6 proven methods to boost your sales during the holiday season of 2022

Regardless of the size of a company or team, everyone is always looking for ways to improve their eCommerce sites and increase their conversion rates. The eCommerce strategies below can be applied to both large online WooCommerce stores as well as a small EDD site just starting to sell its first premium WordPress product.

But no matter how big your store is, be ready for the oncoming wave of customers. Hopefully, the recommendations below will help give you that little bit extra compared to your competitors!

1. Focus on emails

Email marketing is the key to the success of any business. Whether you manually create a newsletter or spend a lot of money on huge campaigns, every successful company has at least done something about this form of marketing.

And with an average ROI of 122%, it's one of the best ways to spend your money. If your return on investment is that high, that means you're doubling every dollar you put into it (plus a little bit more)! In addition, it is cheap and easy to get started with. Brand new start-ups and established big names alike use email marketing, and for good reason.

2. Take Advantage of Your Email List

If you already regularly send out a newsletter (this is the Kinsta newsletter for example ), now is the time to use it to increase your sales. Your users have signed up with you because they are loyal to your brand and interested in what you offer. So reward them with lots of discounts and freebies.

If you don't have a newsletter yet, start right now. You'll still be fresh in your subscribers' minds by the time the holidays arrive, so now is a perfect time to start building an email list .

Consumers don't have time to research as they see discount timers counting down everywhere, but that doesn't automatically mean that authenticity isn't an important factor. They choose a company that they consider to be the most reliable at first glance. So you need a way to quickly communicate that you are in this store.

One way to convince your customers of this is by using 'social proof'. According to Wikipedia :

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon in which people adopt behavior from others in an attempt to display the correct behavior in a given situation.

You've seen this before. It's the main reason why so many shop owners show recommendations on their homepage and allow customers to leave reviews. Users trust other users, so knowing that other people are buying from you is often enough to convince them of your authenticity.

4. Increase the visibility of your discounts/offers

Everyone knows that you can drive more sales during the holiday season by combining promotional campaigns with discounts and offers. But where many of the eCommerce websites fall short is in promoting the offer itself.

As with good content, it is also important to invest time in promotion with good offers! Little tricks can go a long way in getting more attention for your offers.

One of our favorite ways is to temporarily use a notification bar at the top of your eCommerce website. You can do this during the period that your offers for the holidays are running. Think of some clever messages to create a sense of urgency, such as “10% off now” or “30% off between now and Black Friday”. Make sure that people can click on your notification and arrive at the actual offer.

We strongly recommend that you do your A/B tests, but you will be surprised how much more sales such a bar at the top of your website will bring you. People looking for a gift for the holidays often like to keep it simple: you probably have a limited-time offer and they want to check out quickly. But a CTA bar is hard to ignore, making it impossible to miss important information like discount codes.

5. Use Affiliates to Increase Sales During the Holiday Season

It's never too late to set up an affiliate program. Affiliate marketing, also known as affiliate marketing, basically pays for itself: your affiliates post links to your website on their social media and websites, and you pay them when you get traffic or revenue. That way you only pay when you have the attention of a potential customer. And during a big promotion, you can get quite a lot of traffic.

Even if you're only launching your affiliate program at the last minute, a hefty discount code can be a great motivator before the online crowds get going. Use your partners to advertise special products or big deals to drive traffic to your online store. Give them the huge discount code you created and you're sure to have people flocking in to use it.

These months are a pivotal time for your affiliate marketing program. Give your partners a trial, a discount code, or a gift card to work with, and you'll see your traffic increase in no time.

Starting an Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs are a great way to quickly promote your products and brand. Everyone knows that word of mouth is one of the best ways to improve sales, and affiliate marketing can be seen as a form of word of mouth. Affiliate programs can be responsible for as much as 30% of a company's revenue .

6. Try push notifications

If there's one e-commerce strategy that completely blows your mind, it's “the money is in the (email) list”. Don't get us wrong, you should take your customers' email addresses during their purchase as it is a very cheap way to communicate with them.

Creating a newsletter with product updates is a great way to keep your customers coming back, but remember that you need permission to add someone to a recurring newsletter. If you're going to send people unsolicited offers, you can set the clock on getting put on a spam list, so only target customers who want it.

There are some simple plugins you can use to push your eCommerce list to your favorite email marketing software :

Email marketing can be very successful but push notifications have also achieved great success and engagement in the past.

Push notifications are pop-ups that can be seen in browsers, messages that you see directly on a phone, or alerts that you see within an app. Because they arrive so promptly, customers are more likely to pay attention to them.