How to increase your online sales this Christmas

Making online sales is all about convincing consumers that you can satisfy their needs in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible. As such, it is important to consider what potential customers would want from you. Chances are your answer is either one or a combination of these four things:

Great Products
Straightforward Purchases
Easy Payment
Fast Delivery

No customer desires to be left high and dry after deciding to shop online instead of in-store. One of the most crucial points is that their purchase has a good price and arrives swiftly, within a reasonable deadline, especially during holiday season.

This makes the holiday season one of the busiest shopping times of the year, and especially with other key shopping dates being very close – Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and January Sales. Each of these dates has its own peak and requires extensive planning and preparation, so you should always aim to plan five to six weeks ahead of these events.

Utilizing Tech and Software Makes Preparation and Selling Easier

With all the moving components surrounding this season, having tools that can help smoothen things out is incredibly beneficial. Automation software is being utilized by an increasing number of merchants to help them prepare for the upcoming holidays.

Automation tools help you by improving your backend processes and retail flow. These include tools can help you with your marketing strategies, improve your customer satisfaction, gather data and segment your customer base, or use integrated APIs to enhance the shipping processes.

Instead of fulfilling your orders manually, you can use automation tools to do it for you and reduce some of the stressors within your business. For example, you can use automation bots that will download orders, instantly allocate and fulfill them, and send them to shipping while providing automatic status updates for each.

As another example, automation software can help you with your email marketing campaign. There are various tools that can integrate with your CRM system and gather customers or prospective customers’ data to easily segment them and design highly targeted mailing lists for each segment or even retarget your customers.

Strategies that Will Help You Ace the Upcoming Holiday Season

Automation tools will not work without a working strategy, so here are some that will help you with your sales.

1. Provide an Omnichannel Experience
This means providing your customers with a cohesive and seamless experience across your various marketing channels. Your customers expect a consistent experience regardless of whether they are online, in a store, reading an email, engaging with you on social media, or are using a mobile device.

Even if you do not have a lot of dollars to spend on marketing, having a consistent brand experience is essential if you wish to be recognizable.

2. Begin Web-Rooming
A webroom is the online version of a showroom. Consumers typically research stuff online then buy them at a retail store. Therefore, to have an edge over your competitors this season, it is imperative that you design an online catalog showcasing your discounts and bonuses.

3. Utilize Facebook Ads
This social media platform has over a billion users. And with almost everyone being on Facebook today, chances are that your ideal audience is on this platform. The best way of reaching them is through Facebook ads. The benefit of these ads is that, in addition to driving your sales, they also enhance your brand awareness while educating clients about your company and its product offerings.

4. Use Hashtags
People love following trends, and everybody loves laying their hands on the things that are trending. As such, you can utilize the power of hashtags on Instagram and Twitter to spread the word about your discounts and promotions. Hashtags provide you with an avenue to reach more people and get them to talk about you.

If the past few years are anything to go by, it is highly likely that the 2018 holiday season will record one of the highest sales ever made during the holiday season. It is, therefore, imperative that you put your business in a place that it can take advantage of this opportunity.