6 Tips to Maximize Sales During Holidays

2020 has changed the entire shopping experience. eCommerce stores online are way more profitable than offline ones. 

Credits: Bigcommerce

According to these stats, global eCommerce sales will touch $4.2 trillion, making up 16% of total retail sales. It will further grow to $6.5 trillion by 2023. 

Most of the website are underprepared to handle the traffic influx. Therefore, to make the most of this peak, you have to make sure your online store is ready inside out. Learn how to handle traffic surge efficiently.

Here are some tips that will boost your sales during the festive season:

1. Run a Load Test

A Load test is a performance test that determines how the website will behave under a specified load. The main aim of this test is to improve performance bottlenecks and ensuring a smooth experience with the website. Implementing this test will identify:

• Maximum traffic the website can handle with the given resources
• If the current infrastructure will be sufficient during sales
• Number of concurrent users it can support & scope of scalability

Once done, you can take an important decision regarding the resources and hosting of the website backed up by data.

2. Send Cart Abandonment Emails

A customer goes through your website, likes something, adds to the cart, and ends up leaving it, not completing the checkout. This could be because of some distraction, slower website, complex checkout process. However, all is not lost once a person abandons a shopping cart. In most cases, 30% of the carts are recovered with the help of abandonment emails. Here’s an example of an email:

Credit: TargetBay

3. A/B Testing for Best Solution

Changing an image here and there might not seem to be a big thing. However, it is one of the most important things to perform during sales preparation. Every business is different and has unique things as well as their customers. Certain things work for some stores while it might not work for others. When you perform an A/B test, you will be sure what works best for your store. 

Examples of A/B Testing:

• Change text in your CTA buttons. Changing even a word could result in 2-3% increase in conversions. 
• Using fewer fields in your contact form is proven to deliver better results.
• Test different types of headlines at your landing pages. For example, try using words like “Learn How to Make More Money” vs “Make More Money With These Tested Examples”.
• Instead of stock images, replace them with more candid photos of your employees or business.

4. Scalable Resources

Seasonal spikes in traffic could cause downtime and choke your servers. The lack of resources can lead your visitors to find an alternative. 

Therefore, it is important to make sure your store isn’t overwhelmed by traffic and you don’t miss out on sales. To effectively run your business during sales, your host should be able to architect a scalable infrastructure. A managed cloud server will be your best investment. Autoscaling will help in increasing or decreasing the allocate resources. 

Web Server Performance depends on: 

• RAM
• Bandwidth
• Processing power by allocated CPU cores

5. Upsell

One of the most effective yet largely ignored way to boost your sales is upselling. Most of the marketers and store owners think it isn’t worth the effort, however, that’s not the case. Upselling can help boost your sale. According to Marketing Metrics book,  “The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%.”

When Amazon tested upselling on their platform back in 2006, the growth in sales was by 35%. You can either recommend warranties, complementary products or bundling. 

6. Create a Sense of Urgency

When visitors browse your website, leave it without purchasing thinking they’d come back later. The sale is rarely completed. When you offer a compelling reason to purchase the product RIGHT NOW, it can shoot up your sales numbers. 

For example: “Only Last 4 Left”, “Offer Valid Till Midnight”, “Buy Now & Get Free Shipping”. 

This will help in creating a feeling of buying things then and there or missing out on the offer. 

Products with urgency gets 14% higher click-to-open rates, twice the conversion rate and 59% higher transaction-to-click rates.

Conclusion

You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars to make your store successful. The trick is to invest in things which are the foundation of your store (hosting, CMS, payment systems etc), learn from your competitors’ mistakes, and apply the tricks mentioned above. 

Lastly, know your target customers and tailor your pitch accordingly. 

Author Bio

Sakshi Behl heads the marketing at Webscoot.io, a fully-managed eCommerce hosting company. The company is based out of Delhi and has branches in California, UAE, and Australia. With 9+ years of experience in the hosting industry, their motive is to empower growing business by providing finest technologies. Feel free to contact her at sakshi.b@webscoot.io.

eCommerce Paradise was created by Trevor Fenner of Seattle, Washington in 2015 to help you, the entrepreneur, to start and scale your own eCommerce business. Trevor owns multiple 7-figure eCommerce stores and is a digital nomad, traveling the world while working remotely with the help of his team of virtual assistants from around the world. Trevor is currently located in Bali, Indonesia, and is a passionate skateboarder, surfer, scuba diver, photographer, environmentalist, outdoorsman, fitness and tattoo enthusiast.

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