Selling is easy when you know the secrets – good products, great shopping experience, and amazing deals. But what if everyone knows the same secrets as you? The selling part gets a lot tougher as more sellers get ready to grab their individual share from the same pie, especially during the Holiday season.

As per research, last year, Black Friday alone brought around $6.2 billion in online sales, marking a growth of almost 24% compared to 2017. So, how can you leverage some smart holiday selling strategies for sellers this year to boost sales? To help you make the most of the holiday season, we have put these tips together. As an online seller, knowing the right strategies will help you attract, engage and convert customers easily.

Read through the post to know some of the must-follow strategies to help you boost holiday sales for Black Friday and other important events like Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Christmas. Once you have the right knowledge, you can use it to your advantage and have a successful holiday season in 2019.

1.Optimize Your Product Listings:

Product listings are the pillars that your eCommerce catalog stands on. Most sellers make the common mistake of overlooking the importance of well-optimized and properly presented product listing pages.

If you haven’t updated the product listings on your eCommerce website, it’s time to work on listing optimization for the holiday season. Why care, you may ask? After all, the current product listings are getting you sales, right?

Not really. Your product listings play an important part in the overall shopping experience offered by your eCommerce website. Think of them as visual cues or ‘mini-maps’ that guide shoppers to the product(s) they’re searching for. When done right, product listing pages can significantly improve the user experience and create a positive perception of your website.

Without properly optimized product listings, you can miss out on conversions. To avoid doing so, follow these simple practices to optimize your listings to convert more this holiday season –

• Listings Page Headers: well-written, descriptive headers assist people to understand what they can expect to see on a particular page. Think of page headers as short, crisp summaries that briefly inform shoppers about the content of a page.

As sellers, you should focus on clear headers that convey what you’re offering in a nutshell. Plus, you should also aim to cover keywords in your page header to meet the SEO requirements.

• Listings Page Layout: visitors are more likely to buy from websites that offer a clean, easy-to-choose shopping experience. Take for example Amazon, and how it focuses on helping users get to the products faster with its info-rich page layout.

Listing optimization for the holiday season should be on top of your priority list. The reason is that properly optimized listings act as a bridge between turning ‘visitors’ into ‘shoppers’ or customers for your eCommerce store.

Whether you choose a list-based or a grid-based layout for your product page, make sure to use the right images, style, and volume of information, font sizes, whitespace and image thumbnails.

• Listings Page SEO: at the beginning of this article, we talked about the secrets to boost holiday sales for Black Friday. If you don’t know yet, SEO can be your secret sauce to improve your page rankings and close more sales during the holidays.

Keyword-rich product titles and descriptions can lead more shoppers to your website. SEO is a big deal for eCommerce websites as almost 93% of online shopping journeys start with a keyword search.

SEO should be a core part of your strategy for listing optimization for the holiday season. Not only will it help you stay on top of search traffic during the holidays, but it will also give you long-lasting results due to its nature of building upon itself with time.

2.Don’t Neglect Social Media:

Social media is the ultimate tool for every eCommerce business that wants to leverage the power of global reach and boost holiday sales for Black Friday and other events. Trends have shown that about 84% of shoppers in the U.S. review at least one Social Media site before making a purchase decision. In fact, there are more than 500,000 online businesses making use of Instagram as a social advertising platform.

Social media plays a vital role in the buying journey of online shoppers – so it’s a good idea to make them aware of the great deals and discount offers for the holiday season.

Make use of popular social media networks like – Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat as they are an integral part of holiday selling strategies for sellers. But don’t just blindly throw your marketing money on every social network. Take some time out and think about your target audience and their most preferred social media platform. Once you know where they are spending most of their time, you can target them accordingly.

Follow these tips to create a killer social media promotion strategy for the holiday season –

• Prepare your profiles: to usher in the holiday season, update your social media profiles with relevant banners. Work on your profile photo, cover photo, and other image-based assets to tell your audience what they can expect.

Rich, festive visuals are great for capturing attention and creating a buzz to boost sales for Black Friday and the holiday season.

You can even customize the call-to-action link to lead people directly to your Black Friday, Halloween or Thanksgiving product deals. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter also allow pinning a ‘status update’ or a ‘tweet’ to the top of their profile – you can use this to highlight your best deals, discounts and product offers. Tell your audience you are ready for the holiday season because they already are. You can also use Facebook’s live countdown feature to create a sense of urgency about offers.

• Run paid ads: one of the simple tips for selling in the holiday season is to run paid promotions and ads on social media websites. Paid ads are like online billboards, they attract users to your page or website.

Like you, other online sellers are going to run ads on social media too, the key is to separate your paid marketing campaign smartly. How do you do that?

Use creative ads and event-specific hashtags in your paid posts (#blackfriday, #cybermonday etc). Also, harness the power of emotions in your social ads – try to entice feelings of joy, surprise, hope and pleasure in the minds of audiences. Ad Targeting also matters – make use of multiple audience groups to create personalized ads for different buyer personas (e.g. young mothers, teenagers, professionals etc).

Whether you manage your social media yourself or outsource your eCommerce marketing services, keep social media at the center of your holiday sales-boosting strategy.

3.Focus On Customer Experience:

Nothing convinces visitors to turn into buyers than a smooth and easy-to-use shopping experience. You can optimize your product listings perfectly and even run the most creative social media ads, but it won’t guarantee conversions. If your website’s shopping experience isn’t user-friendly, it’s not going to help you boost holiday sales for Black Friday or any other event, for that matter.

As an online business, where should you start with when it comes to improving the online shopping experience?

The answer is – mobile-first. As per research, more than 50% of online shopping is happening on smartphones. So it is imperative for sellers to provide a stellar user experience on mobiles. Not only mobile, desktops and tablets should offer a consistent shopping experience too.

Use these tips to delight your shoppers with great customer experience:

• Make sure your eCommerce website loads quickly. Shoppers hate to wait, especially during the holiday season as they want to grab the best deals quickly.
• Optimize your website to make sure it is responsive on desktop, tablets and mobile devices. Nothing irritates shoppers than unoptimized and poorly responsive web pages.
• Check for broken links on your website. Ensure that each product listing page or product detail page is working. This will help prevent visitors from bouncing off your website.
• Leverage the power of customer reviews to influence buyers. Social proofing helps shoppers validate their purchase decisions.
• Offer time-saving and convenient features and benefits like – free shipping, autosave customer details, fast checkouts, quick-view, personalized messaging and better product photos to generate trust and delight in the minds of shoppers.
• Use chatbots to quickly capture customer inquiries or answer their queries real-time. Chatbots can also be utilized to make real-time offers and give subtle nudges to shoppers.
• Include user-generated photos to instill trust among shoppers. It is also a great way to tell them what to expect when they buy a product.
• Provide a buying guide for first-time shoppers to help them make a purchase decision easily.

Deals and discounts can be the unique advantage you might have, but it only works if people have a pleasant time browsing, navigating and shopping on your website.

Shoppers want great holiday deals and they want them quickly and smoothly. Period.

Providing a pleasant shopping experience is often overlooked yet one of the simple tips for selling in the holiday season. Think about the overall shopping experience from the perspective of a buyer, right from the landing page to the checkout page.

Ready to sell more this holiday season?

To summarize, every online business can leverage the power of descriptive product listings, creative social media marketing, and smooth shopping experience to boost sales for Black Friday and the upcoming holiday season of 2019.

A lot of online sellers make the mistake of blindly following trends without getting the basics right. The competition is stiff and as shoppers get smarter, it’s time for sellers to step up and delight them with more than just good deals and discounts.

We hope you make the most of our holiday selling strategies for sellers and have a successful holiday season.

If you want to make use of professional eCommerce data and product catalog management services, contact us. Leave out the guesswork and trust our professionals to do the right job for you. We provide customized eCommerce product upload services to global online businesses.

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