Festive Season 2021 – Tips to Boost Online Sales

This year, the festive season is going to bring a tide of enhanced sales for eCommerce players as online shopping in 2021 is growing constantly at a faster pace. Well, eCommerce players are managing this wave and boosting their investment in VR, AR, and AI to engage enhanced customers with this festive season-2021.

How COVID Is Affecting eCommerce & Online Sales

Because of Covid, when some parts of the globe stayed open, in some areas the government imposed restrictions that made it difficult for the retailers to catch up with the operations. Simultaneously, while the regions remained under lock-down, routine needs were met as the only important businesses we allowed to stay open. The COVID effect proved to be destructive to the companies that are following traditional ways to sell.

On the contrary, for digital enterprises, the shutdowns have laid opposite effects. With more people at home, the consumers have knocked on the doors of eCommerce platforms and marketplaces to buy products and services.

The effect is dual-sided: businesses that are holding online presence are experiencing a great hike in sales, which is permitting them to stay capturing their customers for long. At the same time, businesses with no marketplace links or storefronts are witnessing themselves lagging.

The COVID has shaken the global economy within the starting six months of this year and is expected to continue until the end of 2021. To defeat it, the retailers embracing omnichannel and eCommerce players should tie their shoelaces beforehand. Specifically, this can be attained by the festive season, which has stepped in India and will stay till the end of this year.

During the pandemic, the compulsion of lockdowns in March resulted in growing eCommerce spending unexpectedly with $52 billion and more. Moreover, the Indian online market is all set to achieve 300-350 million shoppers over the coming five years, guiding the online Gross Merchandise Value to reach $100 to $120 billion by 2025.

Well, the pandemic has altered the entire makeover of businesses, but the recent eCommerce trends are anticipated to stay. The upcoming months will notice a deeper focus on experience-driven eCommerce. The main reason behind this would be the cut-throat competition that would result in increased attention of consumers on online shopping.

What Do Online Shopping Apps Want to Say?

According to Panasonic India head, Shirish Agarwal, during the strict rule of social distancing and more health safety norms in public places, the consumers will prefer digital platforms only. He said,

Brands are focusing more on digital to reach out to their consumers. A lot of brands will be experimenting with digital platforms which will not just be limited to promotion but will also be the preferred points of purchase.

Moreover, he added,

We will see the contribution of high- end appliances such as 55 inches and above television models, 550-liter refrigerator, fully-automatic washing machine, and grooming products going up this festive season.

Senior Vice President and Head of Flipkart Wholesale & Walmart India, Adarsh Menon said,

The upcoming festive season is a great opportunity for retailers and MSMEs to boost sales and profitability. We see this as an opportunity for the whole retail ecosystem to come together, lift consumer sentiment, and drive business growth for local MSMEs across the country.

As per Prashant Verma, Grofers’ marketing head,

In the second half of 2020, we can expect digital adoption to accelerate for grocery shopping amongst other categories as they will continue to grow at a fast pace

Furthermore, the CEO of Myntra, Amar Nagaram told,

This festive season is going to be the biggest fashion event, not just for Myntra, but what this country has seen,

An Indian spokesperson of Amazon said,

The new development will convert into six lakh retailers and MSMEs on its marketplace and will assist in reviving the economic activity broadly.

According to Paytm Mall,

It witnessed a 50% increment in sales for the grooming products, such as trimmers, shavers, hair straighteners, epilators, and other styling products from tier II and tier III cities.

Walmart-owned Flipkart told,

It enhanced the number of sellers in the category of furniture on the marketplace as 10,000 sellers all over the country increased over 3.5 lakh products since the last year to fulfill the emerging demands of the customers.

Well, be it Myntra marketplace or Amazon or Flipkart, each marketplace is narrating the tale of what they have witnessed in the past 6 months and what they are expecting in this festive period. The stories of each may be different, but all are pointing to the same outcome- “Increment of eCommerce this festive season”.

Also Read: eCommerce Website Development Guide 

Tips To Boost Online Sales

So, after placing the entire relevant scenario on your table, we would like to move ahead. Now, as you know it is essential for new e-tailers and offline retailers to start planning right away. Luckily, still, eCommerce players have room to boost their sales by enhancing their online presence along with website experiences.

Well, you don’t need to fret, as today, we are here with some tips that will positively back you in growing your eCommerce business this festive season.

Give Festive Makeover to Landing Page

Sketch a feel-good factor to your store. Bestow the festive videos by adorning your landing page well. You need to exhibit out-of-the-box. Magnetize your customers by making your interiors well-decorated. This will not cost you much as compared to the profit you are going to get by making sales. You should also make the website navigation and the process of checkout easy for your users. You can do the following:

• Use themes and graphics that reveal the ongoing or festival season.
• You can also employ festival images on the homepage of your site and other pages.
• Change the fonts to offer your site a festive look.

Work on Digital Interaction

In this post-COVID time, brands need to craft important changes to root true links with their loyal customers. The only way could be employing user-generated videos or images on their digital properties. This may prove to be the best tool to replicate in-store social shopping visits. Here, the need for AI arrives, which plays a vital role in increasing the digital experience. It can also automate image-detection and video-cropping and streaming the adjustments while incorporating the upload and the delivery performance. Moreover, brands will be required to personalize their assortments according to their digital needs. Let’s take an example – a few top FMCGs have re-crafted the packaging to lower down the usage of water and plastic. Also, it has offered a lighter feel to the packaging making it cost-effective for the shipping. Here also, we may recall AI that can assist deep understanding of the customer preferences that can help the brands in optimizing product assortment and portfolios along with personalizing the recommendations.

Allow Engaging Offer-Stickers/Banner

Being an eCommerce business owner, you should consider altering the look and feel of your eStore always for the festive and holiday season. This way your customer will never get bored and will find your store more engaging to visit again and again. Also, you can append appealing product stickers on your product page and the category page so that your customer becomes able to find the product-specific offers. Apart from that, you can also stick captivating banners and sticky that may highlight the offers and discounts amidst the sale.

Increase Visual Experience

Videos are the only way out that may benefit you by allowing your customer to get the experience of your product and services. Also, you can permit life-like-imagery on the Product Details Pages (PDPs). For example – showing the look of the side-rack in a drawing-room. This results in better conversions, higher engagements, and a lower rate of returns. eCommerce brands will need to modify PDPs with a visual experience all through AR or VR.

Give Chance to Gift Card Approach

Besides free shipping, the Gift Card also plays a significant role that is meant as the most successful marketing approach for eCommerce sales. Gift cards are perfect for grabbing potential customers. Such cards will make your customers happy returning customers. Moreover, you can use 3rd-party Gift Card Extension that will assist you in creating unlimited gift cards. Also, your customers can gift discount cards to their family and friends.

Expose Top Selling Product

The most favorites of your customers, the top-selling products should be exposed much. Such products are frequently bought by customers throughout the year. Presenting such products will make the customers check the product at once and may buy them. The products you display outside of your store depict the judgment people make for your shop. Be sure that you exhibit the fast-moving, the best products to magnetize a lot of customers. Displaying the bad products may guide them to the exit path of your store, regardless of the best quality products you sell. As your best sellers have proved their spirit. Exposing them will magnetize more customers and this will end up in enhanced sales and eStore conversions.
You may do the following:

• You can show-off your top-selling products
• Also, you can generate content around such products.
• Make their access easy for all visitors.

Infuse AI-enabled Voice Assistance

The technology also employs the past behaviors of customers. It leverages data to learn the preferences of customers by analyzing the keywords and enhancing the outcomes on each search. This data can also appear like a base for carrying marketing campaigns all across various channels. In any business, conversations hold an integral space. This leads to an emergence of the need for voice assistants, which is accepted to be the best invention for an eCommerce store. The discovery of voice-based products can ease and augment your customer experience. Resultantly, it ends with faster conversions. AI-powered voice assistants hold the caliber to increase your shopping experience by responding with entirely right search results.

Also Read: How AI Chatbots Are Beneficial for eCommerce Sales

Engaging Offers for New Buyers

Well, targeting the existing customers is fine, but it doesn’t mean we may neglect the first-time buyers. In fact, you can retain them for a long time, and they will prove to be beneficial for you ahead. Offering them some exciting rewards would be better than anything.
You can go with the below:

• Craft offers that are specifically for first-time buyers.
• Offer free shipping, discounts, cashback, and more on their first purchases.
• Provide them with a referral bonus.
• Bestow them early access to the upcoming sale you are throwing soon.

Offer Free Shipping & Smooth Returns

One of the reasons for cart abandonment by customers is the shipping cost. Maybe they find it quite high. As per the surveys, the percentage of sales boost by 49% after the customers are offered free shipping services. As your online shoppers always look for free shipping to save their money, therefore, various store owners are choosing free shipping services. It’s the most robust marketing approach to boost sales conversions amidst holiday seasons. In case you are not in the favor of this strategy then you can create customized shipping rules that can make the customers enjoy free shipping. Along with shipping, the return process should be smooth. Somehow, if your customer is not satisfied with any of your products and chooses to return it, you should ease the process for them. Obviously, during the festive season, the returns will rise rapidly. So, you should make it better if it needs to be.
You can do the following:

• Embrace shipping costs in the cost of the product.
• Promote the free shipping event.
• Fix a specific cost limit for free shipping.

Personalized Category Page Experience

Did you know, most of the product searches are performed on the category pages? Still, many shoppers don’t prefer scrolling beyond the ending of the first page. Here, AI can make you sure that the products that are driving the target of the brand are exhibited exactly where they are anticipated to attain enhanced shoppers’ engagement.AI holds the caliber to fuse the strength of personalization with product placement to affect sales. Altering product arrangements, order, and selection for every shopper can lead to enhanced engagement, discovery, and revenue.

Make Your Customer Feel Valued & specialist

is imperative to make your customer feel special and unique as they stay loyal to your brand. This gesture of your customers also assists you in attracting new customers as they share their experience of shopping at your store with them. Through this mouth-to-mouth approach, your eCommerce store will win an enhanced rate of customer growth. So, be sure you listen to your customers and pay attention to their queries.

Increase Supply Change

Well, technology will determine the rate in the ‘new normal’. AI can assist the brands in handling the sudden rise in demand by predicting inventory planning amidst the festive season. The direct-to-consumer platform should be prepared to merchandize new products, dynamically run the sales, reprice, and alter the tone and messaging to meet the customer sensitivities. Brands should be sure that their eCommerce is flexible enough to deliver the best supply chain and business agility.

Make e-Stores Mobile-Friendly

As technology is improving day by day, the customers are getting smarter. With time, mobile users are increasing constantly. Amidst, the festive season, many times the customers make purchases when they are out with their family. That means your website should be user-friendly if you don’t want to lose your customers. It’s never late. Still, if you haven’t touched this factor, you have time to make your Magento store mobile-friendly by hiring a leading Magento Development company. It will assist you in making your store responsive that performs across all the devices and browsers for an exceptional cross-platform shopping experience.

Learn more: How To Develop eCommerce Mobile App 

Drive More Customers through Social Media

As time is the main witness, people research the products and their prices online and then choose the one with the best price. So, social media platforms would be a great plan to expose the sale details. This way you will reach enhanced audiences and you will experience a rise in your sale this festive season. Let’s check out some interesting facts about social media by which you will get convinced to choose social media to announce your upcoming sale.

• YouTube attains 1.9 billion users per month.
• Facebook magnetizes 2.23 billion users monthly.
• Whatsapp attracts 1.5 billion users every month.

Personalize Marketing Campaign

An effective marketing approach to increase customer attention and thereby revenue is personalizing marketing campaigns. Using this approach during the festive season may help you to make the best of your eCommerce store. Let’s take an example – a promotional email can perform best to re-engage customers and get them to re-purchase. You should use a unique and exceptional marketing campaign to target your current customers. Being an approach, email personalization offers a much-targeted experience to the customer that can be useful certainly to magnetize more revenue.

Use CTA & Craft Promotional Ads

As the festive season is around the corner, the competition between eStores is increasing to magnetize and make enhanced sales and profits. Although, there exist various ways to engage customers in your eCommerce store and make them buy products from you. Moreover, you can run promotional ads and employ a call to action banners (CTAs) to instill zeal in your customer to shop. As promotions are the perfect way to drive increased sales success and yes, it works, always. To boost the sales rate, you can craft promotions when providing big discounts and free shipping on your eStore. If you are managing your marketplace, you can fix the time for your shoppers to attain discounts and slots you provide, this goes according to you. Offering customers various chances to achieve discounts can boost sales and also increase the loyalty of buyers.

Email Marketing to attract traffic

Email Marketing to attract traffic for marketing purposes, email marketing is the channel that has been in use since the past. When increasing sales or traffic is the main target, it is picked as the first preference of the eCommerce industry. As the festive season is approaching, eCommerce businesses may reap the full advantage of email marketing to engage their customers and attract them to their store. Although, when you are in amidst of planning an email marketing campaign for the festive season, you should be sure that the email format holds the content that is perfect and interactive, also promotes and provides the product suggestions.

Optimize Store for Enhanced Performance

While running a sale in your eCommerce store, you will feel a huge load of traffic approaching your eStore. This leads to slow-down the pace of your store. So, it is important to optimize your store for anticipated performance so that customers can witness a hassle-free shopping experience. Although, it is not that easy to tweak eStore for improved performance as the number of products and businesses varies. So, you are advised to connect with the top Magento Development Company for enhanced performance.

Quick Customer Support

Well, being a customer, you also get flooded with various questions in your mind before you make a purchase, even after buying. If you use the traditional way of communicating with your customers, then it will suck your time. This will make your customers leave your store and you will experience a loss. To avoid such an issue and to enhance conversion rate, you can provide live chat support to your customers on eCommerce stores. This will lower down the time in attaining the resolution or the answers and will resultantly escalate the chance to purchase. Also, you can incorporate some robust features of a model live chat extension to learn more about the importance of live chat support. As the festive season can be a crucial clock for most eCommerce businesses, so be sure that you are responding well to your customers swiftly.

Recover Abandoned Carts sending Festive Offers

As per the stats, about 99% of the audience don’t prefer buying when they visit a store for the first time. Resultantly, they leave the store abandoning the cart. It may be quite disturbing, but it’s true. But, you still have the opportunities to bring them back. You can send them festive sale offers of the items they picked. So, you should be all set to re-target the visitors always whenever possible. This venture mostly brings you the anticipated result as the festive time is the best time to strike.

Smooth Navigation to Festive Targeted Products

It happens many times when the customers fail to find the products they are looking for. This is because of the low visibility of your products in the store. Smooth and simple product navigation is the only way to generate increased conversions. It leads the visitors to the most related product they are searching for and that also within seconds. When you are working on enhancing the appeal of the landing page and banners for attracting the sales in the festive season, be sure you are attentive towards developing easy product navigation.

Thank You Gifts

Offering loyal customers a “Thank You” gift is the chief technique that never gives up when it’s all about enhancing festive sales and the transformation of an eCommerce website. When you give cashback offers or additional points to your customers, they re-visit your store. It’s likely to happen that they purchase more in the hope to win better reward points, the next time. So, gift cards are the best ways to attract potential customers.

Prepare Store Before Sales Starts

People usually are all set for the approaching thing, be it an event or sale. Users choose to buy the products easier to timely deliver gifts to their family and friends. If you prepare your store with enticing festive offers, the users will recognize your store as the one which is offering the best deals on products. This leads to an enhancement in conversion rates of your eCommerce website.

Become Upgraded for Online Orders & Digital Payments

As per the research, 54% of the customers choose digital wallets to pay, despite the cash. Moreover, approximately 68% of customers would choose online modes to order if available. As anticipated until the end of 2020, 8 out of 10 transactions would be digitalized and 4 out of 5 people will pick online shopping. It is well noticed today, that various digital wallets are ruling the market. This facilitates collecting payments without meeting the customers in person. So, it is better always to be well-updated when it comes to receiving and sending payments, delivering, and receiving orders.

Incorporate Images of Customer Reviews

Nothing works better than reviews and client testimonials to win the trust of the users. That’s why almost every brand employs testimonials on their sites. As per a report, 88% of consumers check online reviews before buying online. So, taking along the images of the reviewer tie-up more credibility to the store.

Wrapping Lines

Festivals make people crazy. They buy things literally with no thoughts in their minds. You just require to encash the opportunity to give a wide way to the profit approaching and enhance your sales.

Well, it’s not just about the festive season, every time is good to rethink about the creative ways that may increase your online business. It is more important what improvements you should apply to maximize the sales conversion when the festive shopping traffic starts to grow.

Well, the aforementioned tips can help you surely and enhance festive sales at your eStore if you follow them properly.

So, best wishes, go ahead and try them. We are here for you as a leading eCommerce Development Company to assist you ahead in applying such tips and increase your eCommerce store conversion rates.