Make Your Magento Store Holiday Ready With These Tips

• November 1, 2021
• admin
• Blog

Holidays are approaching! Are you ready for the holiday fever?

You need to equip your eCommerce store to deal with the great shopping binge that gets into the heads of customers during that time of the year.

Nothing pushes away a buyer faster than a bad online experience during that time. Magento is no doubt the biggest platform of reliable eCommerce development and there is a round of tricks that you can apply with it to equip your eCommerce store for this holiday season.

Festive times are the busiest period for the retailers and a solid eCommerce strategy can increase up their earnings by manifold. Magento developers community have come with distinctive strategies to boost your Christmas, New Year or Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales. We, at PHPProgrammers, a time-worn Magento development services provider have compiled them here for your convenience. But above all, what is necessary to get your Magento store fully prepared for the seasonal peaks is the complete understanding of the customers and what can fascinate them to buy more.

Magento best practices to scale up sales this holiday

Targeting Holiday emails that convert

While most eCommerce merchants prepared for the long holidays by thinking that deals and offers will be great, they often ignore the power to create an engaging and conversion focused emails.

Generate emails that can actually convert your potential customers with quirk measures.

• Spread a unique content: It is the season where none of the eCommerce companies leaves a chance to promote them with brilliant offers or discounts. So, what will make customers come to you? Obviously, something unique and out-of-the-box will push them to your site. So, target your emails by showcasing all the differentiators of your store. They may be price guarantees, freebies, complimentary gift wrapping, cashback and price guarantees.
• Incentivise with right stuff:  Offering a free item or a discount coupon will no doubt excite your customers but such incentives hit rightly on the minds of buyers when the offers are related to their current purchases. Be it a free gift, or an in-store discount, place them on products that will complement or supplement their last purchase.
• Recommendations: Holidays are hugely marked as gifting seasons with a major trend of self-gifting setting in among the buyers. Use your store’s email feature to send gift recommendations and encourage self-gifting. Send recommendations for products based on their purchase experiences evaluated from their orders history.

Triumph over your competitors

You need to be proactive to reap the most of holiday season spree and rival the competitors’ strategies. Magento revealed that going mobile and having alternative payment systems will help an eCommerce company take over other giant companies.

However, if you concentrate on providing the mobile experience, make sure to make the mStore’s speed faster, facilitate seamless UX, and multiple payment options. Mobile-centric deals are reckoned to increase conversions only when it is supported with great UX.

However, you need to keep these in mind to promote holiday sales with mobile targeting.

• Timing is really important. While BI statistics have revealed that most buying activities take place between 10 PM and 11 PM on Black Friday and between 9 PM and 11 PM on Cyber Monday, try to target your promotions on the hours.
• Zero percent financing promotions like active social media promotions result in more increase in eCommerce sales.
• Customers acquired during Black Friday or Cyber Mondays, have a lower LTV or lifetime value. This is because online buyers are most opportunistic who look for seasonal spree or advantages to buy their wishlist-ed items.

Prepare your loyalty scheme to re-engage customers

Magento community this season rolled out for the retailers a month-by-month plan for initiating loyalty program.

Call back the customers who haven’t visited your site for long and discover the most valuable and consistent shoppers to target your loyalty programs. Specifically in eCommerce, connecting with the existing customers is more profitable than acquiring new customers during the peak seasons.

The best way to run a loyalty campaign for your Magento-built store in this Christmas holidays is to include this three-step program.

• Step One: Engage the ‘at-risk’ customers

‘At-risk’ consumers are the ones who haven’t purchased from the store a while and so holidays are the perfect time to bring them back.  Personalised notifications, messages or emails is pretty effective as that make them realise that you value them as individual customers even when they are the former purchasers.

• Step Two: Engaging the biggest Advocates

During peak sales time, the biggest influence that an eCommerce company can create on the buyers is through word-of-mouth promotions especially social proofs. They help in driving conversion of the new buyers. However,  for that, you need to encourage the biggest advocates of your shop, i.e. regular or repetitive buyers whose average order values are high. Incentivise them at the checkout point with rewards or bonus points to leave positive constructive reviews.

• Step Three: Engaging the most loyal ones

A customer who joins a loyalty program is 47% more likely to make a second purchase than a customer who doesn’t. So, re-engaging your customers who hold membership in your loyalty scheme will help you close more sales. Targeted emails with points reminders, available rewards or redeem offers are some of the ways to secure repetitive purchases from your loyal customers during holidays.

Here is this one extra step to retain and increase the LTV (Life Time Value) of the newly acquired customers who gave business during holidays but to apply later.  Offering them membership to your store’s loyalty program after a month or two.

While bad ordering or checkout experience can be a major fallback for your store, cross-check with these five facts to ensure your customers have the smoothest experience in those rush hours.

• Does your order management strategy have omnichannel fulfilment facilities?
• Does your order system is backed by multiple selling channels?
• Is your order management equipped to provide you with an accurate picture of your stocks or inventory across all the sales channel?
• Do the customers have the flexibility to choose from more than one fulfilment and payment option?
• Do your store have return back facility?

The Final Tale: Avoid Making These Grave Mistakes

Seasonal promotions are sensitive and one mistake can break your business! Even in the worst case, do not fall prey of these mistakes while prepping up your Magento store.

• Subject lines should not be plain and boasting discounts always! Instead, put catchy banners with lines that evoke a sense of urgency in the buyers like, “Offer Lasts Till Midnight”.
• Sticking with the age-old website design and templates
• Forgetting to invest on mobile responsiveness
• Neglecting SEO aspects to focus only on the marketing

Hope this guide will get you close to the dream of making your business most profitable in this holiday season! No more staying a just a reactive spectator in the market during the festivities but try in your own way with Magento strategies to reward your customers.

As the holidays are nearing, no more staying back but get in touch with PHPProgrammers, an eminent company for Magento development in Sydney, having a team of dedicated Magento developers with sheer expertise in website development, website upgradation, features integrations, website redevelopment, and version migration. In short, a one-stop solution to sky-rocket your sales overnight.

Get in touch with our team today to power your Magento store before time runs out!