Christmas sales are as important as your Black Friday. Unlike Black Friday, Christmas sales are more subtle and meaningful to both the customers and retailers.
During this period, customers search through stores for gift inspiration. They buy from stores that offer the best combo, creating promotional campaigns to attract traffic to their stores.
With that, you need to prep your store in anticipation of this year’s Christmas sales. In this post, we’ll show you how to create Christmas promotions that attract attention and sales. Let’s get started!
Preparing Your Shopify Store for Christmas Promotions
Before running sales promotions on your Shopify store, you need to set up your store for success. Carefully list your promotion goals and how you intend to achieve them.
Doing this makes you stand out among your competition and gives you a clear view of what to expect. In this section, we will discuss ways to prepare your store ahead of your Christmas sales.
1. Plan Your Promotional Campaigns Ahead of Sales
Remember the saying “When you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Applies to Christmas sales too. Waiting until Christmas to start scrambling ideas and promotional offers to render to your customers not only affects your sales but also causes a loss to your store.
2. Audit Previous Holiday Marketing/Sales Campaign Performance
Post-sales analysis is important because it gives you an insight into the performance of your marketing/sales campaign strategies. Campaign data shows you well-performed and under-performed strategies.
Observe the social channels with the highest conversions, the promotional campaign with the highest click-through rates and the leads from your email campaigns. Let data from the previous sales be a guide to this year’s holiday sales.
Focus more on the channels that gave you the number and seek ways to improve other channels to increase store traffic.
3. Get your Shopify Store Ready for Christmas Sales
Create an element of fun, cheer, happiness and joy in your Shopify store; that is what the Christmas season is all about. This can be changing your Hero image to a Christmas-themed banner or spicing your store with Christmas confetti & images.
Use Christmas-themed Popups to announce your upcoming holiday sales, or create a special sales campaign banner to display on your page. Better still, create a new page where all your discount prices are listed.
4. Optimize Your Shopify Store For SEO
Search remains one of the top traffic sources for e-commerce stores. Data shows over 99,000 searches are processed on Google per second, and over 8.5 billion searches per day. Quite interesting!
Optimizing your store for SEO pushes your store to the first page of the search result page, increasing the odds of sales via organic search.
To optimise your Shopify store for this Christmas season, infuse relevant keywords into your heading, product descriptions, page titles etc.
For example, keywords like Christmas, Christmas sales, Christmas promo sales, Christmas discount sales, holiday sales promo etc.
7 Promotional Strategies to Prep Your Shopify Store for Christmas Sales
1. Offer Christmas Sales Discount
You can always go right with offering discounts in your store. Research shows that 75% of consumer always scan their email boxes searching for relevant discount offers. In America, 91% of consumers check for discounts before shopping online. Therefore, you need to offer irresistible discounts to your customers.
For more site traffic, consider offering a second-item discount valid for every item purchased after the first item. This is a smart product recommendation strategy to sell complementary products. Not only does it increase traffic, but it also increases sales and revenue.
However, don’t let discounts eat into your profit margin. Discounts can be tricky so be careful when planning for discount promo not to run into a deficit. Plan your discount offers ahead of your sales and make sure you stay within budget to please your customers.
2. Create Custom recommendation Campaigns
Insights from previous year’s sales can tell you what customers mostly shop during the Christmas sales. Utilize these data to create custom product recommendations for your customers. Reports show that 77% of global loyalty program members rate the benefit of personalized promotions based on past purchases.
This shows the importance of product recommendations, they make shopping easier and the shopping experience better just as online shoppers want it. Also, it recommends to the customers newly added products that might interest them.
In addition, you can create secret promotion codes for your existing customers and send them through mail. Make them feel included and see them respond. For effective recommendations, try Adoric. We offer powerful features to create the best product recommendations for your customer.
3. Offer Free Shipping
Shipping cost is one of the main reasons for cart abandonment. Statistics show that businesses that offer free shipping have a 20% higher conversion rate than those that do not and increase retail sales by up to 10%.
However, with improper planning, free shipping will cost you money. To cushion the effects, you can combine free shipping with any other sales promotions you deem fit. For example, offer customers free shipping when their orders exceed $150 or when they shop with other sales promotions.
Ensure your customers are aware of your free shipping offer. This can be sent to their email or with the free shipping bar. It allows you to visibly display free shipping offers on your website for maximum attention.
4. Make Use of PopUps
Popups are small windows with information displayed when a customer is on your website or has taken a pre-conditioned action. For example, when a customer strolls to a certain point on the website or on exit-intent.
These pop ups are generally good lead magnets because they offer irresistible promo offers in exchange for your email address. This is helpful to grow your email newsletter subscribers and customer base.
Use Christmas-themed popups to offer promotions to your customers. For best results, make your popups show when your visitors have already engaged with your website say after 5 minutes of being on your page. Better yet, use the exit intent popup to promote sales to your customers.
5. Create a Christmas-themed email marketing Campaign
Use Christmas-themed email newsletters to notify your customers of the Christmas promo. Use eye-catching subject lines that include promotional offers and personalize each to the recipients’ interest. A 2019 survey suggests emails with personalised subject lines generate a 50% higher open rate.
Offer exclusive discounts, price slash, gift cards, combos, GOBO and any other holiday-themed content to engage your customers. To get started, install Adoric from the Shopify app store.
6. Social Media Ads
Leverage social media ads to get your Christmas sales deal noticed. A recent survey shows that 28% of online shoppers find inspiration for products to buy on social media.
Social media is effective for brands to market their products and create engaging content for users.
So, create ads that announce your sales on the platform with your most active audience. Share discounts deals and other delectable offers that are irresistible. Remember to combine it with a good ad copy that shows the time frame and terms and conditions of the promo where applicable.
If possible, create shoppable ads that allow your customers to shop right there from the ad. This makes shopping easier and also increases revenue.
7. Offer Gift Cards
Gift cards are becoming popular amongst online shoppers. About 71% of consumers showed interest in digital gift cards and about 73% indicated interest in purchasing a gift card during the last holiday season.
Leverage on gift card offers for your Shopify Christmas promotions. Give your customers chances to send gifts to a special one this holiday season. For gift cards to be appreciated, it needs to be of value e.g. you may offer a $30 gift card to shop between a stated period or a gift card for $1500 worth of orders.
Differentiate gift cards from coupons as consumers often presume they are the same. This assumption, if unaddressed using clear designs, can affect customers’ reception.
Proactively promote your gift cards on all channels of communication. Be it social media, ad campaigns or promotional banners on your site. Create awareness of this marketing promo to your audience and how it will benefit them.
8. Collaborate with Influencers
Leverage the power of social media influencers to showcase your Christmas promotions. Collaborate with influencers who align with your brand and have a strong following. Their authentic promotion of your products can reach a wider audience and boost your holiday sales.
Conclusion
The holiday season is a win-win period both for online shoppers and business owners. Retailers offer the best sales promo in their Shopify store and consumers seize these opportunities to shop for the best products at an affordable rate.
Take inspiration from these Christmas promotion ideas to create offers that are irresistible to both your existing customers and new shoppers.
Get ready for record sales this Christmas season with Adoric as your go-to conversion tool.
