With the holiday season rapidly approaching it’s time to focus on your online marketing strategy! Starting well in advance of the holiday season with “Early Bird Discounts” and “Sneak Peeks” is a great way to ensure that you have a successful and profitable final quarter this year.
Make a marketing plan today for the months of November, December and January. Your plan should include a schedule of what sales you will run, how you will run them and what customer groups should receive each sale (be it via email, advertised directly on the site, or through social media). To maximize your sales this season be sure and look over your previous campaigns for the year. Try and replicate your most profitable campaigns for the holiday season.
Other great ideas for Magento sales this holiday season include:
- Special pricing on your best selling product.
- Buy-One-Get-One-Free (or % off)
- Special pricing on “Holiday Bundles” which include several of your best sellers
- “Stocking Stuffers” sale
Another of my favorite tactics is to create new a new category in Magento called “Gifts” for the holidays. Then segment this category down to “For Moms,” “For Dads,” “For Kids,” etc. Once you have these categories live use them for a couple of your holiday campaigns, it makes finding the perfect gift easy on your customers which of course helps to increase conversions.
There is more to having a successful holiday season then just coming up with innovative sales. Retaining prior customers can be difficult, and turning that first conversion into a second is critical for success at any time of the year. Email marketing and social media provide a perfect opportunity to re-market to current customers and attract new ones.
Three Keys for Magento Store Success (All Year Round!):
- Abandoned shopping cart emails
- Refer a friend
- Cross sells, up sells and related products.
Sending out an abandoned shopping cart email to a customer after they have left your Magento store is an easy way to increase conversions. Many customers just need a little extra push to purchase something online. Including a coupon for free shipping or an extra 10% off is a great way to push a customer towards making that purchase.
Another easy way to increase revenue and gain new customers is to reward them for their friend’s purchases. A great example of this is to give out a discount to your customer for every friend who makes a purchase. It’s best to do this through both social media and email marketing so that your customer can decide the best way to contact their friends.
Finally make sure you have set up Cross Sells, Up Sells and Related Products for all your products in Magento. In some cases you may need to modify your current theme to show these for your products. Generally though you can set up each of these features by going to your Magento Admin Dashboard, going to Catalog -> Manage Products and then selecting the product you’d like to add these too. Then just go to the sidebar find Cross Sells, Up Sells or Related Products. Once you’re in one of those tabs just change “Yes” to “Any” and click search, now you can select your product and check it off to add it.
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