Now the craziness of BFCM week is over here are some of the key things that we think have seen to be very effective to end the year super strong and power through the rest of the holidays.
Shopify has a lot of amazing features, data, and apps that you can work with to really understand your customers and give them more of what they want while increasing your sales, conversions, and AOV.
1. Gift With Purchase
Our clients are having big success year after year by coming straight out of BFCM and offering a free gift with purchase over a certain threshold of spend moving through the rest of December.
This increases the average order value and is a great opportunity to offer a free gift to help increase AOV. It’s also good to make the threshold over your free shipping threshold too so it’s a double whammy. When having an offer like this is very important to make it clear and congruent across your advertising efforts, product copy, banners, etc. so it’s really clear that there is an offer on that they can take advantage of. It’s also really important to thoroughly test any custom code that you’re doing thoroughly ensure your checkout is working correctly as errors can occur! It’s best to go live and run your tests in low periods of traffic, probably early in the morning.
Tip: Choose a lightweight gift with a high perceived value and something that won’t add on to your shipping cost!
2. Listen To Your Customers
There is gold in your customer’s reviews and we recommend using the Yotpo review app to thoroughly understand the language that your customers use…and then in using this language back on them! You can export your reviews from Yotpo into wordcounter.net look for the most commonly used words and phrases that people mention in the current holiday period.
If people are mentioning gifts, a specific family member they buy for or whatever else may come up, these are all things you can use in your product copy, advertising and email marketing to really speak directly to your customers. You can also use this method if you’re running Facebook ads and check people’s comments and take note of the data and look for the most common points that crop up.
Tip: Leverage testimonials that mention the core words and phrases as much as possible!
3. Email Marketing
Make sure that you are email marketing heavily while still providing useful and valuable content and using that as an excuse to put your products inside the emails with catchy subject lines. Don’t be afraid to run straight up sales emails referencing the holidays too and using emojis and testimonials where people reference gifts for the holidays is great at really getting people into the holiday mode.
Tip: Don’t forget to resend to unopens!
4. Exporting Holiday Data For Facebook Ads
It’s a great idea to export your data from Shopify from the holidays from the previous year/years and upload these as custom audiences in Facebook. You can run ads directly to these people again and also build lookalike audiences from the exact same type of people who were purchasing this time last year and reach more similar people. This is a fantastic way to scale your advertising campaigns and reach similar people who were proven to buy from you in the past.
Tip: 6% Lookalikes are outperforming 10% for us across heavy spend currently
5. Make It Easy For People To Claim Offers
Auto-applying any offers and coupons make it much easier for people to claim your offer. You should make it really clear in your site banner and in your email pop-up that no coupon code is required to claim whatever offer it is and it’s also a good idea to check your product page copy to make sure there are no confusing or conflicting offers from previous periods.
Tip: Make sure to double-check your banners (hint hint: mobile) on all devices to make sure they look good!
6. Create Gift Categories
It’s a great idea to make a gift category and collection in your store so it’s very clear for people that your products can be gifted. You can take this further by getting more specific on who the gifts are for such as husband, daughter baby and so on.
Tip: You can also organise by price bands such as ‘Under $25,’ ‘$25 – $50,’ etc.
7. Upsells & Cross-Sells
Don’t miss out on upselling and cross-selling complementary products to your customers. People are in super buying mode whether it’s for themselves or as gifts for others. Your upsell conversion rate should increase as long as your product is complimentary and the offer is great. Try and make it as irresistible as possible.
Tip: We love the Bold Product Upsell app for this!
8. Lay Out The Red Carpet For Existing Customers
Don’t forget about your loyal customers. They’ve proven to buy from you before, so let’s bring them back again. You can create personalised emails, content, and offers for these guys to bring them back. Crack this and you won’t go wrong this holiday!
9. Use a solid, reliable theme
We absolutely love Out Of The Sandbox themes and find them to be reliable, flexible, and perfect for our client’s needs at every level. Working with their quality themes like Turbo has enabled us to work on stores quicker than ever, saving our clients time & money while being able to easily customize certain features to help push sales and conversions during the holidays.
Tip: Turbo is our favourite theme from Out Of The Sandbox!
To get a free review of your Shopify store, click here: https://calendly.com/rebecca-worsley/review
