As the holiday season fast approaches, it’s important to get your ducks in row before the increase in sales leaves you wanting.
Finder reported that Australians expected to spend a combined $23.9 billion over the 2021 holiday season – an increase of 38% on 2020 figures.
Of these same 1015 survey respondents, Finder also reported that 2 in 5 Australians planned to complete their Christmas shopping online.
This trend reveals just how important it is to perfect your promotional marketing in the lead up to the annual sales frenzy.
But perfection doesn’t happen overnight. It will be important to test out your promo strategy ahead of time to make sure your conversion rate is maximised.
As an expert white label digital marketing agency, Agency Stack suggests you consider these pointers and try them out as soon as possible.
Which Offers Work
If you’re an established brand, you’ll hopefully have tried out a range of offers over the years and come to know how your audience reacts.
Whichever strategy you decide on, MailChimp recommends keeping it simple or else you risk confusing your audience and scaring them off.
If you’re not sure, consider these tried & tested options for a bump in sales:
Tiered discounts
Start by identifying an average order value (AOV) that you’d like to accomplish – potentially just beyond your current AOV – and create a discount for customers that surpass it.
For example, “10% OFF orders over $100” could work especially well if your most popular items are priced just below this dollar value.
Free Shipping/Gifts
Something that can be involved in a tiered discount is free stuff! This could be shipping, a small gift, store credit, you name it.
Offering this service on orders over a certain value can see your AOV get bumped up as people look to cut costs from their Christmas shopping.
Alternatively, offering free shipping for metropolitan locations can appear generous and could be the final value-add to get customers to convert.
$ or % ?
Symbolism is everything.
Some customers will perceive “-$ off” differently to “-% off” and it’s this distinction that could make or break your strategy.
Make sure to test both options on your website and stick with it throughout the holiday season.
You may find different results for different products or order values, so make the most of the data you uncover.
Reimagine Your Merchandise
MailChimp also recommends considering where your promotions are seen by customers.
Rebranding your website to highlight a big offer is the digital equivalent of putting a sale display in your physical storefront.
Not only does it let people know what’s going on, it also acts to keep your website fresh and exciting for loyal customers. Fresh colours or imagery could be just the spark that’s needed to signify your brand is still relevant and excited for a big holiday season.
On top of this, email promotions and social media campaigns should play their usual part in promoting your promotions. Don’t be scared to jazz them up too!
Test with Purpose
Once you have a pool of promotions you’d like to try out, make sure your strategy to test them is reliable and airtight.
Many people have good intentions to test their strategy but waste their time because their tests are flimsy, or they don’t know how to interpret the results.
A/B testing
This research method has epitomised marketing strategy for quite some time as it provides some of the clearest and most specific results possible. It is also cheap and simple to conduct.
A/B testing, also known as split testing, involves exposing one group to variant A, exposing another group to variant B, and recording their results. In this case, the results would be measured by the uptake of a product or promotion.
The key to A/B testing is making sure to change just one defined element of the content between subject groups, such as the colour of an object.
If you were to change more than one element, this would be called multivariate testing and results would not be understood in the same way.
Yieldify depicts this well:
[x] vs [x] = A/B test
[y] vs [y] = A/B test
[x] vs [y] = not an A/B test
[x] vs [x+y] = not an A/B test
Test Out Agency Stack
We’ve been working passionately with eCommerce clients and we love finding the right strategy for your brand and your audience.
Get in touch and allow us to put in the work to perfect your promo strategy this holiday season.