On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…more online marketplace tips.
In our 12 marketplace tips of Christmas Part 1, Rich Insight delivered six festive sales-boosting stocking fillers, including advice on gifting, free returns, cart abandonment and southern hemisphere marketplaces. Here’s numbers 7-12.
7. Send personalised emails
At this time of year, the wave of email promotions floods inboxes with percentage signs, exclamations marks and capital letters. Designed to make emails stand out, they tend to have the opposite effect.
To grab attention amid the deluge, it pays to personalise. For instance, send personalised emails to customers based on their purchase history over the year (or the previous Christmas) - providing discounts on items they like. After customers make a purchase, send thank you emails with a loyalty bonus (i.e. a £10 voucher on their next purchase). If they’ve abandoned their cart, send reminder emails with incentives (i.e. free next day delivery). It can be tempting to send out blanket-style emails to your whole customer list, but segmenting by customer type and personalising the messages (and discounts) will boost your open and click-through rate.
8. Embrace targeted social media campaigns
In the UK, there are 30 million Instagram users, 44 million Facebook accounts and almost 10 million active monthly TikTok users. Social media undoubtedly helps raise awareness of your products to a wider audience, but running generic ads on social media channels can also backfire - either by annoying consumers or failing to grab their attention.
With social media use increasing during the holiday season, the cost of social media ads also rises, so savvy brands need to use social media in a more targeted way. For example, TikTok launched a marketplace-in-all-but-name this year - enabling you to sell products directly on the platform. Crucially, TikTok Shop lets you tag products in TikTok videos (no need to rely on organic searching) and also connects you with relevant content creators for your products, so your promotions (and ad spend) are aimed directly at your target audience.
9. Create urgency
Christmas presents are the ultimate ‘urgent’ purchase: no matter if you're an advanced planner that buys all your presents in the Black Friday sales, there’s always something or someone you’ve forgotten in the run-up to the 25th (or 24th for much of continental Europe).
For brands, there are multiple staging points to add urgency to the sales journey. For example, provide exclusive offers (i.e. gifts like a free candle or money-off vouchers) for your first 100 customers in December to get early-bird sales or add a festive countdown clock (i.e. a melting Christmas candle or flipping advent calendar) to the last date for next-day delivery. No-one wants to rush Christmas shopping last-minute, so incentivise customers to get it sorted early.
10. Offer loyalty-based incentives and discounts
Everyone loves a discount, especially during Christmas when you’re buying lots of presents for extended friends and family. Broad stoke discounts can work when paired with a sense of urgency, but making loyal customers feel special with personalised discounts is a whole new game entirely.
For instance, if a customer has bought from you this year, offer them a discount on similar items. If a customer has recently browsed an item or placed it in their cart, offer them an incentive to go back and complete the purchase. If a customer has made a purchase, offer staggered discounts for each repeat purchase. From sending personalised gifts to offering vouchers for upcoming January sales, there are numerous ways to give customers the extra nudge at Christmas.
11. Go green and reduce Christmas waste
Be it health and beauty products made from natural or ‘upcycled’ ingredients or clothes made from locally-sourced fabrics, sustainability is a 2023 megatrend that should feature prominently in your Christmas product descriptions.
In particular, offering sustainable packaging at Christmas can help you stand out from the crowd. Christmas is by far the most wasteful gifting event in the UK with 300,000 tonnes of packaging waste, 125,000 tons of plastic waste and 227,000 miles of wrapping paper. Given 83% of consumers consider sustainability when making a buying decision, offering recycled or natural packaging made from mushrooms or beeswax (coupled with greener deliveries) will benefit the sales and the planet. However, while 58% of shoppers are willing to wait longer for a more sustainable delivery, this percentage will likely fall as the 25th approaches.
12. Make a donation
Christmas is the time of giving - and not just to family and friends. Supporting a dedicated charity or social programme that aligns with your brand or products is a great way to show how you’re different and make a positive difference at the same time.
For example, you could offer automatic donations per sale to a local charity where your products are manufactured or offset the carbon footprint of each delivery by sharing parts of the sale with a climate change initiative. The key is making the donation directly (not asking customers for a donation) and choosing an initiative close to your brand’s heart. It’s Christmas after all.
Stay tuned with Rich Insight
How many of the 12 marketplace tips of Christmas can you remember (check out Part 1, if you missed it)? At Rich Insight, we provide marketplace advice throughout the year (not just at Christmas), so follow our blogs for more insights.
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