5 Campaign Ideas to Maximise eCommerce Sales this Christmas

Don’t be the eCommerce business that misses the boat!  It’s vital that you start launching your Christmas campaigns now for any chance to maximise sales before your CPC starts rising later this year.

Driving repeat purchases from past clients is much cheaper and easier than converting new site visiors into paying customers. Review your end-of-year email marketing plans to offer discounts, personalised product recommendations, bundle offers, and gift suggestions.

A good idea is to review historical sales data - this can guide you on the most popular products that you can promote. Consider offering discounts for products that are less popular so you can clear them off your shelves for a relative profit. 

It’s also smart to review sales from peak transaction periods over the past year. What drove the most revenue last holiday season? What were consumers’ spending habits during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales on your site? 

Use this data to create wishlists and gift suggestions for your specific segments within your database and potentially drive more revenue.

Tip: The month of December sees the highest percentage of cart abandonment. This is a great time to refresh your cart abandonment series and find ways to improve conversion. Consider adding additional branches to your nurture series to send different emails based on cart value or potential product bundles or time-sensitive discount codes.

Couple the abandoned cart emails with an integrated display retargeting campaign so your brand and products are always top-of-mind of prospects.

Christmas decorations have flooded Target and Kmart, and your local Woolies and Coles have already stared stocking pudding. It’s definitely not too early to update your website to reflect the season of gifting. 

Seasonal promotions should be front and centre for all your website visitors. Whether it’s a new homepage header, a pop-up banner or a new category for gifting on your navigation, take every opportunity to adapt your site.  Your website doesn’t need to suddenly morph into an artwork of red and green. There are simple ways you can adapt your site to the holiday season without compromising on your branding. 

See this example from Madewell:

Tip: Take measures to optimise your website speed. A site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds.

SMS marketing typically gets more cut through than email or other paid channels. It’s a sure-fire way to reach your customer’s pockets and remain top of mind during the holiday period. 

Platforms like Klaviyo and Active Campaign have inbuilt SMS features, while there are many integrations available for the like of MailChimp and HubSpot. 

You don’t have to over-complicate or worse, overuse this channel. With 98% open rates, SMS marketing can be utilised to announce giveaways, discounts, and last-minute shopping reminders, especially in the week leading up to Christmas. Adding a discount code and link to your website in the SMS is an enticing incentive for an efficient and smooth purchase process. 

Tip: Conduct rigourous user-testing across browsers and devices to ensure your website is optimised for mobile purchases.

Educate your website visitors to make it easy for them to make Christmas purchasing decisions. 

Consider building landing pages on topics relevant to your products like ‘Gifts for Him’, ‘Gifts for Mum’ and even ‘Gifts Under $50’. 

Double down on this effort by writing u pgift idea content via blogs, promoting this via social posts and genetating backlinks to drive organic webite traffic. 

Tip: Consider partnering with Influencers to promote this content and leverage their reach to boost traffic and sales.

Scarcity is one of the strongest levers of persuasion. While not an original idea, a ‘12 Days of Christmas’ or ‘12 Days of Giveaways’ campaign allows your eCommerce business to create anticipation and excitement over your products in the lead up to Christmas. 

It also stimulates a sense of urgency, or fear of missing out for consumers who know they only have 24 hours to make a purchase in order to receive a discount or gift bundle. 

This can be leveraged through email marketing and social media posts, to drive extra traffic to your website.

Tip: Add a Christmas countdown icon to your pages, in order to evoke this sense of purchase urgency with consumers. 

Need more ideas? We’ve complied 19 killer detailed tips to scale your eCommerce business in this free guide.