Top 10 Proven Ecommerce Marketing Ideas for the Holidays

If you’re operating an ecommerce store, then this holiday season is going to be a real money-making opportunity for you. However, the competition will be tough and your ecommerce store needs to be optimized to not only stand out but also handle high traffic volumes as well. It is especially difficult for startup online companies because of their limited budget and resources.

For Holiday Marketing Ideas, there are a few pointers and ideas I have come up with that is guaranteed to make sure your online ecommerce venture benefits from the heavy influx of traffic that is to come. The same ideas will also apply if you are looking for christmas promotion ideas for this year. There are several ideas for consideration before you start marketing and make the necessary checks you would need in order to cater to the holiday season.

I love to focus on proven marketing ideas and that’s why this written articles as a solution to address all your ecommerce problems for the holidays. The holiday season has officially begun, so it’s best to prep your online store for your customers right away. Just follow the given marketing ideas below and your online store can stand a chance against stiff competition during the holidays.

1. Choose a Better Host

It is a common anomaly these days that entrepreneurs and even seasoned marketers, because of their limited budget, startup ecommerce store owners often make the mistake of choosing the cheapest web hosting plan, which usually ends up putting the owners and the website’s stability at risk. Granted, this may help them save up on their investment at first, but websites that run on cheap web hosts are prone to crashes during high traffic spikes.

A great ecommerce store is only as good as its web host, which is why I recommend you use a credible web host provider such as Cloudways, Nexcess or MGT-Commerce. Not only do they provide supreme caching abilities, but they also scale your server’s size in order to cater to high volumes of traffic. The hosting providers mentioned above have their own set of tried and tested principles and features to make sure marketers face little to no issues when using them.

What’s more is that setting them up is a breeze and even ecommerce business owners with little experience can get their websites up and running in no time. As a holiday promotion ideas go, you can get your website optimized now to cater to the holiday season also.

According to Niket Sharma, Co Founder & CEO of My Comparision Guide, “One of the very first and important Holiday Marketing Ideas I would suggest is making sure you are choosing a hosting service with a reputation without emphasizing on how much it costs.”

2. Pick a Better Ecommerce Platform

Apart from selecting an efficient and scalable web host, it is just as important to ensure that online stores are powered by a strong and user-friendly platform. For this, I recommend choosing Magento.

Being one of the most preferred to and known platforms for ecommerce stores in the world, Magento comes with credible features and a reputation for stability. Magento is more than just a user-friendly platform, it offers security and stability which is rare to find in a platform nowadays.

In addition to other Holiday Marketing Ideas, you could look into the fact that Magento also offers flexible freedom in customizations and control over an online store. If you wish to run a store with a more personalized experience, Magento is the one to opt for.

3. Utilize High ROI Marketing

When it comes to Holiday Marketing Ideas, Gift guides and Facebook ads are excellent examples of high ROI marketing. This goes hand in hand even for christmas promotion ideas, that if you can create well-made Facebook ads that are well-targeted, not only will your brand image improve, but you will be able to convert quality traffic into likely sales.

In addition to High ROI marketing techniques, you can also make sure you provide a seamless but stable user experience for your customers to promote loyalty through targeted marketing schemes designed specifically for old or returning customers.

4. Improve Your Ecommerce Store’s Speed

For Holiday Marketing Ideas, speed is extremely important for a website. Nowadays, a website that loads quicker is a global standard for ecommerce sites everywhere. It is a crucial factor for driving traffic and maintaining a high search engine ranking. If there even a three-second delay in your site’s loading speed during a transaction, 40% of web visitors will bounce and opt for another online store.

It is also a fact that when a website takes more than 2 seconds during a transactional procedure or through payment verification, customers tend to either walk away or experience lack of trust on websites. Nowadays, speed is paramount when it comes to providing a better user experience for customers. Proven marketing ideas suggest that a bad impression usually stems from websites with poor performance which always results in a website’s bad reputation and no loyalty.

Thankfully, for Magento-powered stores, there are lots of plugins that you can use. I can suggest Amasty’s Full Page Cache as the plugin you could use to help speed up your website and also optimize the buying procedure for your customers. Not only does this plugin improve your store’s loading speed, but it also leads to better conversions as well as high search engine rankings. You can use SEO as an early christmas promotion ideas as well.

5. Use Responsive Design

To give you the best Holiday Marketing Ideas, I did some research for you. According to a report from Marketing Adept, mobile sales had accounted for 27.9% of total sales on Black Friday in 2015. Therefore, you must ensure that your online store has been optimized to be user-friendly for mobile users. Some customers would often complain about not being able to view all the important elements on a screen, images not being rendered well and more.

Several proven marketing ideas conclude that being responsive means more than just a website that adapts itself to mobile platforms. Being responsive means that a website caters to almost every mobile phone platform out there. Most smartphones these days are changing their layout which makes it difficult for websites to catch up to in terms of optimization and screen layouts.

With trends changing more and more every day, it is becoming harder for developers to properly cater to them in time. Failure to cater to such platforms usually results in a bad user experience so when this happens, customers end up abandoning the store and look for alternatives. Almost every website nowadays needs to be responsive, anything less than that is not acceptable.

As a tip for Holiday Marketing Ideas, not optimizing your ecommerce store for mobile devices, you could be missing out on large potential sales. What’s worse is that Google penalizes sites that are not user-friendly. Even for the upcoming christmas promotion ideas, you have to adopt a mobile-first approach if you wish to succeed in your holiday season sales.

6. Use High-Quality Product Photos

As fundamental Holiday Marketing Ideas go, the infamous saying; a picture is worth a thousand words, still precedes its reputation. Similarly, high-quality images of your ecommerce store’s products are vital in converting quality leads into potential customers.

You should take plenty of screenshots from multiple angles to make the product as visible and tangible as possible. Taking quality and clear images of your products from multiple angles to give customers a better view of what they’re buying is one of the best Holiday Marketing Ideas you can offer in today’s competitive ecommerce landscape. You can also show several different screenshots of the same product in different colors and materials as well.

However, while it is important to use high-quality images, it is also wise to ensure that your online store’s speed is superb. In order to prevent your website from slowing down, you should make sure that you conduct lots of testing before you upload more images.

7. Make a Page About Gift Ideas

As far as Holiday Marketing Ideas go for 2018, you can take hints from the fact that customers are usually planning on buying several gifts for the holidays because of the limited time they have, so they need lots of gift ideas as well. So why not make a page full of gift ideas for your customers? It will make it easier on their end from doing all the planning plus it will also help to make buying decisions quicker for them. What that will result in is more chances of conversions overall. You can use this as christmas promotion ideas also.

For Holiday Marketing Ideas this year, you can also show a holiday-themed banner, and create flyers for Halloween, Thanksgiving or Christmas on the gift idea page that redirects customers to the landing page. Just to make the deal even sweeter, you can also offer exclusive discounts and deals as well.

8. Update Online Store’s SEO

As far as Holiday Marketing Ideas for 2018 go, you need to focus on Search Engine Optimization for every piece of content that you have on your store or your website. Implement this in your product descriptions.

If you want your ecommerce store to have a better chance at ranking higher on search engines and gain better visibility in the eyes of your customers, then you have to improve its SEO. Unfortunately, it takes time to get SEO updates to take place. That’s why it is better for you to begin optimizing your website three to four weeks in advance. A good rule of thumb is at least 2 to 3 months before, also great for christmas promotion ideas.

Once it’s optimized, take a few minutes to inspect the backend of your website and ensure that your website’s title tags, meta descriptions, image ALT tags and everything else are up to date with your focus keywords.

9. Offer Free Shipping

Everyone loves getting things for free. This is especially true for the holiday season since customers everywhere are looking for the best deals and the best products offering the best value for money. If you cannot give products for free, you sure can offer delivery for free or free shipping.

For Holiday Marketing Ideas, free shipping is a great tactic for increased conversions. Most of the times, customers hate to pay to have their products shipped especially during the time of great merrymaking that is the holiday season. Leaving this as it is, will discourage shoppers from ever buying your store’s products. Even for christmas promotion ideas, the best alternative for this is to offer free shipping or shipping discounts for certain products. However make sure you do not exceed your budget by giving discount on shipping. You can invest in a business budgeting software that will help track your expenses and invoices, ensuring you stay on top of your finances.

10. Make Purchasing Easier

Getting things done quicker is always welcome. It saves on time and resources. For Holiday Marketing Ideas, it is important to know that in order to streamline processes and make sure you are not messing up a customer’s buying journey, checking out should be quick and easy.

I included the checkout process because as far as Holiday Marketing Ideas go, one of the most annoying things that customers experience during a checkout process is having to fill out various fields and forms. This, as a result, ruins an online store user’s experience.

As Holiday Marketing Ideas go, if your checkout process is anything like this, please replace it with a one-page checkout. Ensure that this page includes all additional costs such as delivery charges and taxes. Also, remember to display multiple currencies to foreign customers if you are also trying to cater to a wider audience. This is especially useful as holidays promotion ideas for 2019.

Conclusion

Hopefully, as far as Holiday Marketing Ideas and christmas promotion ideas go, all of the ideas I have suggested are enough to get your online store fired up for the holiday season. By having a fast, efficient and reliable online store, assure yourself that your holiday sales will go smoothly. If there is something that you would like to add as a suggestion, I’m willing to read it in the comments below.

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