6 Things You Can Do Now to Boost Your Holiday Sales Online

For digital marketers, the holiday e-commerce season is never far from mind. But now that the calendar has turned from summer to fall, it’s time to shift fully into planning mode. After all, the biggest shopping season of the year only lasts six weeks, so we had better make the most of it.Planning your online holiday sales strategy
As you begin mapping out your holiday strategy, keep these three things in mind:
1. Be mindful of past data
If you’ve run holiday campaigns in the past, you already have a wealth of information at your fingertips. Before starting any planning, consult your e-commerce data from the last two years with an eye for the big takeaways. Determine what worked and what did not. Are there trends you can take advantage of? Is there something you wish you’d done differently? Look for sales spikes you might be able to anticipate and leverage again this year.

Then, examine the same data from late summer and early fall of this year. Has anything changed? Are there new competitors that didn’t previously exist? You may be surprised what insights your sales history holds, so don’t overlook it.
2. Consider shifting some budget to early November
Many marketers reserve the majority of their holiday advertising budget for the few weeks between Black Friday and Christmas. However, digital marketers are seeing more purchasing happening early in November and, as a result, ad dollars are starting to follow. This tracks with buying behavior as consumers expect early promotions and deals.

I’m a big advocate for getting customers while you can, so consider targeting those early shoppers using a portion of your holiday budget. There’s no reason to intentionally miss out on early November revenue because you’re holding out for something that might be better in December.

As an added bonus, you may be able to meet your holiday return-on-ad-spend goals earlier in the month at a lower cost-per-click (CPC) than if you waited until later in November. CPC costs always spike on Black Friday from the increased competition.
3. Take a dashboard snapshot
One of the biggest challenges of the holiday e-commerce season is returning back to normal once the promotions end. If you’ve switched to a more aggressive bidding strategy to compete for all those new eyeballs and don’t back off quickly enough, you risk blowing your monthly budget out of the water. At the same time, rediscovering the pre-holiday balance you spent months perfecting can take time.

We’ve developed a simple solution to this problem depending on the size of your campaigns. For smaller accounts, I recommend taking screenshots of all your current keyword and product group bids. For larger accounts, you’ll want to export a backup of all of your campaigns using Google Ads Editor, for example. Regardless of which method you use, when the holidays are over, you’ll have a handy guide ready to help recalibrate your campaigns back to normal.
Looking ahead to next year’s holiday selling season
Digital marketers are in the business of building on success and learning from their failures. As this year’s e-commerce campaign plays out, it forms the basis for what happens next year. With that in mind, here are three tips you can use during this year’s campaign that will set you up to achieve even better results in the coming year.
1. Document your work
This easy, but often overlooked, step can make a huge difference next year. While you’re planning, executing, and reacting to events in November and December, make a point of documenting them in real time. That way when the new year rolls around, you’ll have a play-by-play guide that will refresh your memory, reminding you of important insights you could easily forget. If done correctly, this can serve as the guiding document for next year’s campaign.
2. Increase your insight
Anything you can do to increase the granularity of your insight this year will benefit you next year. I recommend setting up pay-per-click campaigns on the product line, category, or brand level with ad groups made up of single item IDs. While this approach may not change your results this year, the insight gained for next year will be invaluable.

By digging deeper into the product level, you’ll be able to identify what’s being clicked on versus what’s being purchased and adjust accordingly. If you also audit your search query reports, you’ll begin to see which products are showing up based on search terms. All this data will serve as direct feedback from the customer in the form of what they’re looking for, how they’re looking for it, and if they’re willing to make a purchase.

Armed with this new information, you can build better campaigns that deliver exactly what customers are searching for based on the search terms they’re actually using. You can also take this information into other parts of your business. For example, it might be necessary to restructure your website so customers can more easily find what they’re searching for. Collecting more granular data today is the key to unlocking better results tomorrow.
3. Create a custom audience
As the holiday sales come rolling in, you can target these buyers again the following year by creating a custom remarketing audience. This approach is especially useful if you’re offering some kind of holiday-specific item. So save the audience, apply your dates, and use it next year to hit a really engaged audience.
RELATED: Do Customers Secretly Hate Your E-Commerce Website?

About the Author

Post by: Brandon Bauer

Brandon Bauer is director of client growth at Logical Position. As a veteran of the search engine marketing industry, Brandon has made substantial contributions to Logical Position’s enterprise team. In particular, he drew on his personal passion for video to help pioneer Logical Position’s YouTube advertising service. He’s also grown some of Logical Position’s largest accounts while helping other team members implement strategies for their clients.

Company: Logical Position

Website: www.logicalposition.com

Connect with me on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn.

Can Offering ‘Subscribe and Save’ Deals Increase Your Small Business Revenue?

Many businesses have started offering a “subscribe and save” feature, which allows customers to receive a product at regular intervals, rather than making a simple one-time purchase. Amazon was one of the earliest adopters of this feature in its modern format, but it has since spread among major online retailers and small companies alike.The idea is fairly simple: Give customers both a one-time purchase option, and the option to “subscribe” to a specific product, receiving it weekly, monthly, or even semi-annually, in a specified quantity. Usually the subscription feature comes with a discount per product, so consumers are incentivized to subscribe.Could offering this feature increase your total revenue?The perks of subscribe and save for small businessesLet’s take a look at some of the advantages of this approach:Multiple purchases. A customer will be presented with two options: make a one-time purchase, or softly commit to indefinite, recurring purchases in the future. If even a fraction of your customers commit to future purchases, the mere option of subscribing and saving should increase your total revenue. For any product where a subscription makes sense, having the subscribe and save option is strictly better than only offering the one-time purchase.Consistent revenue projection. Encouraging customers to subscribe and save may also help you make more accurate revenue projections. If you’re able to retain a certain base of frequent-buying customers, you should be able to reliably predict at least a chunk of your monthly revenue, helping you stabilize your income. Depending on the size of your business, this could help you secure more funding or make smarter investments.Brand loyalty. Subscribing and saving is also a cheap way to secure more brand loyalty from your customers. If you can convince someone to buy something once, they may commit to buying from you indefinitely, because it’s just as easy as buying a single product. Ordinarily, every time a customer needs a product (like toilet paper or laundry detergent), they’re faced with a decision on which brand to buy from; if they’re subscribed to your service, the decision is already made.Don’t underestimate the power of convenience. Most customers don’t like the hassle of going to the store every time they need a specific product, or having to remember exactly when and how much to buy of a given product. Subscribing and saving takes away the guesswork (i.e., customers don’t have to set up manual reminders on when to buy the product), and spares them effort (i.e., they don’t need to make a conscious decision to make the purchase). Giving them a more convenient way to buy the products they want or need will add to your value proposition, and encourage more customers to choose you over a direct competitor.Are there downsides to subscribe and save?Of course, there are some secondary, somewhat negative considerations to keep in mind as well:Profit margins. Not all customers will be willing to subscribe if it means buying the product at the same price as usual, but conversion will make sense if you give a discount. Unfortunately, giving your customers a significant discount means eating into your profit margins at least slightly. If your business is dependent on making a minimum profit margin, the subscribe and save feature might have to serve as a loss leader to generate more business.Ongoing management. Managing customer subscriptions inherently requires more internal processes; you’ll need to develop a way to receive and handle subscription requests on your website, and you’ll need additional staff to ensure that subscription orders go out on time (and to handle cancellations). Overall, however, the costs of these additional pieces of infrastructure pale in comparison to the additional revenue you’ll generate in the process.Product-specific considerations. You’re also probably already aware that not all products are equally likely to attract subscriptions. Items that need to be replaced periodically (like air filters or batteries) are common choices, as are perishable or frequently used and disposed items (like groceries or paper towels). But if you’re selling big-ticket items like computers or game controllers, odds are subscribe and save won’t be a feasible option. Consider your products and consumer demand carefully.Overall, the weak points of a subscribe and save feature are heavily outweighed by the advantages—as long as you have products that require frequent purchasing. Invest the time and effort to keep your product subscriptions up and running, and make sure your target demographics are familiar with how it works.RELATED: 7 Simple Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment by Half