Are you ready for the holiday rush? 21 Unique eCommerce strategies to stand out in 2023

With the festive season fast approaching, it’s crucial to have a breakthrough strategy in place for your online shop. You don’t want to be left holding mistletoe while your competitors thrive and make up to 10X more sales. Although the pandemic has made the market more challenging, there’s still a tremendous opportunity for businesses that can stand out from the crowd.

Online shopping has skyrocketed, and consumers spent $211.7 billion over the 2022 festive season, with a 3.5% year-over-year growth. To pierce through the competition and generate revenue, you must provide unique services and products that stand out. For 20+ whopping years, Nethues Technologies has been preparing businesses for their growth potential periods. From Holiday Seasons to Black Friday Sales to Custom Sale Promotions, we have helped enterprises ignite their year with profits & loyal customers.

With expert guidance, businesses can leverage their incoming traffic and turn visitors into loyal customers, reaping the rewards of a successful Holiday Season and beyond. Our guide presents practical improvisation points aimed at bringing desired results. 

Go on, Read.

Optimize your store in every possible way.

Remember, preparation is key when it comes to succeeding in the holiday season rush. Begin optimizing your eCommerce store for the holidays well in advance to ensure you’re fully ready when the season hits.

• Integrate a website load balancer

If an eCommerce website cannot handle an inflow of visitors, it could negatively impact the brand’s reputation and overall sales. Therefore, it is crucial to optimize the website/store to handle unexpected spikes in traffic, such as during holiday periods. This can be done by integrating a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or a Load Balancer. 

By using a data center to balance the load and distribute incoming requests across the server pool, a CDN can efficiently handle traffic spikes while ensuring secure encryption. This will not only keep the website stable but also maintain its high performance, ultimately leading to greater satisfaction for visitors.

• Deliver Mobile-First Experience

Statista research shows that in the first quarter of 2023, 58.33 percent of global website traffic was generated by mobile devices. To ensure success, your online store must have a responsive design that works seamlessly on both Android and IOS systems. Fortunately, PWA development offers an opportunity to supercharge your business with unique capabilities and features that your competitors may not have, giving you a competitive edge.

• Third-Party API Check

Don’t overlook the significance of assessing your third-party integrations. Proper tuning and updates are crucial for extensions and plugins to function correctly. Neglecting this step can result in unforeseen risks, particularly during peak holiday season days, and lead to a poor browsing and checkout experience for your eCommerce site visitors. 

• Loading Speed

According to Google, websites that take longer than three seconds to load will often lose visitors. This is especially true during the holiday season, as website speed often falls behind even with good hosting. Therefore, it’s important to optimize servers and prepare for emergency situations where fast loading speed is crucial.

• Images & Content Optimization with Keywords

Another user-centric research suggests that a significant proportion of people, approximately 70-80%, disregard sponsored advertisements in favor of organic search results. In light of this, optimizing your eCommerce site using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can help you attract more relevant traffic, thereby increasing the potential for converting them into paying customers. 

Hire an excellent digital transformation company that can optimize your entire site with keywords, images with alt-text, content with internal/ external links, and search engine performance with intelligent scripts. SEO, of course, is an inexpensive way to improve conversions. It’s time-consuming yet worth it because of its long-term benefits.

Personalized User Experience

Research done by ‘Accenture’s Personalization Pulse Check’ shows that 91% of customers are more likely to convert when provided with a personalized shopping experience.

• Integrate Personalized Push Notifications

Sending push notifications to customers who have abandoned their basket is a proven method to win them back. Moreover, it is also a powerful technique to reactivate your dormant customers by being a little creative with your push copy. Popular sites like Amazon, eBay, Zomato & Swiggy do it all the time.

• Custom Promotional Mailers

Custom promotion mailers are still one of the cheapest yet most effective ways to earn new customers, considering worldwide email users are projected to grow to 4.73 billion in 2026. These mailers effectively captivate the attention of your target audience. However, it is crucial to merge eye-catching graphics with persuasive messaging to ensure your mail is not classified as spam. 

• Personalized Combos & Deal Suggestions

When customers are offered customized deals and combos, the outcome can be extraordinary. You can enlist the help of experts to integrate APIs that can do this job for you. These third-party APIs will understand your visitors’ interests and present them with the needful combos you fed them with.

• Coupons! Coupons! Coupons!

Sprinkle some coupons across your website this holiday season. These tiny discount shredders can drive even an uninterested buyer to make a purchase. It creates the fear of missing out in the minds of your audience and prompts them to immediately add your products to their shopping basket without any second thoughts.

Dress your website up for the Holidays!

Transform your website for the holiday season with the help of a skilled eCommerce development company that can make seasonal modifications while maintaining the overall appearance of your website. 

• High-Res Festive Banners

The key to presenting a festive-ready website is incorporating high-resolution and captivating promotional banners. As previously mentioned, you only have 3 seconds to engage a visitor’s attention. Therefore, if your online store fails to impress them upon initial inspection, they will not hesitate to navigate away from your offerings.

• Flashing Labels

E-commerce giants have a way of catching our attention with their latest offerings. Their use of large banners, side stripes, and other marketing tools is undoubtedly effective. One of the most powerful aspects of this strategy is the use of flashing labels on select products to increase sales. Attention-grabbing labels, such as Few Pieces Left, Sale On, 50% OFF, and New Arrivals, create a distinct image of the product in the minds of visitors and significantly improve the chances of conversion.

• Promotional Web Pop-Ups

Play with promotional website Pop-ups. They effectively catch your visitor’s attention by splashing limited deals & promotions on their screen. However, it is crucial to avoid excessive use, as it can become annoying and give your business a desperate appearance.

• Separate Festive Landing Pages

Holiday Specific Landing Pages are a pretty hot trend nowadays among digital marketers. It acquires precise data regarding your users’ behavior and helps in refining your long-term decision-making.

You can create as many landing pages as you want!

Each for a specific type of audience regarding their demographics, interests, age, or income, and can target smartly for rapid conversions.

For instance, If you have an online gift shop, then you can create dedicated landing pages for specific interest audiences in such a way:-

Target audience: People who missed the previous sale. Copy: ‘Missed out on the Black Friday sale? Here’s something that would make up to all your desires.’

Target audience: Generally, everyone. Copy: ‘These are the gifts your parents badly need but never ask.’

Target audience: Teens/Youth. Copy: ‘Show your siblings that unexplainable love through these unique Christmas gifts.’

Smooth & Effortless Checkout

According to the Baymard Institute, checkout optimization can increase your eCommerce conversion rate by 35.62%. This means it would be wise to incorporate these enhancements into your online store to ensure a seamless and hassle-free checkout experience for your customers.

• Multiple Shipping Options

It’s advisable to provide your customers with various shipping options, just as you do with payment gateways. From standard ground shipping to expedited options, giving your customers the ability to choose the shipping option that suits their needs can lead to higher satisfaction and more repeat business.

• Multiple Verified Payment Gateways

To establish trust and professionalism with your customers, you must integrate 2-3 verified and trusted payment gateways on your website. This ensures a seamless and secure transaction experience, leaving a positive impression on your customers. By offering multiple verified payment gateways, customers are assured of your credibility and are more likely to recommend your business to others.

• Simplified Navigation

The easier the navigation, the lower the chances of cart abandonment. Unfortunately, numerous eCommerce sites utilize a complicated navigation process that asks excessive and unnecessary questions or presents too many options, ultimately diminishing the overall shopping experience. Hence, always try to keep your navigation process simple enough to be understandable by a kid.

• Well-Explained Return Policy

Besides making your exchange & return process easy, always provide a thorough explanation of its terms & policies. This is the most needed info during holiday season sales, or else you will lose your customers to those shiny-door eCommerce giants with unbreakable trust among the audience.

Vivid ‘Marketing & Promotion’ Campaigns

According to Oberlo eCommerce statistics, 81% of consumers conduct online research before making an online purchase. This explains why your marketing strategies should stand out of the box.

• Testimonials & Customer Reviews

How do you expect a new visitor to trust and shop from your site in this tangled world of cybercrimes? The solution is to include a dedicated portfolio page on your website & earn their trust. It should have your customers’ reviews, testimonials, and ratings. This encourages customers to think of you as a reliable source and establish a legitimate image of your products in their minds.

• Social Media Integration

In today’s world, it’s hard to find someone who isn’t active on social media. Therefore, it’s crucial for online brands to tap into this social market if they want to succeed. By integrating your YouTube unboxing videos, influencer content, Facebook page, and Instagram handle onto your website, you can easily convert your free organic holiday traffic into a loyal following on social media.

‘Customer is King’ – Level Support

The holiday season is one of the most fragile tenures when brands lose customer loyalty. Therefore, you should never loosen up the support ropes and offer an excellent customer experience that makes your audience feel like a king.

• Smartly Programmed Chatbots

Automation is the key to improved productivity – Elon Musk.

You should improvise your store with a chatbot programmed to answer the most common user queries during holiday season sales. Doing this won’t just save your team’s energy but also keep things organized and your customers satisfied.

• Proactive Comms

Even if it requires onboarding new members, do not hesitate. Ask your BD team to stay sharp with charged communications & quick replies during the Holiday Season sales. It will strengthen your brand’s long-term relationships, help you stand out, and control audience loss to your competition sites.

Final Words

The holiday season is the busiest time of year for online stores. We hope that these tips have helped you understand how you can prepare your website & digital marketing strategies so that your business will be ready when December comes around!

Despite most businesses prefer to operate on autopilot during this period, there is still ample time to make improvements. Contact Nethues Technologies today, and we’ll help set up a plan for success with our team of experts right by your side every step of the way. 

Cheers to a prosperous business!