Boost your online sales with these helpful tips
The festive season is almost upon us and after nearly two years of pandemic-induced online shopping, it’s absolutely imperative that your business is ready to grab its share of the market. But how can your business take advantage of online shoppers and what tools are available to you to boost sales, attract new customers and increase revenue?
Email Marketing
Email marketing in 2019 was responsible for 20% of sales throughout the Christmas period and this trend shows no sign of slowing down. Therefore email marketing has to be a sharpened tool in your arsenal to create sales this Christmas, and there are some particular ideas that you should take into account.
Plan ahead. Start your campaigns as early as possible. People claim they don’t start thinking about Christmas until December, but as soon as the leaves start to change their colors and drop from the branches, your customer’s minds begin turning to Turkey sandwiches and stocking fillers. Let them know you’re ready for them with an early, targeted email blast.
But make sure that every email contains a personal touch. An email addressed directly to someone is 26% more likely to be opened, giving your business an advantage over competitors who lump all their customers into one campaign. Not only will referring to them by name create more traffic, but, believe it or not, adding a festive emoji to the subject line will also boost the opening rate, leading to more clicks and more sales.
Email marketing is a great way to showcase who you are as a brand, and so the voice and tone of the emails should correlate to your business. Showcase your offers and exclusive deals whilst building a lasting, grounded relationship with your consumers, giving them more reason to return, again and again.
Social Media
You’re already on Instagram, fantastic. But are you showing off your business in the best possible light? Your social media campaigns should create a feeling of the time. Leaning into the social and cultural feelings of the Christmas season will bring in new followers and delight the old. Think family, love, gatherings, snow, and warmth. In creating a Christmas aesthetic, you’re getting your followers in the festive spirit, making them think about what should go under the tree, and there you are, ready to help them make those gift-buying decisions.
Instagram is a great way to show off your inventory, especially if your stock is particularly large. The layout of the grids on Instagram’s mobile site will let your stock jump out at consumers, leading to a click, and then by adding the link straight to your online store you’re making the process of buying from you as seamless as possible for your customer.
Youtube is a perfect channel for showing consumers not what your products are, but also how they work. Small clips, reviews, how-to’s, will all draw your customers in, giving you more chances to make a sale.
Content marketing
This Christmas, make sure your content is working for you. By putting a constant, steady stream of information out, be it via social media channels, email marketing, blog posts, and content on your website, you and your business will be making sure you’re maintaining a public image, keeping right at the forefront of your mind.
But what strategies are there? It doesn’t all have to be about products. It has been shown that consumers value an emotional and personal relationship with their brand. One way of creating this bond is to show the consumer who you are as a company. Let your employees share something about themselves, show off their skills and interests, pick their product of the week/month. This can help turn your business from a faceless entity to a store where the customers feel like they know the employers, creating a hybrid version of the online/physical aspects of shopping.
Blogging should be a huge part of your content strategy. 60% of online users read blogs, with almost 40% of those reading blogs three or four times a week. But why do people read blogs? Simply to learn something new and be entertained. This can be incorporated into your online strategy easily. Show them how to use some of the products you have on sale, whilst adding links in the blog straight to that product, making it as easy as possible for the consumer to purchase the product.
Paid Social
Facebook Ads do work. Wonderfully so. If you are new to Facebook then there are plenty of fantastic blogs to help you begin, and some brilliant digital marketing agency in bristol who can do the hard work for you, but those who have experience with Facebook Ads, it’s important to keep on top of it.
There are different ways to do this. One way is to refresh your audience profile. Define the absolute perfect consumer to target your ads at by changing the parameters of those ads. You can directly target users by location, gender, interests, connections, education, workplaces to name but a few. Selling DVD players? Find people on Facebook who have interacted with film pages, actors’ pages, even those who have liked a post about a re-release. By dialing down on this information then your ads are super-targeted, giving you more chances of making those sales.
Synchronization
You can do all these perfectly, but if you haven’t married them up and aren’t running a tight, targeted, synchronized campaign, then you’re creating hurdles for yourself. Organize a calendar to keep track of uploads and paid socials with times and dates for new content to be uploaded. It’s also key to make sure your mobile site is as tight as your desktop site, especially as 73% of shoppers prefer using their mobile device whereas nearly half of 2019’s online shopping revenue was generated through mobiles. This is a huge number and one that cannot be underestimated when it comes to boosting sales this Christmas period.
With these tips, along with quality stock and a strong brand, you can make this Christmas the most profitable one yet
