E-commerce Tactics for Holiday Season

The holiday season is the time of big sales in e-commerce. And now is the right time to start preparing your Magento 2 store for it. Today we will talk about e-commerce tactics and promo ideas for the holiday season, that you can use in your shop. But first, we want to inspire you with 3 statistics:

• 60% of customers spend on online shopping more than half of their vacations, according to an Internet Retailer and Bizrate Insights survey in November 2018.
• Users spent $120 billion from November to the end of December 2018 online.
• The average American spent $846 on gifts in 2018.

Let’s see what you can do to hit the jackpot these holidays.

Ready: Optimize your Magento 2 store

Firstly, you need to make your site easy to find. Up to 80% of users take into account only organic search results in Google. So you need to be on top of the list to get as many visitors as possible.

You need to improve your SEO to reach this goal. Of course, we understand that this is a huge part of the job, so we prepared for you some optimization tools:

• SEO Toolkit
• Google Page Speed Optimizer

Here is a quick overview of their features.

SEO Toolkit

This mod is an all-in-one SEO solution that will allow you to automize your work. It will help you manage all main SEO tasks, such as:

• Create templates for your meta tags and generate them automatically;
• Customize rich snippets: display price, stock status, rating or number of reviews;
• Set 301 Redirects to Home page;
• Turn on automatical 404 Page Not Found Redirect;
• Enable automatical cross-linking;
• Generate XML Sitemap automatically;

Analyze your detailed statistic by clicking the SEO Toolbar button on any page.

Google Page Speed Optimizer

This module not only helps you to achieve SEO goals but also improves user experience. It has the next features:

• Automatically optimize JS files;
• Minify CSS files and optimize HTML code to reduce the number of requests to server;
• Compress images in bulk and optimize them for mobile devices
• Enable lazy loading.

Note: read how optimizer address google warnings to understand how it works.

Set: Create promotions

The next step is a special offer creation. Merchants create thousands of promotions before holidays. For this step, we prepared 5 plugins for you. You can create numerous unique offers and notify your clients about them with their help.

Here are some ideas about how you can use them.

Free Gift

People are looking for a big number of gifts in the holiday season, not only for every family member but also for friends. Say, you have a special promotion: get a gift after every $100 spent. How can it help you to increase the revenue? For example, the customers add goods to the cart and see the banner, that they need to spend $5 more to get a gift. They add one more item. As a result, they buy more products than planned.

Our Free Gift module will help you to manage 4 additional promo actions, and it automatically adds a gift to cart depending on the next conditions:

• Specific product;
• The total amount of cart;
• For every N-th product;
• For every $N spent.

Also, you can create a catchy banner to attract more attention.

Special Promotions

The gift is not the only option of promotions that you can make. The Special Promotions Pro extension offers 20+ different promo types. How can it look like? Here are some holiday promo ideas that you can create with this mod:

• Buy 3 toys in different colors at a special price;
• Buy gloves and hat with a 25% discount;
• Buy 3 books, get the 3-d for $3;
• Buy 3 sweaters, and the cheapest will be for $1.

Also, you can use advanced conditions for more complicated promotions. You can set promo based on customer attributes, purchase history, or your custom options.

Gift Card

Another good idea for holidays is gift cards. 70% of adults plan to buy at least one gift card in a holiday season. That means you can boost your revenue with our Gift Card mod. It allows you to create an unlimited number of gift cards with unique design and autogenerated coupon codes. You can set fixed or custom certificate value and date of dispatch. Customers can send these cards in an e-mail or via the post office. It’s possible to add a gift card as a PDF to the email or send a certificate anonymously.

Promo Banners

Say, you have created your special offer. It’s time to inform your customers about it. Use Promo Banners to attract more attention. With this mod, you can create 3 types of banners: images, cms-blocks, HTML text – and place them on any page of your store. It has 10+ position options. Also, you can set the date and time when your banner should be shown. And the plugin will automatically remove outdated promotions. Moreover, you can specify display conditions. For example, you can show banner only for customers who have 5 items in cart.

Push Notifications

Promo banners are good to attract the attention of new customers, but you can use push notifications to inform regular customers. They are opened in 90% cases. Our module allows you to make a popup with an image and message for subscribes. You can create as many campaigns as you need and target them to any customer groups. 

Go: Make last tests

And last but not least, you need to check that nothing can stop your customer from purchase. Test your checkout, enable secure payment methods and convenient shipping ways, protect your store from cart abandonment. You need to check all the steps before the holiday season starts. Here are quick tips what you can follow:

• Enable a one-step checkout. According to the Baymard Institute report, 26% of customers leave your store because of too long and difficult checkout. Enable/disable or rename graphs, create your design, and analyze how customers behave on each checkout step.
• 17% of users don’t trust the site with credit card data. But you can make them feel secure with stripe payment. This module is compatible with various local and worldwide payment options. It supports 3D secure 2.0. Admins can create a partial invoice if you don’t have enough items in stock. Partial refunds are also available.
• 58% of visitors are not ready to buy or are just browsing. But you can return them to your site with an abandoned cart email. This plugin sends notifications for those users who have abandoned carts automatically by your schedule. It has ready-made templates that you can change for your needs.

In conclusion

In the end, we would like to remind that 40% of e-commerce revenue is generated by repeat customers. And the holiday season is a time when you can find new clients. You can use reward points and follow up emails to retain them. An RMA will help you to provide your clients with high-quality customer service.