21 Hands-on Tips To Increase Holiday Sales In 2022

Want to increase your holiday sales?

A cliche question but I know the answer is Yes. That’s the reason you’re reading this post. Isn’t it?

But increasing holiday sales isn’t something you can do overnight. You require a thorough and robust strategy to do that.

And in this blog post, you’re going to learn 21-holiday sales tips you can use to create strategies that increase holiday sales of your eCommerce store.

So let’s not waste time and begin since the blog is already quite lengthy with 21 tips to discuss in a go.

21 Tips To Increase Holiday Sales In 2022

1. Be COVID Conscious

The covid-19 pandemic had changed everything. But now everything is coming back on track. Life is getting normal.

Covid 19 affected our daily routine to our shopping style. All small and large businesses were affected. The survival of businesses depended completely on the 100% safety of your customers. Now, as the covid cases are increasing again. Store owners are trying to keep their shoppers safe, and customers updated.

For example, Zomato, an Indian food delivery brand, offers a dedicated filter that displays only restaurants that are safe to order from. Also, nowadays they are updating the temperature of the delivery boy. They regularly ensure that the temperature is measured, the time when it is measured, and contact-free delivery.

Here are the tips you can follow to tell people you’re following all the safety measures:

• Show you care about your customers’ health
• Give your content a Covid-19 touch
• Encourage shoppers to make cashless transactions to avoid physical contacts
• Add product filters that help customers sort products according to their safety

2. Run Cart Abandonment Campaigns

Statista reports that in March 2021, 80% of the online shopping orders were abandoned globally. And I remember this number was 88% till 2020.

Abandoned carts bother every business. And I’m sure it has an impact on your company as well.

Cart abandonment can be an antagonist for your online store. And if you want to increase holiday sales, you must eliminate it.

But the fact is, you can’t stop customers from doing that. But if you know the reasons for it, you can work on them so your customers don’t leave your site until they buy something.

Here are the top reasons for cart abandonment:

But let me tell you a secret, even if you do everything right, users will still abandon carts. So try to recover those abandoned carts by convincing your customers to complete their orders. And you can do that by creating cart abandonment campaigns.

Here’s how you can recover your abandoned carts through campaigns:

• Use email automation tools to create cart abandonment email campaigns during the holiday season.
• Remind users at a set interval of time to complete their purchase
• You can also remind them through push notifications
• Use indicators that generate FOMO like Out of Stock, Countdown Timers, etc.
• Show them retargeting ads to bring them back

3. Leverage Audience Segmentation

Customer segmentation is a process where you divide your users into different groups as per their characteristics. These characteristics can be anything like their Location, Gender, or something else.

Audience segmentation can benefit you in many ways. When you segment your users, you can deliver the content they’re really interested in. And doing that has more chances of better conversions or sales.

For example, if you segment bodybuilders as per their previous purchases, i.e., protein bars, you can retarget them in the future with more relevant products like energy drinks and supplements.

This will give them a personalized customer experience and restrict you from using a scattered targeting approach.

Here’s how you can leverage customer segmentation:

• Use tools to segment your audience
• Generate content as per the customer stage to move them down in your sales pipeline
• Create email marketing campaigns as per the characteristics of the customers

4. Expose Your Top-selling Product

Some of your top-selling products are the audience’s favorite. Your customers buy them throughout the year and if you present them in front of every visitor, they’ll at least check them out once and may purchase them too.

Your best sellers have already proved their mettle. Showing them often will attract more customers towards it and boost holiday sales, conversions, etc.

Here’s how you can expose your top-selling products:

• Display your best-selling products in your website’s footer, landing pages, etc.
• Make them easily accessible for every visitor
• If possible, create a dedicated landing page for top-selling products
• Pitch your top-selling products through emails
• You can also generate content around your best-selling products

5. Review Your Previous Data to Avoid Mistakes

You become better when you don’t repeat your previous mistakes. The same goes for eCommerce businesses. If you’ve committed some errors in the past, it’s better not to repeat them. You can also read below holiday selling eCommerce tips.

Fixing the previous bottlenecks will make sure that users will not drop off your website. This will help you move them through the funnel easily and increase holiday sales and conversions.

Here’s how you can avoid your previous mistakes:

• Analyze your previous year’s data on Google Analytics and Google Search Console
• Check heatmaps and scroll maps, to understand what’s driving your visitors away
• Watch the recording of the page visits to learn the behavior of users on your pages
• Fix what things went wrong for your business in the previous year, like marketing of a product, non-converting ads, etc.

6. Exciting Offers for First-time Buyers

Converting new customers costs more than converting the existing ones.

But that doesn’t mean you can neglect your new buyers. If you can retain your first-time customer for long, they will also be profitable for you in the future. And nothing works better than offering some exciting rewards to those users.

Here’s an example from Amazon,

Here’s what you can do to retain first-time buyers with exciting rewards:

• Offer discount, free shipping, cashback, etc. on the first purchase of the users
• Create offers that are dedicated only to first-time buyers
• Provide them early access to your upcoming sale. This will be a great idea to increase sales during the Holidays.
• Offer them a referral bonus

7. Don’t Overlook Customer Service

People shop most during the holiday season. And the more they shop, the more issues pop up. Your job is to provide them with customer service that can fix those issues in no time.

If you do that successfully, 93% of the customers would like to shop again from your brand. Keep in mind, that you can’t keep every user happy, but if most of them are, you’re doing great.

Here’s what you can do to improve your customer service:

• Reduce your average response time
• Provide an omnichannel customer service
• Add a self-service option to your website
• Use chatbots to fix common and repetitive problems

8. Retarget Your Existing Customers

Targeting existing users is much more beneficial than targeting new ones. The existing customers are already interested in your brand and have interacted with you before. Hence they are more likely to listen to you and your offers when you approach them.

According to Invespcro, investing in new customers is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining the existing ones.

And also the existing customers purchase more products than the fresh ones. So it’s always fruitful to target existing customers if you want to boost holiday sales.

Here’s how you can retarget your existing customers:

• Segment your existing customers for better targeting
• Show them personalized ads through remarketing
• Offer them products relevant to their current and previous purchases via cross-selling and upselling

9. Boost Impulse Buys with Upselling and Cross-selling

Has it ever happened to you, that you planned to buy something but returned with many other unplanned products? Personally, it happens to me a lot.

We call this impulse buying. When a customer is purchasing something and buys another product with it she/he hasn’t planned to. Increasing impulse buys also increases the revenue of your store since the customers purchase more products.

In the online business, we propose impulse purchases through upselling and cross-selling.

Upselling is about offering an upgrade or a better version of the product the user is purchasing. Whereas, cross-selling refers to offering complementary products to the initial purchase that will add more value to the parent product if bought.

Here’s how you can increase impulse buys at your store:

• Use smart upselling or cross-selling plugin
• Offer post-purchase upsells, i.e., after checkout
• Offer them cross-selling products right before they add a product to the cart
• Show them the products relevant to the initial purchase
• Avoid offering a product they’ve already purchased before

10. Include Countdown for Offers

A few days back, I was looking for new headphones and found one but thought to purchase it later. But then I saw there’s a discount on those headphones that were about to run out in half an hour. So I ordered them immediately.

In other words, it is called a sense of urgency. Creating a sense of urgency prompts the fear of missing out (FOMO) among the users.

This helps you convert those customers who think to purchase the products later.

Here’s how you can use a sense of urgency:

• Add countdown timers for your sales, discounts, or product going out of stock
• Offer reward points to customers if they buy the product under the deadline
• Display the number of products left in the stock
• Notify customers through email, SMS, or social media about products going out of stock, sales ending, etc.

11. Target Your Niche Market

One of the must-try methods.

Instead of using a scattered approach where you try to attract every single user, focus on your niche market. Doing that can get you better conversions since your niche market will be more interested in your offerings as compared to any random niche.

Perform market research to get an idea about the trending niches. If your niche is in trend, focusing on it can increase holiday season sales pretty well.

Here’s how you can target your niche market:

• Identify your passion or what problems you love solving
• Look for trending products related to your passion
• Use tools like Google Trends and AdWords to find out the trending niches
• Monitor your competitors and look for their best-selling products
• Create a buyer persona of your ideal audience and look at what problems they’re facing and how can you fix it

12. Boost Your Website Security

During the holiday season, the number of transactions increases. And so do the frauds. Hence, it becomes imperative to make your portal secure so that customers can pay without worrying. Here comes the concept of securing your eCommerce website.

Securing your website doesn’t affect your sales directly. But if customers think your website is safe, they will not hesitate to spend on your store. They may also refer your website to others. This leads you to more sales in the festive season.

Here’s how you can keep your website secure:

• Make sure your online store is PCI DSS compliant
• Use secure payment gateways
• Buy an SSL certificate from a trusted brand like Comodo SSL, GoDaddy, Digicert
• Use multifactor authentication
• Use a secured WordPress host

13. Nurture Users with Email Marketing

Email marketing is not an all-gone fashion. Many digital marketers still use emails to pitch their sales to potential customers. And why do they use it? Because it gives amazing results.

It is seen when you use email marketing to offer coupons and rewards, 7 out of 10 people use them. Not only this, emails bring great traffic to your website and can also convert users.

But remember, sending random emails is like taking shots in the dark. So you need to create an infallible strategy that can help you increase your holiday season sales.

Here’s how you can create an effective email marketing strategy:

• Choose the perfect email platform that best suits your needs. There are many like HubSpot, MailChimp, Optinmonster
• Avoid email marketing mistakes like not sending welcome emails, using a bunch of stock images, etc.
• Send segmented and personalized emails to your audience
• Always test your emails via AB testing
• Optimize and make your emails mobile-friendly
• Don’t be promotional in your emails. Try to provide them value
• Monitor your email deliverability. If that’s not good, you may ruin your reputation

14. Give Your Website a Festive Look

Have you seen how brick-and-mortar stores are decorated for festivals? They decorate their shops according to the festival so that people can relate.

In the eCommerce business, your website is your store. You need to give it a festive look and feel so that customers know you’re prepared for the festivals and they can get some good deals there.

Along with giving your site a festive look, make the website navigation and checkout process easy for the users.

Remember, many users shop from mobile devices, and according to a report, if your mobile website has complex navigation, 61% of users won’t return to it. And 40% will visit the competitor’s site instead.

Here’s how you can give your website a festive look:

• You can use festive images on your website home and other pages
• Use graphics and themes that represent the festival or the ongoing season
• Change the fonts to give your website a festive look

15. Optimize A2Z for Mobile

Mobile devices were responsible for almost half of the total online sales in 2016. And this number is set to grow up to 73% by the end of 2022.

Everyone likes a compact and easy shopping experience, and they can get it only from their mobile devices. I always shop from my mobile and don’t even remember when was the last time when I bought something from a desktop.

So the bottom line is, don’t ignore mobile shoppers. Focus on providing them with the best shopping experience.

Here’s how you can provide the best mobile shopping experience:

• Optimizing your website for mobile devices
• Make sure your website loads fast on mobile
• Make the checkout process smooth for mobile devices
• Avoid adding content in excess for mobile pages
• Make your e-store responsive for mobile if it is not.

16. Offer Free Shipping and Easy Return

Just a couple of weeks back, I was searching for some trousers for myself. One of them was so mind-blowing I added it to the cart instantly. But as I saw the shipping charges were mind-blowing too, I abandoned my cart.

This is what you should care about. Don’t charge too much for shipping. Or you can also offer free shipping in the holiday season.

Also, focus on smoothening the return process along with shipping. If a customer is somehow not satisfied with the product and wants to return it, make this process easy for them. And in the holiday season, the number of returns skyrockets. So make it better if it’s not.

Here’s how you can use free shipping and return:

• Set a specific price limit for free shipping
• Promote your free shipping event
• Include shipping cost in the product price
• Make returns easy for customers
• Clearly list the return deadline on every product page

17. Leverage User-Generated Content

Nothing’s better than user-generated content(UGC) to gain the user’s trust. This is the reason almost every brand uses it on their websites.

According to a report from Brightlocal, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendations. Incorporating pictures of the reviewer buckles up more credibility to the website.

Here’s an amazing example of Backlinko using UGC:

If you visit Backlinko and read these reviews, you won’t think much before subscribing to their newsletter.

However, it’s not possible for every eCommerce business to display user-generated content on their homepage. But if you can show them somewhere, you have a chance of attracting loyal customers who can grow your holiday season sales.

Here’s how you can use user-generated content on your website:

• Add testimonials on your home page
• You can also create a dedicated page for testimonials, case studies
• Don’t limit your testimonials only to your website. Share them on social media
• Use them in your content to gain readers’ trust

18. Build a Customer Base Before Sale Season

Building an audience after the holiday season begins will get difficult for you. This is because people don’t trust new brands so quickly over the trusted ones.

So try to build an audience prior to the holiday season. You can use several mediums for this. For example, you can collect email subscribers, social media followers, or members for your social media groups or spaces.

The idea is to grab an audience who, whenever you run a new festive sale, gets to know about it instantly through your posts, emails, etc. If they get notified, they’ll visit your website, shop there, and increase holiday sales at your store.

Here’s how you can build an audience before the holiday season sale begins:

• Find your target audience in social media groups
• Offer free subscriptions to some users
• Look what kind of audience your competitors are targeting
• Analyze your products and think about what kind of audience’s problem it will fix
• Create memberships and offer them for free in the beginning

19. Plan a Targeting Content Strategy

This is the mistake we’ve made in the past and will be rectified this year. Planning a content strategy for the holiday season at the 11th hour won’t be worth your efforts.

Why?

Because the content doesn’t rank overnight. It needs time, sometimes months, and years to get on top of the SERPs. So plan your content strategy prior to the festive season.

Generate and market your content before the holiday season begins just like established brands. So if you start creating or optimizing your holiday season blog posts at the last minute, the competitors’ content will outrank your articles.

Many brands underestimate the power of content when it comes to sales. But it is a powerful asset to boost your conversions and increase holiday sales.

Here’s how you can create a content strategy prior holiday season:

• Start creating the blogs during the holiday season at least 3 months before it begins
• If you have enough blogs for the festive season, optimize them. You can also de-index the least performing ones
• Create freebies or lead magnets you can offer for free during the holiday season
• Look for the holiday sales trends and create content around them if you don’t have any

20. Encourage Video and GIFs

If you have demo videos of your products or have an explainer video and walk-through videos, then you are through with this. Videos and GIFs have become the centerpiece for conversion.

During the holiday season, one tends to increase revenue, thus amplifying the checkout process through something innovative and out of the box. And using videos and GIFs is the best choice to do so.

Not only this, but it will also grab the attention of your customers. But using such marketing strategies will surely increase the click-through rate.

Here’s how you can use videos and GIFs effectively:

• Use videos to explain the functioning of your products
• GIFs are trending these days. You can use them in your social posts and promotions
• You can also use product teaser videos to generate curiosity among the customers

21. Pep-up Your Social Media

According to a report from Wearesocial, every 2nd person in the world uses social media.

Every day millions of posts are shared on different social media platforms. And since it has an impressive power of spreading word of mouth, every brand is squeezing more and more value from it.

You should also do the same to share your holiday deals and offers. All you need to do is be more active on social media platforms, and engage and nurture your audience. Trust me, if you leverage this platform, you’ll witness a great hike in your festive sales.

Here’s how you can use social media to increase holiday sales:

• Be on the platforms your audience uses
• Every platform has a unique role. Some drive traffic, some drive leads, and conversions. Analyze which one is most effective in your case and create your marketing strategy accordingly
• Never be promotional on any platform. Focus on providing value or solving user’s problems through your posts
• Connect with other brands and make them promote your offers

Over to You

Holidays make people crazy. They literally buy things without even thinking too much. You just need to encase this opportunity to make more profit and boost holiday sales.

And the tips I’ve told you above can surely help you out and increase holiday sales at your store if you use them properly.

So go ahead and try them. If you have some doubts or queries, the comments section is always on.