5 Tips to Amplify Your Holiday E-Commerce Sales

By Matt Meeker

As we’re all blissfully enjoying the last moments of summer, the clock is ticking ever closer to the fourth quarter and the all-important holiday shopping season. This year the Covid resurgence, supply chain shortages, and the end of pandemic-era benefit programs have injected some uncertainty into the e-commerce marketplace, meaning sellers will potentially face more competition for less holiday traffic.

Within this environment, it’s critical for small businesses (SMBs) to lock in their strategies early. In other words, if you’re not already planning for the holidays, you’re already behind.

How to improve your holiday e-commerce sales

Last year’s holiday e-commerce season was a record-breaker for nearly everyone. The same likely won’t be true in 2021, which is why SMBs need to bolster their e-commerce strategies with a few new tactics to achieve the same success. Here are my top tips:

1. Establish your holiday goals now!

Entering the holiday season without a clear idea of what you’re trying to accomplish can be a recipe for chaos. You’ll potentially waste money, miss new opportunities, and find it difficult at best to see meaningful results. Now is the time to examine last year’s results with an eye toward this year’s strategic improvement opportunities.

Like any good strategy, the first thing to do based on your examination of the 2020 season is to set clear goals. Some businesses automatically gravitate toward revenue growth during the holiday season, but there are other goals that might benefit your business long after the holiday lights are packed away.

For example, perhaps you want to pursue new acquisitions during the holidays so you can spend 2022 growing their lifetime value. You could also choose to focus on inventory reductions, not only allowing you to spend fewer ad dollars than last year, but also freeing up warehouse space and increasing profits.

Whatever goals you choose, remember to use the SMART framework (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based) to ensure the best benefit for your business.

2. Build a strategy that supports your goals

Once you’ve established your holiday goals, it’s time to build the strategy you’ll follow to achieve them. Rather than dividing your limited budget evenly between advertising channels, use your goals to determine where to allocate spending based on outreach to three distinct audiences: 1) current customers; 2) people already searching for the products you sell; and 3) people who don’t know who you are.

By prioritizing those audiences in relation to your goals, it will become clear how to allocate your ad dollars. This will allow you to maximize your advertising budget, spending where it will benefit your business the most.

An example of a goal to drive seasonal revenue could be moving to capture existing demand through the Microsoft and Google advertising networks and targeting current customers through email marketing or loyalty programs. On the other hand, if your goal is to pursue new acquisitions, you may focus your spending on social media awareness campaigns and capturing existing search traffic. In every case, understanding that advertising platforms and methods can target different people at different places in their purchase journey will help you refine your strategy to maximize results.

3. Portion ad spending based on consumer behavior

Many businesses make a similar mistake of portioning their ad spend evenly throughout the fourth quarter instead of syncing their spending to match holiday consumer behavior. This year, think of your ad spend like a standard bell curve. Your spending starts small on October 1, increases steadily to a peak around Thanksgiving, and then decreases steadily until Christmas.

This approach more closely resembles consumer behavior as buyers research and window shop early in the holiday season before actively purchasing during the “Turkey 5” period—the high-volume shopping days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. As you lay out your holiday advertising plan, you should allocate 80% of your budget for the weeks before and after Thanksgiving.

More articles from AllBusiness.com:

• Here’s Why Your Business Should Hire During the Holidays
• What Etsy Can Teach Us About E-Commerce
• How to Build an E-Commerce Business From Scratch
• How to Keep Your Sales Team Productive During the Holidays
• 7 Best Practices to Increase E-Commerce Sales: Q&A with Mitchell Harper of BigCommerce

4. Incentivize larger carts with holiday specials

Getting a new customer to your site is only half the battle. Now you need to convince them to buy something and, ideally, spend more than they initially planned. One smart way to incentivize larger shopping carts is by creating holiday bundles, which can consist of similar products, products used in a series (think shampoo and conditioner), or a popular product combined with a new product you’d like to promote.

A similar strategy would be to offer a gift with purchase, such as giving away a free tote bag with every yoga mat you sell. Both these strategies allow you to strategically encourage customers to make larger purchases while giving them something of value in return. Bundling and gifts with purchase are also effective ways to boost your holiday revenue without adding significant costs through discounting.

5. Stay engaged; stay flexible

Finally, during a potentially turbulent shopping season, businesses must stay engaged for the duration. The holidays aren't the time to set your ads and forget about them until after Christmas. Instead, be prepared to shift your advertising spend when something's not working as planned, or double down on a successful strategy. If you find yourself running behind the goals you set, you might need to increase your ad spend.

Being flexible during the holiday season means paying attention to your ad accounts, monitoring progress to your goals, and making potentially tough decisions when necessary. By staying engaged and staying flexible, you'll have the best chance of achieving success.

Bonus holiday e-commerce sales tip: Don’t ignore your current customers

Here's a bonus tip to amp up your holiday strategy: In most cases, your current customers will be the most significant source of revenue during big shopping periods as well as fertile ground for discovering new buyers.

Both Google and Facebook allow businesses to create campaigns targeting previous purchasers. Facebook also has tools to enable you to build lookalike audiences based on your current customer lists. Keep an option like this in mind as a viable way to engage your current customers in the fourth quarter.

Your holiday e-commerce sales strategy can help you come out ahead

Hopefully, after putting all these pieces together, you'll come away with a refreshed holiday strategy that will have you attacking October, November, and December with new ferocity.

While there’s no way to know for sure what to expect this year, having tangible goals and a well-defined plan in place will always give you a head start on the competition.

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