During the Christmas season, online store traffic rises sharply. More and more shoppers choose to do their Christmas shopping online to benefit from the advantages of eCommerce. But this surge in traffic is a real challenge for eShops, which need to prepare well in advance to make the most of the sales opportunities.
In this post, we share some tips to get the most out of your online stores during this period.
- Plan a solid stock forecast. During the Christmas season we will need more stock to cope with the increase in purchases. We also need to keep this stock constantly updated in our eShop to inform customers about the real availability of products and avoid selling items or models that are already out of stock.
- Manage logistics well to ensure optimal distribution. We need to strengthen our online stores’ logistics over Christmas because of the huge rise in shipments. Shoppers want to receive their orders as soon as possible, so our eCommerce stores must meet delivery times to the letter. If a gift arrives after Christmas, we’ll have an unhappy customer who will probably never buy from us again.
- Create Christmas-specific content for your online store. Just like physical stores, when Christmas comes our eShops must be ready to spread the holiday spirit. We should personalize our online stores with content tailored to this time of year. There are several ways to do it, such as adding Christmas-themed photos or videos or adapting the copy to the season. We can also update our eCommerce stores with new products or Christmas-specific categories, or create dedicated sections for holiday products. For example, sections highlighting Christmas best sellers, the best gift ideas, the most affordable gifts or limited-edition products for the season.
- Prepare a Christmas-specific SEO strategy. We need to prepare a dedicated SEO strategy for our online stores for the Christmas season. To build it, we have to work on our eShops’ content, especially product descriptions, including holiday keywords such as Christmas, holidays, gift, Three Kings’ Day, New Year’s Eve… Also, the sooner we get all this content indexed by search engines, the better our rankings will be.
- Create a Christmas-specific email marketing strategy. To boost sales in our online store, we need a dedicated email marketing strategy for the holiday season. We can use email marketing to tell customers the Christmas campaign has started, share the store’s opportunities during this period, highlight the benefits of buying at Christmas (free shipping, discount vouchers, gift wrapping…) or offer extra perks to VIP or most loyal customers.
- Strengthen customer service. At Christmas, customers often have more questions about product prices, delivery times or return policies, since many purchases are gifts for others. We should therefore reinforce customer service across all channels during the Christmas campaign, including social media, and hire extra staff if needed.
- Promote your online store’s products on social media. At this time of year, when consumers are more inclined to buy, we should use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest more often to promote our products to our closest audience and offer them special perks. The more active you are on social media, the better your chances of your content going viral.
We hope these tips help make this Christmas a sales success for your online stores.
