The end of the year is an excellent time for businesses, especially e-commerce businesses, but if you sit in your hands and enjoy a small increase in sales, you could be missing out on the chance to grow your customer base and your business going into next year. Don’t miss out!
Content Marketing
Content marketing can benefit any business, but for e-commerce businesses coming toward the end of the year, content marketing is indispensable. In order to boost your sales at the busiest time of the year, you need to get your brand in front of the right people, so even if the search engines have yet to index your content, it is still worth getting started with a content strategy.
Creating high-quality SEO content, publishing it on your website, and sharing it across your social media channels creates visibility for your brand and promotes the right products at the right times. In the lead-up to the busy season, you need to post content more regularly through your channels in an intelligent way. Use scheduling software to strike the right balance.
Social Media Marketing
As you can probably tell, social media is a key component of any content marketing strategy. A little under five billion people are using social media worldwide, which is significant. Make sure you have social media accounts open on the right channel – the ones that best suit your brand – and ensure you have some basic skills on them, such as creating posts and social media ads.
General posts on social media are an excellent way to create visibility and increase traffic to your e-commerce store, but these channels can do a lot more besides that. Using social media ads can boost your visibility further; this is especially useful when you have a promotion. Additionally, you can hire social media influencers that act as third-party product advocates.
Customer Reviews
Social proof is one of the most powerful forms of advertising because people trust the opinion of people they know well. If your friend or family member recommends a product or service to you, it’s likely you will consider this brand first if you need that product in the future. E-commerce stores use this dynamic to good effect on the website by offering customer reviews of products.
Chances are you have seen customer reviews on Amazon – probably the biggest e-commerce platform in the world – or you have some product reviews on your business website. It pays to source reviews from customers for your own discretion and to promote your products; learn how to Improve Your Amazon Customer Reviews, and you can boost your e-commerce sale quickly.
E-Mail Lists
Some businesses and websites use gated content to acquire emails from website visitors – this is content that can only be accessed when someone trades their email address for it. Other methods involve sign-up processes during the customer journey. However, you acquire your customer emails; it’s important that you have them and archive them in a CRM system to use.
E-mail lists are another powerful form of marketing, allowing you to send newsletters, updates, and promotions directly to the customer’s inbox. But, as with social media, you need to be careful with how often you send customer emails to prevent them from unsubscribing from the lists. A CRM tool allows you to target customers with relevant information at the right times.
Heat Mapping
Heat mapping is a secret weapon to boosting sales this winter. Heat mapping is the process of tracking the customer’s behavior on your website, gathering data about how different customers use your website, and making changes that can result in better sales figures. One of the most popular third-party software options for heat mapping is called HotJar, available on subscription.
Using HotJar or a similar software solution, you can see where the customers arrive at your website and how they navigate it. This gives you valuable insights into the customer’s intentions, the website navigation, and the possible reasons for failed conversions. Naturally, these are powerful signals that can be used to optimize the website and boost sales throughout the year.
Final Thoughts
E-commerce businesses shouldn’t need to boost their sales in winter as there is usually a boom in sales anyway, but with the right attention to detail, you can make the most of the sales rush in winter and acquire customers that you can retain throughout the year to grow your business.
Take advantage of the winter months using a content marketing strategy, social media marketing, customer reviews, e-mail lists, and heat mapping. Using a combination of strategies, you can increase your sales and your customer base when the commercial world is busiest.
