Most online stores have a high traffic and sales flow around the winter holidays.
But this season, we’re already seeing signs of slowing economic growth. People are more reluctant to spend substantial amounts of money, since they are facing a lot of high prices and high utility bills.
For your business to be or remain profitable, you need sales.
So, by default, you should also think of a strategy optimized for this period and these conditions, so that sales will keep coming.
Let’s talk a little bit about this topic.
I’ll show you some methods worth testing in your store to boost your sales even when the holiday season is slow.
Contents How to boost sales when the holiday season is slow
- Offer special discounts to your existing customer group
- Provides Buy Now, Pay Later payment options
- Create a unified marketing plan just for the holidays
- Give them what they want: free shipping
- Be memorable – online and offline
- Mark on persuasive videos
- Branding beats other strategies
1. Offer special discounts to existing customer group
When shopping budgets decrease, interest in discounts automatically increases.
But these automatically mean a lower profit margin for you – and your business must survive to continue to support your lifestyle.
To balance goat and cabbage, you’ll need to think differently about your pricing and discounting strategy. Take a look at your spreadsheets and you’ll see how you can package your prices in such a way that they are attractive to your customers this holiday season.
Sometimes you don’t even need to discount them individually.
Bundles (in which you can add even harder-to-sell products), BOGO (buy one, get one) offers, loyalty points… these are all ways of presenting products in a more attractive way, because they are perceived as “well-made bargains”.
In this way or directly in the form of an exclusive code discount you can also focus on the category of customers who have bought before.
Loyal customers or those who have placed at least one order on your website.
These are the customers’ mass with higher chances to buy, without having to spend as much as to attract completely new customers.
In addition, you can persuade them to promote you to their circle of acquaintances, either through direct encouragement (by email, invitation, SMS) or through the memorable experience you provide with every order.
2. Provide Buy Now, Pay Later payment options
Your customers don’t have the budget to shop at their leisure?
Invite them to use alternative payment methods, safely and as they prefer. Buy Now, Pay Later services have become increasingly popular lately, mainly because they are even more affordable.
Financing is confirmed in a much shorter time, without trips to banks or face-to-face meetings with various people. TBI Pay or Mokka are just two examples of platforms that process such payments, and they are not the only ones.
We offer direct integrations with these processors, either individually or through unosoft Payments, through which we have already negotiated preferential commissions in your favour.
Once the option is activated, your customers can buy more and more often, and pay later in as many instalments as originally agreed.
3. Create a unified marketing plan just for the holidays
Ok. It’s not the first time you’ve heard the idea of unified multichannel marketing from us.
That is to say, to convey the same message / tone through all your promotional materials, no matter how many channels you use.
Since you probably have a wide range of customers (different demographics, behaviour, habits), they will find you through different channels. Your goal is to convince them to enter the site, make a basket of their preferred products and complete the transaction.
With this goal in mind, what might your holiday marketing plan include?
- Offer inspiration through content: blog articles, answers to frequently asked questions (updated with seasonal answers, e.g. about packaging or delivery speed), videos, tutorials, webinars, video courses.
- Build a dedicated landing page for the holidays – make sure you have an evergreen URL, so it stays indexed in Google for the rest of the year. Through page builder in unosoft, you can program the component sections of the landing page to deliver the right message for the right amount of time.
- Sustain a festive air through social media posts. Do giveaways, celebration posts (December 14 – Free Shipping Day), surveys for extra services offered during the holidays, etc.
- Run paid ads and invest in remarketing, Including abandoned cart content (where possible).
- Send newsletters at least once a week during this period. If you have a special promotion, send it more than once a week.
- Collaborate with other businesses in your niche that sell to a different audience / other location (for end of year clearance).
- Collaborate with influencers and opinion leaders in your niche, even if they’re not big celebrity names. The more focused the audience, the more their recommendations will have a visible impact on sales.
Read if: Marketing Plan – 365 day calendar of posts, content and promotion ideas
4. Give them what they want: free shipping
If you can’t offer discounts or price reductions, it’s not the end of the world. You can, instead, play with value thresholds for free shipping.
Or free delivery regardless of basket value.
One of the common reasons for cart abandonment is too high shipping costs. Use this information to boost your sales during the holidays or low sales periods.
You can create a longer campaign with free shipping or choose only certain days (like December 14). Be sure to promote this type of promotion aggressively to make sure the news reaches all your potential customers.
5. Be memorable – online and offline
This is a tip to apply both during the holidays and the rest of the time.
Every great experience you give a client encourages a new referral. That is, a potential new order from the same or a new customer.
How can you create magical experiences for your customers?
- Create one or more surprise products with a minimum value of x lei. Add products to the site, in individual pages, together with attractive descriptions. For these products you can also offer discounts or present them through a unique offer (One-Time Offer, in checkout).
- Add gifts to your parcel with every order – can be small products in value and size from the website, or merch with your brand logo and insignia. Your customers will remember you more easily if they associate you with such an experience.
- Run a Bring a friend challenge. You can activate it, for example, via the Loyalty points, section Invitations for friends. Automatically, the customer who adds the address of a friend and invites them to the store to make an account, receives an additional number of loyalty points. Actively encourage this action.
- Use the application Configurable product to make customizable packages on the site. Allows customers to choose available complementary products according to their preferences from the list you make available.
- Activate banners in the cart and checkout page. Here you can add incentives for checkout in the form of testimonials, the promise of a gift in the parcel, the fact that you have free shipping during this period, etc. Constantly remind customers of the benefits they get by choosing to buy from you.
- Make them stars on your website and communication channels. Promote the content you create with your products, take it from Instagram with InstaApp yes in photo galleries from the shop.
Read also: 4 Strategies to increase your online store sales
6. Brand persuasive videos
We’ve prepared 2 formulas for you to try for your video marketing strategy.
Killer Ads Formula
- Made from a client perspective (UGC or influencer content)
- Statement: Earnings X Value with Brand Name
- What it is / What it does
- Why it’s so good (USP)
- How it works (demo)
- Solves the main objection
- More USP evidence
- Ends with testimonials or before/after
Formula TikTok style
- Demo how the product works
- Without voice
- Overlay text only
Include your videos in a sales funnel, following the example:
Leads
Warm audiences > Video content > remarketing > start sales flow in store.
Customers
7. Branding beats other strategies
What we’ve noticed from talking to our partners and customers on Black Friday is that a good portion of consumers are more likely to buy after having impactful or repetitive contact with a brand that offers real value.
Yes, ads, newsletters and SEO work well, but all of these are backed up by brand presence and branding efforts you make over time.
As a top tip during the holiday season, and the rest of the time, prioritize the branding actions you do for your store.
- Make sure you have a concrete and well-established USP.
- Make sure you know your differentiators, so you can leverage them into promotion.
- Make sure you know which key customer groups you are targeting.
- Make sure you can deliver a unified message from the store.
- Make sure you have a name that is easy to understand and remember.
- Make sure you are constantly doing customer loyalty actions that support and promote you to their circle of acquaintances.
- Make sure you have materials with your logo and messages on hand to pass on and send everywhere (in parcels, at events, after talks, etc.).
Read more here: Online shop brand and logo – 10 tips to help you make good choices
Perhaps the expected growth during this year’s holiday season will be weaker than previous years.
Or maybe you’re in a niche where customers have pressing needs that they have no choice but to satisfy – and then your campaigns will succeed.
Whatever the situation, it’s better to be prepared in advance than to act out of panic in the moment.
Try the tips I’ve offered today and see what works for you.
PS. Use the advantages of the unosoft platform for yourself. Activate the useful applications for you and, in particular, the modules for on-site marketing.
And if you’re not selling on unosoft yet, it’s not too late to try the platform. You get 15 days free demo, and then our subscriptions start from 1 euro per day.
Passionate about entrepreneurship and eCommerce, I started my online activity in 2000.
Together with my team I have helped over 2,200 companies grow their business on the unosoft platform.
