Did your e-commerce business underperform this past Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend? While this holiday spectacle is a great time for businesses to attract new customers, boost their sales, and increase overall traffic and conversions, it’s also one of the most competitive times of the year for online shopping. Nevertheless, it’s important to become familiar with the hype, as consumers expect deals and likely won’t be motivated to shop if you aren’t keeping up with the competition. Thankfully for you, Boxing Day is fastly approaching and there are a variety of strategic ways that you can gear up for this annual shopping event! 

Plan your deals well

Since Boxing Day is one of the largest online shopping days of the year, the most important thing you can do is carefully craft and orchestrate the deals that you’re going to offer, with enough time to let your audience know that a promotion is headed their way. 

Here are some steps that we recommend that will help you to plan your Boxing Day offer(s): 

• Make a list of the products that you want to put on sale.
• Estimate your revenue goals for the promotion and how much traffic you will need to meet them. 
• Determine how much you want to spend on your advertisements, professional copywriting tasks, email marketing management, and more.  
• Analyze your profit margins. Be sure to add the product price against each of your items to make these calculations easier. 

Doing all of the above will help you to decide how much wiggle room you have so that’s easy to determine how much of a discount you can offer. Remember to set realistic goals that can be fulfilled without disappointment and be mindful of overspending on inventory. 

Use strong social proof

The term social proof is a psychological and social phenomenon wherein consumers copy the actions of those around them in an attempt to engage in the stereotypical behaviours of a given situation. For example, if shoppers click through to your website and can see that others like themselves have already purchased a particular item, they are more likely to also make that purchase. 

Since there are different types of social proof that you can use to attract leads and promote conversions, it’s best to do a bit of research to see which methods would be most effective in your industry. One of the most popular approaches that shoppers trust is user-generated content. This could include genuine reviews or images of satisfied customers using your products or services. You can also create a sense of urgency to shop by counting down the days to buy through a social media post or some professional copywriting on your blog. The above efforts have the power to trigger a fear of missing out (FOMO), encouraging users to take action quickly to grab hold of the opportunity you have presented them with, which in turn correlates to the entire concept of social proof as a psychological phenomenon! 

Create striking images 

You don’t need to have a lot of skill or knowledge to create images that will help to advertise your promotions. In fact, there are a variety of free tools that you can use to create striking graphics that can be used in your emails or shared within your social media channels. 

Pexels is a great source for free stock imagery. Simply type out what you’re looking for in the search tab and peruse through a vibrant selection of professional styled graphics. For those who are keen on learning to design custom images but have never been able to master photoshop, we recommend testing out Canva and selecting from their variety of aesthetically pleasing templates. 

Optimize your checkout process 

Whether you have some web development experience or you work alongside a professional tech team, your checkout process must be optimized before Boxing Day shopping commences. After all, there’s no point offering your customers amazing offers if the people taking advantage of the discount can’t complete their purchases due to a faulty checkout process. 

Do you need help with plugins, graphic design, and other website development features? We highly recommend Numinix Web Development Inc. for any web development service, big or small! 

Did any of the above information motivate you to plan something big this Boxing Day? Drop a comment below to share your experiences.