Excitement around Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and New Year’s has long been one reason that businesses increase sales and profits during the holidays. People are buying fashionable clothes, shoes, and jewelry as well as gifts and many other things.

The 2021 holiday season may turn out to be a relatively calm one, but it’s still an opportune time for ecommerce businesses to take advantage of various marketing and promotional methods. 

This year brings with it good cheer on the one hand and plenty of pandemic fever on the other. Even so, you can expect the following during the holiday season:

• Great sales and promotions
• Improved brand loyalty
• New potential customers
• Strategic plans and models

Businesses wait a whole year for the holiday season, but, to keep up with market trends, you must accelerate your preparations. Let’s start with the bigger picture.

The Sales Landscape in 2021

There are multiple factors affecting the holiday sales environment:

• The Corona virus is still impacting businesses and changing people’s buying habits ahead of the 2021 holiday season.
• Ecom owners can use email marketing (among other communication tools) to inform customers of new products and holiday offers.
• As has been true for a while, ecom businesses are supporting their marketing campaigns with big-data analytics that help them make informed sales decisions. Planning ahead for the holiday season and having a solid marketing plan in place has been shown to be of great benefit to businesses.

Online purchasing has been on the rise since 2020 as the pandemic made it a better way for consumers to do shopping and now that most people have experienced this convenient way of shopping, they’ll be looking forward to purchasing their 2021 holiday gifts for their loved ones online as well. Ecom stores should be prepared to meet the demand. 

The biggest gift this season is that people are able to be physically closer to their families and share many experiences with each other again. The 2021 sales landscape could be a repeat of 2020 with a lot of online shopping and free shipping. Or there could be a return to in-store shopping, which wasn’t possible back in 2020. 

Here are some great steps you can take to increase your ecom sales this holiday season.

1. Introduce Special Discounts for Customers

It’s important to attract new customers. It’s also key to maintain a good relationship with the customers who already shop at your ecom store. Here are a few ways to do that: 

• Customers feel valued if, after they make repeated purchases, they’re eligible for a discount. 
• Offering discounts to introduce customers to your new product line is also a great way to get people to browse your catalogue. 
• Ecom stores offer discounted products during the holiday season to reward their loyal customers.

2. Get Good Content Out There Early

Ecommerce store owners should create their promotional, email marketing, and blog content as early as possible. As I’m writing this, consumers are already reading promotional content for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the entire month of December. 

Ecom content is central to great sales, The idea is to provide content that builds trust with customers who may need or want your products. Having a good relationship is very important for encouraging new and repeat sales. Businesses need to send new and informative content and email marketing promotions to their customers on a regular basis.

3. Optimize Your Store 

More than half of the world’s population now uses mobile devices, laptops, and tablets, and can browse on online stores. People who use their mobile phones daily, may land on your ecom store when they’re looking for a product to buy and will be very happy if they can learn the following very quickly:

• What your store carries
• How easy it is to navigate from page to page
• How to place their first order

It can be tedious to scroll through multiple catalog pages without good search and navigation capability, especially on a phone. That’s why it’s important for a well-designed store to have a simple catalog that’s optimized with filters and search features that make it easy for customers to place an order. 

Regardless of the device they use to browse, you want customers to be able to easily complete their holiday shopping on your ecom store.

4. Offer Online Contests on Social Media

During the holiday season, online contests become an important tool for attracting customers. Since many interactions with people and your brand take place on social media, the big social media sites offer the best platforms for customers to learn about and come to understand your product before they make a purchase. 

Start with customers who already follow your page but have never made a purchase. Ecom store owners can take advantage of their interest by designing attractive and engaging content on various social media channels. This will attract new customers and reward repeat customers. 

Offer your customers gift cards for varying amounts for participating in the contest. This helps expand your audience with the goal of increasing your holiday sales.

5. Review Data Analytics

Every business starts with an idea, and the decisions that an “ecom-preneur” makes while running the business can determine its success or failure. Data analytics is a good tool for helping to make such decisions—it can be crucial to get the right data. 

The data from 2020 is still informative, and the metric features (such as which ad converted best and which ad platform delivered the most customers to the checkout page) still show the opportunities and risks of the business. A review of data analytics can reveal important information that can help ecom store owners develop an ideal strategy for designing a layout that will positively impact their business during the holiday season, potentially doubling or tripling sales compared to the previous holiday season. 

The benefit of data analysis is that you can make year-over-year comparisons that can help you make clear predictions. With reliable data, you can create marketing campaigns and promotional content to attract new customers for the holiday season.

6. Collect Customer Feedback

What does the customer feedback tell you? If customers complain about the following:

• The many steps involved in getting to the checkout page
• Bugs that they faced when shopping

Ecom store owners can then fix these bugs and redesign their store’s navigation, making poor usability a nonissue while promoting a simple buying process that can make shopping easier for customers. 

Customer satisfaction should be the number one priority for ecom businesses. As business writer Michael LeBoeuf says, “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.”

Conclusion

The biggest sales of the year are made during the holiday season. This holiday season, ecom businesses can improve their online presence and boost holiday sales in these ways:

• Entice new and returning customers with great discounts and online contests.
• Prepare strong holiday content and post it early enough to give customers time to peruse the holiday-season offers.
• Optimize your ecom store website.
• Review data gleaned from data analytics to develop a marketing strategy.
• Review customer feedback.

By planning ahead, ecom owners can be sure to meet the needs of customers during the holidays.

Resources

LeBoeuf, M. [n.d.]. BrainyQuote.