The biggest sale season of the year is upon us again. This year you can do things better to gain more sales and retain a bunch of customers you get during the sales season.
To achieve this feat, you need to make a place and prepare your Shopify store to maximize this sales season for 2023. National Retail Federation projected that holiday sales are expected to have a 6 to 8% year-over-year growth for 2022. However, at the end of the sales season, the growth was way below the projection at 3.5% sales growth from the previous year (2021) with an 8.6% sales increase
The low sales growth was attributed to rising inflation in the US. Amidst this low sales growth, the two giant holiday sales took the lead. Cyber Monday generated about 10.7 billion US dollars in 2022 with Black Friday generating over 9 billion US dollars in revenue. Looking at shoppers’ spending, online shoppers in the US spent more than $3 billion in 38 days between November and December.
With these huge sales numbers, it is evident that you need to optimize your store to attract sales and convert your visitors to customers during holiday sales. Here are some ways to get your Shopify store ready for the sales season.
What You Need To Do To Get Ready For The Sales Season
1. Get Your Store Ready For Large Traffic
For e-commerce merchants on platforms like Shopify, you have less to worry about when it comes to traffic on your website. Shopify is built to handle the high traffic that comes as a result of the holiday sales period.
Shopify uses the Content Delivery Network (CDN), which ensures that the site performs properly with high and extreme trafficking. That is why you can have a large number of visitors to your store across many stores on the Shopify platform without having a slow website speed.
About site speed, you can keep your store in a better-performing state in terms of speed which is one of the things online shoppers are looking for as they want to get done with any purchase as soon as possible. Site speed becomes a key point for online shoppers since they want to meet up with a sales timer or countdown. To get this done, you can rework your Shopify theme and the number of third-party apps on your store. That is why at StoreBundle we have an all-in-one marketing app for Shopify store owners to block bots, create sales timers, edit thank you pages, have currency switcher options, and more on your store.
2. Start Marketing From Social Media
You can start with teasers about sales for the holiday season on your store with promotional ads that serve as teasers to your target audience. This will create a form of familiarity with customers on your brand and products as well.
Outside sales season, social media should be one of your core marketing strategies for your Shopify store. This strategy has been able to help store owners drive traffic, increase their customer base, and push sales in real-time. With social media, you can gain more customers and improve awareness for your brand and store.
Social Media: A Marketing Tool To Enhance Growth For Your Shopify Store
Go to your plan book, look at products you want to have for sales during the peak sales season, map out a promotional strategy to serve as a thirst trap for potential customers, and put these promotions out way before Thanksgiving, Black Friday, or Cyber Monday.
In 2022, global sales through social media were estimated at $992 billion, almost a trillion dollars with a projection to reach $2.9 trillion in 2026. Social media is not the platform you want to ignore when it comes to gaining sales.
3. Product Images And Description Update
Have a walk through your product catalog and see products that need their images to be updated and descriptions changed to fit the holiday sales. You might have to use some SEO-backed words to get customers to find what they need.
Images have a way of getting customers attraction and can lead them to check the items’ details. From the interactions, they can be nudged to make a purchase. So ensure you have your product images sharp and sellable to customers.
To make your product image a selling point, professional photography can help you showcase what you have in multiple dimensions. If you are working with a limited budget to prepare your store for the sales season, you can use apps that helps you provide customers with clean images.
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4. Have A Plan To Work With
You might miss out on many things if you do not draw a plan on how to make sales, drive traffic to your store, convert traffic into leads, retain customers post-sales season, and more.
A proper plan gives you a defined goal and the path to actualizing that goal. You should have the goals you want from the 2023 sales season written out alongside how to achieve the result. This will help you in budgeting and staying on track to achieve your goals.
Some of the things your plan should include are the products that will be on sale, discounts or price splash,
– how do you intend to nudge customers to buy
– strategy to convert first-time visitors into customers
– how to handle the influx of traffic that comes with this season so that you don’t leave customers with a poor impression of your customer service
– sales and revenue target
– order fulfillment strategy
The list is endless and unique to every store depending on the kind of products you sell or customer behavior. The key point here is to have a plan to work with so that you don’t overstretch your revenue as well not miss out on potential customers.
5. Keep A Simple Checkout Page
A study by Baymard shows that 69% of online shoppers abandon items in their cart due to the strenuous checkout process. And that is for a normal sales period when there is no sales rush.
During peak sales season, online shoppers have non-existent patience to get through long checkout processes. To reduce the cart abandonment rate for your store, you should optimize your checkout forms and allow buyers to checkout as visitors. This will help you keep a portion of buyers in your basket during this period.
Also, customers usually are always on the run during sales season. Some of them are rushing to finish up an order so they can meet up with a sales countdown from other stores. So there is little patience on long checkout.
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6. Retarget Customers
When getting ready for peak sales season like this, you can retarget existing customers to get them ready for the sales that will be happening. Retargeting can help you drive customers to plan to buy a product during sales. It sort of opens their mind to the sales that are about to happen.
Consistent exposure to retargeting ads can help reinforce your brand in the minds of potential customers. When they are ready to make a purchase during holiday sales, they are more likely to think of your brand due to the repeated exposure.
With retargeting ads, you can create a sense of urgency which is a sales season strategy to draw customers to buy. You can highlight limited-time offers, special holiday discounts, or approaching deadlines for shipping. Urgency can motivate hesitant shoppers to make a purchase before missing out on a deal.
Retargeting Ads: Ways To Reach More Customers And Increase Sales
7. Customer Support And Live Chat
During the holiday season, customer inquiries and support requests tend to spike as shoppers have more questions about products, orders, shipping, and returns. Having a robust customer support system in place, including live chat, can help handle the increased volume of inquiries efficiently.
Live chat allows customers to engage with support representatives in real time, providing immediate assistance and resolving any issues or concerns they may have. And due to the huge traffic of first-time visitors, some visitors might need guidance on how to explore your store or other shopping-related questions.
With a good support team, you can help minimize frustration and ensure a positive customer experience. Quality customer service has been a huge reason why some buyers stick to a brand. You can use that as a unique selling point to retain customers during the peak sales season.
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