blogs
6 TIPS TO HELP ONLINE BUSINESS MAKE MONEY DURING HOLIDAY SEASON
Holiday season is definitely a great opportunity for online businesses to stimulate customers and fill their baskets. As Independence Day comes close, customers are starving for the 4th of July sales. However, without right strategy, it is difficult for online business to take advantages of these sales. So, today, Maginx is going to provide six useful tips, which can help you make more profits during the upcoming holiday season.
1. INCREASE THE MINIMUM ORDER AMOUNT FOR FREE SHIPPING
Raising the free shipping minimum is worth to try during the sales season. If your shop’s free shipping minimum is determined based on price and order size, you only need to increase the minimum by a few dollars before the sales. A few dollars’ change may increase your profit a lot.
Need to Remember:-
- Always be aware of the cost of offering free shipping.
- Only offering the lowest fare shipping option for free shipping and charge customers for a premium option.
2. PROVIDE ACCESSORIES
Maginx understands all these concerns, and want to help online business build security and trust. In order to do this, Maginx provides the following advices:Selling accessory is one important way that traditional retailers make most profits. For example, if they sell a cell phone, they always put a higher profit margin on the cell phone’s accessories than on the cell phone itself. Accordingly, online business can also use this technique. Because online retailers can easily provide accessories to many of their products. So if they can sell these accessories to customers, they would have an opportunity to earn more profits.
You should start working with your best-selling products: find the relevant accessories and display them on the product page. Additionally, you need to bundle an accessory together with the product. So, during the holiday season, you can sell this bundle with extra discount to attract customers.
Need to Remember:-
- Provide accessories for all your product category;
- Manually match accessories with products, and focus on items with high turnover first
- Explain the relationship between the product and the accessory, and why to buy the accessory.
- Show the additional saving of purchasing bundles to customers
3. PROVIDE PRODUCT RECOMMENDATIONS
Automatic product recommendation is another important tool to use during holiday season. Because customers are willing to purchase more items, and they need some inspirations.
A lot of software systems feature this function out-of-the-box. Raptor Smart Advisor or Nosto is highly recommended for software that provides product recommendations based on order history, viewed products, and customer preferences.
Need to Remember:-
- Don’t forget to manage the automation on highly convertible products.
- Make sure that the system does not recommend products of low margin to customers during the holiday season.
4. OFFER ADD-ON SERVICES
Although only a few webs offer add-on services, add-on services can be an important way to increase revenue, especially during holiday season. Add-on services could include faster delivery, gift packaging, personalization (i.e. Monogram), and more.
During the holiday season, lots of customers are willing to pay for these extra services, because many purchases are gifts. These add-on services are the strong motivation for a higher minimum order, an advantage that can differentiate you from your competitors or an additional product to make revenue.
Need to Remember:-
- Provide add-on services that your customers might consider purchasing.
- Try to sell a service before you offer it for free.
- Services could also be specific within product categories, such as special delivery arrangements, packaging, and installation.
5. STICK TO A PRICING STRATEGY
Besides accessories, online business can also learn the pricing strategy from traditional retailer. Traditional retailers always make specific plan for sales prices of each product. Online business should adopt the same strategy to maintain the brand image during any holiday season, which they would advertise huge deduction.
Need to Remember:-
- Make specific plans for the price of your products before, during, and after the sales.
- In order to make your campaign period longer, you need to provide ongoing offers, instead of putting all products on sale at once
- Regularly check the rules and regulations about setting prices.
6. SEGMENT YOUR CUSTOMERS
Increasing the profit earned on holiday season is important, but business also need to focus on long-term success. Although holiday season can certainly generate more sales for online business, these customers acquired during the holidays are highly possible to have lower lifetime value (LTV) than others. So, it is important to segment your customers, and spend your marketing budget on the right ones.
Need to Remember:-
- Some analytics tools, like google analytics, can help you analyze your customers.
- Because not all dollars are spent equally, you should invest in the loyalty of customers of high lifetime value.
After reading this article, you can make a list to check whether your business is “equipped” with these six tips. With these tips, Maginx believe your business can definitely take more advantages from 2017 holiday season!