profit maximization so do not overdo it!
4. Offer complementary seasonal services
A lot of products brought from your online store will be offered as a gift so why not considering including gifts packages and accessories like decorated boxes, wrapping paper, greeting cards and so on, for free?
5. Reward your loyal customers
Holidays are the best time to reward your loyal customers and give offer them special attention and special prices. Create especially for them a series of discount coupons and distribute those to your most loyal customers, thus getting new sales and developing a special relationship with them.
6. Greeting cards with every order
With every delivery of your products send your clients a greeting card to thank them for their purchase. Want to create a more special approach ? Include their names on the cards and also try at least to sign by hand the greeting card. The costs involved are not at such high levels but the effects will be visible on a long-run.
There are of course many other ways to increase your sales during holidays but these steps should be a great start when creating your online store’s strategy.