E-Commerce: Seasonal sales maximization

Hi All,





Much of your business growth comes from exploiting seasonal shopping bonanzas such as Christmas and Easter. So, with Easter just around the marketing corner, here are some top tips for tapping into the chocolate and daffodil inspired ecommerce frenzy – though of course, these rules apply to any season.

When should you do it?

Naturally, your seasonal marketing should be in place before the season, so for Easter – which in case you hadn’t noticed is 3 to 6 April this year – you should be getting it up and running right now. For Christmas 2015, you can probably relax until about September.

Ideally, you should be working these seasonal sales splurges into your annual marketing plan and be well aware of them all year round – and make sure that you have budgeted for the extra marketing spend you may need to make to promote your seasonal offering.

Get the goods

First of all you should already have identified what goods you have on your inventory – or what goods your suppliers have on theirs’ – well in advance and ordered them. Now, in the case of Easter this may be simple: themed goods around eggs, candles, rabbits, crucifixion, resurrection and so on.

So look at what you sell and see how you can make it seasonally relevant.

Alternatively, you can box-clever and try to create a relevant story around what you already sell. This is the hard bit, but can be the most rewarding if you can pull it off. If you sell mugs, then look at how to put an Easter egg in a mug or similar. If you sell bike lights, you may have to really give it some thought – although Easter can be a good time to get rid of anything yellow.

Marketing the goods

The key thing about seasonal selling is the marketing. We have already touched on the idea that you have to create a seasonally relevant ‘story’ around your goods to tap the seasonally affected orderer and this is indeed key, but you also have to look at how create seasonal collateral.

• Message – You need to come up with a seasonal ‘story’ about the specific goods you are looking at promoting and using seasonal language and allusion. This is where you really have to sell the idea that what you are pushing is relevant to the Easter or Christmas – but it should be a matter of writing down cleverly how you arrived at the promo in the first place.

• Promotional codes – Another approach is to offer a special seasonal discount on certain goods. This can obviate the need for special graphics and messaging, but you do need to have a code in place and a story as to why those particular bobble hats or inner tubes are being reduced for Easter, Christmas.

• Market materials – You need to push your seasonal marketing with advertising, graphics, mailers, emails and messages to help sprinkle some of the season’s magic over the marketing medium as well as making the message and the goods seasonal.

• Your website – You may want to carry this theme through to pimping the appropriate parts of your website so that it too looks the part. Again, make it relevant to the season, make sure its in place at the right time and allocate some budget to it.

• Make it mobile – people will be out and about in the run up to and over the holiday period, so make sure that what you are sending – be it email, text or just a promo on your site – is mobile optimised. This should be a given these days for any marketing activity, but seasonal specials make it all the more relevant.

• Seasonal SEO – The last, and very important, part of the seasonal marketing puzzle is to add seasonal SEO to help shoppers actually find your seasonal offerings in the first place.

Courtesy: http://eseller.net/ecommerce-easter-maximise-seasonal-sales/

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