
Do the next holidays seem far away for you? Let me tell you they are not. To make full use of the shopping madness around Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas, you should already be busy with the holidays of 2019. Do you already have plans for your webshop for this year’s holidays? There is a lot to do in order to generate as much revenue as possible in the months before and during the holidays. Stockpiling, content planning, content creation, webshop adjustments, running social media and ad campaigns.
The possibility of a lot of extra sales
Many webshop owners don’t think about it. It is possible to earn in the last two months of the year what you have earned in those ten months before. Okay, this generally applies to the big boys among us. But with a thorough plan and good preparation, it is possible to generate a significant extra turnover. 61% of online gifts for public holidays are made in November and December. 1% of the gifts for holidays are made in January. The madness of sales nowadays starts during Black Friday. This phenomenon has spread from America to The Netherlands. In the beginning, mainly Apple shops and electronics stores participated. Nowadays, stores like Zalando and Rituals also participate on this day.
What do you bet on during the sales madness?
Try to bet on products that sell best in your webshop. Your customers come to you for these products. You are known for this and you are easy to find on these products. Have extra inventory of these products and ensure that you have products that you can sell with these products. Promote the new products well during a sale. If you have lured customers for a bed with a discount, you offer bedding in several places in your webshop that fits in style and size. Of course these side products or not or only a little bit on sale.
You then easily persuade people to add a product that has a higher profit margin. In addition, a good way to offer products is in bundles. For example, also offers coffee with a French press. You do not get a discount on the products separately, but you do receive a discount if you buy them in the bundle.
Your best-selling products are easy to discover if you look back at what you sold the best last year. It is also important to build extra stock of these products. It is useless selling products that you cannot deliver during the holidays. This will immediately cost you that new or returning customer.
Good content for the holidays is worth gold!
Content is king! We all know that. Special content for the holidays is important. You can do very special things with your posts on social media, in your advertisements and mailings. It does not stop there and as a result creating new content for the holidays takes extra time. We swear by a content calendar for the entire year. We will tell more about this in a blog soon. For now, a content calendar for the rest of the year or one that only focuses on the holidays would be handy.
What do you want to promote and communicate during the holidays? Which products are you going to push? What discounts are you going to give? It’s best to prepare this now.
We are happy to help with the preparationsImprove your position with Google
Before you start thinking about promotion, it is important to check your position at Google. Not only with your homepage but also per product category and per product. The first 10 positions are worth gold because they receive 94% of all clicks.
A first position is worth gold. Invest in it. If you can not achieve it through organic SEO optimization it’s a good idea to add your products to Google Shopping. You use Google Merchant for this. By using a competitive pricing strategy through Google Merchant you ensure that you are always at the top of the results within Google Shopping. Even before the first organic link on page 1. If potential buyers come to the product through this channel, the chance of a sale is many times greater than by coming through another channel. People assume that if you are the cheapest through Google Shopping, this is the case. As a result, they often look no further and proceed to purchase.
Promote your webshop
Many small webshop owners do not start with online advertising, because they think that it is not possible to advertise with a small budget. Platforms such as Facebook AdsGoogle Adsense offer the perfect solution for this.
You can easily define your target group and the areas where these advertisements should be displayed. It is impossible to compete against companies that advertise with mega budgets on a small budget. By cleverly deploying your campaign alongside your normal social media posts, it is possible to reach your target group who is already familiar with your brand locally and within the region. This ensures that you increase your traffic and call to actions in a managed manner. People who already know your brand and existing customers come into contact with your shop more often during the holidays, which means that they will order that one product faster from you.
Our customer Eigen Zinnig uses the different channels precisely to optimally facilitate organic and dynamic growth.
Make sure packages are on time!
PostNL processed around 12 million packages from Black Friday to Sinterklaas last year. Almost 500,000 packages arrived late. This can ruin many holidays. It is important to ensure that this does not happen to you.
Try to persuade customers to make purchases earlier by giving a discount for early ordering well in advance of the holiday season. This is possible with a sale but is often even more effective due to the use of a discount code. Codes such as earlybird, preholidaysale, christmas2019 often work well. As a result, customers have the idea that they must strike now. Choose a deadline until the discount ends. In addition, you can play with free shipping from a lower amount if you order earlier. The possibilities are endless.
Despite the means to persuade customers to make the purchase earlier, the purchase peak will still be in the two weeks before the holidays. Indicate in different places in the webshop until when you can order with the certainty that the order is also available for Christmas. Discuss with your shipping service what this was like in previous years. Always add one or two days to this because it is the same thing every year with packages not arriving on time.
We would like to help you with the preparations for the 2019 holidays. We deal with these issues annually, both within our clients’ projects and within our own projects. We would love to chat to see how we can help you to be optimally prepared for the coming holidays.
Your online concept starts at Snoober Media
A series about e-commerce
It is important to us to inform about e-commerce and to give tips about a webshop. Therefore read the previous article, “E-Commerce 2 | What are the trends for webshops for 2019?“, about e-commerce. Soon you will read a new article in this series.