9 Christmas eCommerce marketing tactics for maximizing holiday sales

If you were in doubt whether you should make extra efforts in preparing your eCommerce website for the Christmas holidays or not, to save you time, you should! Today, we present you with 9 Christmas eCommerce marketing tactics to increase your sales as early as this Christmas! 

And if you plan on creating such a business and provide your customers with great features, we’re happy to help you.

We’re experts in building integrated eCommerce businesses with a focus on using the latest technologies and best development practices.

In any case, there are plenty of benefits of eCommerce for both businesses and consumers, and throughout this blog post, we will introduce you to them so you could start preparing your webshop for Christmas.

According to holiday eCommerce & marketing statistics by Website Setup, when asked how they’d split their holiday shopping, consumers indicated they’d use the following channels:

• 59% online shopping
• 36% in-store shopping.

This clearly shines a light on the importance of improving your online store for the upcoming holidays. 

How to start your digital commerce business (our step-by-step guide) will help you jumpstart your digital commerce business, so feel free to check it out and if you already didn’t – start today! 

Anyway, we’ll talk about some essential features, customer experience, design, and a lot more! 

So let’s dive in.

1. Decorating your eCommerce website for Christmas 

Although decorating your eCommerce website for Christmas may seem like an obvious choice, not all online shop owners tend to follow essential holiday marketing tips like this one.  

People better respond to visual content and why not then provide them with the ultimate Christmasy experience.

For example, you could create a winter fairy tale on your online store and strengthen the holiday spirit with free online tools such as Freepik. 

Another useful webshop Christmas tip is setting up a timer counting down the days until Christmas.

Days Until Christmas offers three different countdown templates to choose from. Their Christmas Day Countdown Clock 2 is incredibly helpful for online stores that want a less obtrusive countdown. 

 This feature produces a feeling of urgency that Christmas is coming and that customers should make their purchases as soon as possible. Changing a few themes and elements to emphasize that the holiday season is coming can significantly improve your customers’ experience and willingness to keep shopping. 

Another good reason for decorating eCommerce websites and following these eCommerce Christmas marketing tips is SEO. 

According to Google’s fresh content ranking factor, Google seems to like and reward websites that refresh their content regularly. And what better opportunity to do so than the upcoming holidays. 

And if you still haven’t started your own, follow these 8 steps for starting a digital commerce business!

2. Focus on the customer experience during holidays

So why should you focus on customer experience during the holidays? 

There are several reasons but let’s focus on the main ones. The top 3 reasons are:

• improve customer retention
• improve customer satisfaction
• increase cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

There are many ways to track and improve your customer’s experience in your webshop.

Look for shortcuts, simplicity, and intuitive design. 

Given the higher customer demand and more increased traffic during the holidays, this is not the time to experiment with your buyer’s path. You can do that in advance. 

You don’t want to invest your time, effort, and money in creating a customer journey path contrary to your customer’s needs, especially at this time of the year. 

Capture customer feedback in real-time.

You don’t know what your customers think and how they feel about the customer experience you’re delivering until you ask them. It would be great to do this by capturing feedback in real-time. You could use live chat tools to have real-time conversations. 

Focus on your business results.

You can measure customer experience by using Net Promoter Score (NPS) – it collects valuable information by asking a simple question:

“Would you recommend this company to a friend or relative?”

It’s simple to use and implement, and that’s why many companies use it as the standard customer experience measurement. 

A strong focus on customer experience can yield more conversions and revenue. 

For example, people will better respond to personalized product recommendations and shopping experience than a non-personalized shopping experience. 

You should also focus on the eCommerce website features not to miss any crucial elements. 

Here’s a great eCommerce Christmas tip for the future.

You should see Christmas as an opportunity to retain your customers and ensure they come back. Highly personalized and relevant communications demonstrate your value, keeping customers returning once the New Year arrives.

3. Check your site’s mobile responsiveness

It’s not a secret a lot of people shop with their smartphones more often during Christmas time. Why is that? 

The answer lies in the simple fact: mainly, it’s because they are traveling and don’t have access to a desktop. Therefore, you should consider having a mobile-friendly site a top priority to provide an exceptional user experience and generate more sales. 

According to eMarketer, mCommerce before the holidays is 43.8% larger than mobile shopping for the entire year, 39.6%. 

Even if you think your eCommerce website works perfectly on mobile devices, confirm it and test it anyway, so you don’t face any last-minute problems. Testing the mobile version of your online store is obligatory, but it’s also important to emphasize not to make any significant changes. 

The biggest benefits, from a customer’s standpoint, are speed and simplicity. Enable an easy overall buying process to increase your sales. 

According to MarketingLand, 83% of customers used smartphones inside real stores to shop. It just shows you how crucial the site’s mobile responsiveness is. 

P.S. Check out our article on the revolution of mobile commerce to learn more about this growing trend.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

This tool is very easy to use – you just need to enter your website’s URL for it to generate a report. It’s very helpful because it sees your website the same way Googlebot does rather than mobile users might see it.

In the final report, you can see whether your eCommerce website is mobile-friendly or not. Aside from that, it provides you all the reasons why your website failed, and the necessary actions you can take to make it responsive.

This is the example report of a mobile-friendly website:

And this is the example report of a website that isn’t mobile-friendly:

If you’re interested in this subject, here you can read about returning mobile e-commerce visitors and ideas for online retailers to improve customer retention rate.

4. Test your site’s traffic capacity

During the holidays, customers tend to be impatient. They want to make a purchase as soon as possible to spend their time on something else. It means that they’re not going to stay long on your webshop that takes too long to load. 

According to Marketing Dive, 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t load within 3 seconds. 

Your store needs to be ready in terms of stability and scalability to handle the increased demand. Improving your site speed should be your top priority because improving it by milliseconds can help you avoid site bounces and shopping cart abandonment. 

A few things that contribute to a site’s loading time is a slow external API, slow database, code errors, and large image sizes – they are usually the most common reason for a site’s delay. 

Here’s a tip: after taking quality pictures of your products, compress them before uploading them to your site. You could use free online tools such as Tinypng to compress the image size.

You can also check your site’s load speed by using free online tools like Google Pagespeed Insight that will also show you what’s causing the delay. 

To serve many customers for the holiday season, you should check your site’s traffic capacity using a “load impact.” It will flood your website with millions of fake visitors to test your site’s strength. 

In the end, you don’t want to disappoint your customers if your site crashes under pressure.

5. Importance of online store inventory tracking

The next step refers to online store inventory tracking. Inventory tracking is of great importance during Christmas time. You should ensure your webshop is adequately stocked and can reorder inventory quickly when needed. 

To avoid unsatisfied customers, you need to analyze your sales for the previous year’s holiday and find the most sold products.

With proper inventory management, you don’t have to worry about ordering too much or too little of any product in your line.

Par inventory system

Par levels are a basic concept of inventory management, and this term refers to the minimum amount of inventory you have in stock for each type of product sold. They fluctuate depending on how much stock you order and how much of it sells at any given time. It would be a good idea to set up a system that automatically tracks this information.

First-in, first-out rule

As you continue to order products to fill in your inventory, older inventory may get relegated to a back of the warehouse shelf. This can lead to product spoilage, or products that lose relevance to customers, resulting in lost sales. The first-in, first-out (FIFO) rule is a simple method for ensuring inventory ordered first is sold before newer inventory.

6. Highlight shipping and return policy

Shipping policy during Christmas time can boost your sales quickly under the right conditions. 

If you don’t already offer free shipping, you should consider it for this holiday season. Free shipping quickly became a must-have for many customers.

 According to Retail Touchpoints, nearly 9 out of 10 eCommerce customers prefer free shipping over fast shipping. 

If you’re worried about losing money by implementing this feature, you have several options. You can put the shipping cost into your products’ purchase price, or you could eat the cost. 

Be sure to monitor sales and decide based on your specific data to see if it’s worth it. 

Of equal importance to shipping policy is your (holiday) return policy. 

Holiday returns can be a tricky subject. Customers often wonder if they can return their purchase, how they can return it, who’s paying for the return trip etc. 

Make your return policy easy to navigate and include any questions that might interest the customers. 

If you can remove any doubts about the return policy, you can increase the average order value or order volume and reduce the number of times visitors abandon their carts. 

7. Optimize your customer service

Online store customer service during Christmas time can be overloaded. 

Customers might want to know more about the product, return policy, or the product arrives. Whatever problem/question they had, your customer service needs to be there to meet their requests.

Improve customer interaction: it’s a good start if your staff has the necessary skill set, but they still need to relate to your customers.

• Implementing active listening is a way to let your customers know they’ve been heard. You should rephrase and clarify what the customers say to ensure you understand them.
• Admitting your mistakes, even if you discover them before your customers, can build trust and restore confidence. It will also help you to control the situation while you’re solving the issue. 
• The last thing is making sure the problem stays fixed and that your customers were satisfied with the service. 

It’s also vital that customers on your webshop can easily find your contact information. Here’s a useful holiday marketing tip: add a sticky bar at your website’s top with your contact information.

You could also add an FAQ page to reduce demand for customer service staff.

Another advice is to consider implementing customer service software. The right tool will help you get organized with help tickets and stay on top of customer complaints and feedback.  

8. Create gift guides

What are gift guides?

 A gift guide is one of the most powerful tools you can have during the holidays. It allows you to showcase your products, inspire shoppers, and give them gift ideas.

 It’s also beneficial because the guides are separated into sections so customers can easily find great gift ideas whenever they want to. 

Releasing gift guides is a common feature in the retail world, so yours would have to be thoughtfully marketed.

For example, Etsy had a guide that offered customers to create customized presents. 

In their guide, they offered personalized family Christmas ornaments, portrait mugs, name necklaces, sweaters, and many different gift ideas. 

You can also see how they used different Christmas elements to improve their design and strengthen the holiday spirit with the title “We consulted some elves…”. 

9. Wrap up (service)

If you seek additional opportunities to increase webshop purchases, then you came to the right place. 

Online store wrap up service can save customers time, which can be of great importance at this time of the year. They are also more open to add-on services if it can save their time and save the trouble of doing it themselves.

Another useful holiday marketing tip is including the option to add a special message. Along with gift wrapping service, it can help you boost your overall revenue. 

If you want to stay in touch with the latest eCommerce news, here are 10 eCommerce blogs you need to follow. 

We asked our designers to give you some tips for designing a webshop! 

To help you with any additional questions you might have had after reading this blog, we thought it would be a great idea if our designers gave you some extra holiday marketing tips.

Here’s what they said.

Give us the best example of a design hack you saw on Christmas editions of the website.

Seasonal changes in some page elements such as sign-up form.

List 3 features a Christmas edition of an eCommerce website or mobile app should have.

The most common holiday features on the websites are the festive logo, a suitable cover photo, and special offers in pop-ups. Often companies decorate their logo with Christmas motifs so we can see Santa Claus, a logo with a Christmas hat, ornaments, snowflakes, or the whole holiday scene, as is the case with Google.

The easiest way to bring the Christmas spirit to your webshop is definitely to change the cover photo. Make an effort to take original Christmas-style photographs that will adorn the cover of your site.

 Ultimately, you can also find convenient images online on several sites such as Shutterstock and Freepik or many free sources.

A creative copy is also one of the features we mustn’t forget. 

In addition to taking your marketing and B2C communication to the next level, creative and custom copy will positively impact the holiday layout of your site. 

Change your delivery notes with descriptions like “Our Santa helpers and elves work hard to pack your gifts and deliver them on time.” It’s a technically undemanding change, but it can put a smile on your customer’s faces, and that’s what’s worth a lot.

Give us an example of a Christmas edition feature so you could stand out from the competition.

Definitely, the best Christmas feature is the Advent calendar. 

Visitors to the site can open one window on the calendar every day of Advent and win a valuable prize. 

I think this is a great marketing move for webshops and mall pages, and I notice that this trend has been spreading more and more in recent years.

Start preparing your webshop for Christmas today!

I hope this blog gave you some guidelines on preparing your eCommerce website for the holidays.

We covered the essential features, and now it’s up to you to implement them and start attracting new customers! 

Let’s summarize what we talked about:

• Create a winter fairy tale on your online store to strengthen the holiday spirit. 
• Focus on your business results throughout customer experience measurement.
• Make sure your eCommerce site is mobile-friendly.
• Test your site’s traffic capacity for increased demand.
• Ensure your webshop is adequately stocked.
• Shipping and return policy should be on point.
• customer service needs to be there to meet their requests.
• Meet your customer’s requests with good customer service.
• Consider implementing gift guides.
• Add-on service, such as gift wrapping, is always a good idea.

Be sure to cross off this checklist before starting an e-commerce app.

Also, if you’re in need of reliable and trustworthy solution partners, we’d be happy to help! We have vast experience in building successful integrated eCommerce businesses – and we’d like to see you succeed too.

Feel free to reach out to us at hello@factory.dev and let’s talk about your ideas!