Christmas is almost here. For most businesses, this is their highest selling time of the year.  But as people are spending more and more during the holiday season, the competition is also getting stiff. Big and small businesses all try their best to attract more customers and get the most out of this shopping spree.

To stay in the competition, you need to have some actionable strategies to supercharge and increase your holiday sales. Here are 9 holiday season tips from us.

1. Update the hero image and banners of your website

You don’t need to overhaul your site’s design to focus on the holiday season. However, some simple, small changes can make a big difference:

•     Make changes to your hero image and highlight promotional offers focusing on the holidays
•     Replace your banner ads with holiday-specific discount and delivery information
•     Use high-quality images that easily catch the viewer’s attention. In particular, you should change the homepage images often because visitors will frequently visit your site during this time
•     Add custom banners that link to categorized items, like Gifts under $30 or Gifts for Children.

Source: Target

2. Write holiday-specific content

Your blog can be one of the best ways to drive more traffic to your website during the holiday session. An article like “Gift Ideas for Your Dad” will bring genuinely interested customers to you. You can also create other content, like trend guides, tutorials, videos etc. The content doesn’t need to be overly promotional.

Offer genuine tips and guidelines that your potential customers find helpful, and mention a few of your related products. Good, helpful content can bring you new customers for years to come.

3. Create ads focusing on specific offers

Whether you run ads through Google AdWords or Facebook, promote holiday-specific offers for this time period. People usually spend a lot of money during the holiday season,  so pause your regular ads and run a targeted campaign. Getting your special offers in front of your customers at the right time will surely boost your sale.

Source: Facebook Offer Ads

4. Reward your customers for loyalty

During holiday sales, customers will always be looking out for cheaper deals. Comparison shopping is practically its own industry. But you can still retain your loyal customers by promoting special offers among your brand’s social media followers. Also always give something extra to your long-time customers if you already have an ongoing loyalty program.

5. Utilize your regular marketing channels

According to a report by Mailchart, about 20% of holiday sales in 2015 resulted from email marketing. So despite newer channels and campaign techniques coming out every day, the battle-tested ones – like email and search engine marketing – remain in power.

6. Offer special gift cards

More than 70% of consumers purchased gift cards in the 2015 holiday season. And on average, each customer spent around $150 on gift cards that year. Thus, you should obviously start to promote your gift cards before the holiday sale starts. Try giving your customers a bonus offer, like if they buy $50 worth of gift cards, they get an extra $10 gift card for free!

7. Sell bundled gift packs

During the holidays, people are often looking for gifts to give to friends and family. Bundling related products in a nicely packed gift box is bound to attract your customers. You can also give a discount offer if a customer buys bundled products instead.

8. Provide special offers for your social media followers

Social media engagement boosts your sale at any time. If you can increase social media interactions around the holidays, it can have an even a greater effect. In addition to your general offers, announce special discounts in your social media profiles. Or post promo codes that your followers can apply at checkout.

9. Amplify your customer service

During this high-selling time, your customer service will have to manage some extra pressure. By stepping up your support and after-sales services, you can indirectly increase your future sales and reputation.

Here are some ideas regarding how you can enhance your customer services during the holiday season:

•     Clearly mention your customer service contact channels and hours on each page of your site.
•     If your store has a live chat option, make sure you have multiple people present so that your customers don’t have to wait in a queue.
•     Be very active in social media networks, too, and respond to your customers as early as possible
•     Provide free gift wrapping options, add a wishlist feature to your site, and send reminder emails for abandoned carts.

In conclusion

As holiday shopping is something that most of your customers are looking forward to, you should optimize your site, ads and social media to get in front of your customers. We hope the strategies we discussed above will help you to convert more potential customers this holiday season.

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This post was written by Liakat Hossain. He is a content marketing professional at WebAlive, where he is involved in creative content strategy and web analytics. He has been helping businesses grow by developing search and content marketing strategies since 2011.

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