The holiday season tends to be one of the most successful (and profitable) times of the year for e-commerce business owners. With so many customers looking to buy gifts for their friends and loved ones, the amount of money they are prepared to spend on that special gift can increase quite dramatically.
It’s not always just as simple as sitting back and watching your sales increase throughout the holiday season though. While it’s not impossible that you could see some good levels of growth by not doing much, if you want to see significant growth, there are some things you can do to keep you ahead of the game.
Boost Your Advertising (And Do It Well)
Increasing the aggressiveness of your marketing campaign does come with a financial cost. However, if you get it right, you could make much more money than you spend throughout the holiday season.
Toward the end of the year, people start thinking about the holidays. They start thinking of ideas for gifts, and they might even start shopping around to find the best price for what they are looking for. As searches increase, your marketing needs to be seen by as many people as possible. If you have been really strict with your marketing budget and quite passive in your strategy, now is the time to take it up to the next level.
Expand your audience, add some more keywords, increase your PPC budget, put another ad out on social media, and do what you can to make sure your business is seen by the people who want what you are selling.
It’s important to remember that pretty much all of your competitors will be increasing their advertising as the holiday season approaches. Unless you respond by doing the same (and doing it better), you could very well miss out on a lot of sales and growth.
If you do decide to boost your holiday advertising, it’s really important that this is well planned and thought out in advance. It’s no good just increasing the audience of the ads you already have running (although this might help in some instances), you will probably get much better results if you design, plan, schedule, and adapt a marketing campaign specifically for the holiday season.
If you get your advertising and marketing right, you stand a very good chance of seeing some pretty significant growth in your e-commerce business this holiday season.
Increase Your Inventory
If you are trying to grow your business, you need to make sure you have enough inventory to support the increase in sales you hope to achieve. No matter how good your marketing campaign is, no matter how good your customer service is, no matter how effectively you use social media to engage with your customers, if the product your customers want to buy isn’t in stock, they will go elsewhere to make their purchase.
The holiday season tends to not be far behind Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As these will also have a need for increased inventory, it can be challenging to get things right. Your best bet is to have accurate forecasting processes. Maybe your e-commerce platform can do this for you but, even if it can, it’s well worth casting an eye over the order numbers before committing to them.
Not having inventory of a specific product can actually be more detrimental to your business than just losing customers too. For example, let’s say a customer buys a product from you that arrives damaged or faulty. They have been happy with your customer service and processes so would be happy to exchange the faulty product with one that is fully functioning. This has the potential to be a very straightforward solution that has a minimal cost to you and your business. However, if you are out of stock of the product in question, you have very little alternative other than to offer a full refund to your customer.
If this happens too many times, you could end up losing much more money than you feel comfortable with as so many refunds will need to be given. By having enough inventory, you give yourself more options to not only make sales but also to keep the profits made from each one without having to refund orders.
Test Your Site And Make Sure Everything Is Working
When trying to significantly grow an e-commerce business, one aspect that seems to be overlooked more commonly than it should be is how well your website functions and can cope with high numbers of visitors
Obviously, growing your e-commerce business will usually mean generating more traffic to your website and making more sales as a result. However, the first stage (increasing the number of visitors) can actually end up negatively impacting the second (making more sales).
If your e-commerce platform is designed to be best suited to a small e-commerce store that only gets a few hundred visits per month, it’s unlikely to be able to cope particularly well if you start getting thousands of visits. Things like the speed of your site, functionality, and the overall feel can quickly take a hit if too many people land on your site at the same time.
Before you start thinking about other ways of significantly growing your e-commerce business this holiday season, it’s really important to stress test your site. You need to know and fully understand its limits. You need to know if the software, programs, processes, and procedures you currently have in place will be suitable for a larger business with significantly more customers.
Most customers find slow or clunky e-commerce stores extremely frustrating. If your website isn’t functioning exactly as it should be and allowing your customers to find what they need, make a purchase, and have everything finalized in a smooth transaction, you could very well lose out on holiday season growth. If your competitors get everything right throughout the holidays, you could get left too far behind to catch up, and this is a position you never want to find yourself in if you want to run a successful e-commerce business.
