Nail Online Shopping Sales As An Ecommerce Owner

Prepping for an online sale takes time. Let’s get prepared!

There’s no denying it – prepping for an online shopping sale takes time and effort. It’s crucial to start planning well ahead of the sale – from six weeks to more than 6 months in advance.

Consider this – people start searching “Christmas gift ideas” in August, four months ahead of Christmas Day.

If that doesn’t scream “PREPARE YOUR CAMPAIGN EARLY”, we don’t know what does.

Nailing online shopping sales comes down to well-thought-out preparation. Set some time aside and plan your advertising material, potential online marketing like AdWords, social media strategies, and how you’re going to manage shipping following an onslaught of orders.

Create a marketing and shipping plan ahead of time to avoid roadblocks like missed orders, poor customer service and a low conversion rate.

Preparation comes down to you – but successful shipping doesn’t have to.

We’ve collected three tips for nailing online shopping sales, plus we’ve highlighted some of the most valuable sales to prep for throughout the year.

Update your advertising and experiment with Adwords

The first step in preparation for an online sale is to update your advertising.

Whether it’s storefront posters, vibrant online banners, or an aggressive email marketing campaign, your promotional material needs to reflect the nature of the sale and convince shoppers to take advantage of the discount.

On Black Friday, for example, you might use an eye-catching black and white design with bold fonts, simplistic images, and make the discount the key feature.

Make sure to take advantage of the colour wheel when designing your promotional material. According to ecommerce experts, Kissmetrics, colour increases brand recognition by 80% and 85% of customers purchase based on colour alone.

See the graph below for more ideas on how you can use colour to set the tone of your advertisements. Alternatively, check out this colour theory lesson from Canva!

Image: Kissmetrics

You can also use Google AdWords to give your promotion some extra oomph online.

AdWords is a hugely popular pay-per-click advertising network that allows you to place advertisements on relevant Google search results pages, YouTube videos, and partner websites.

You can custom design text-based ads, graphic display ads, YouTube video ads or in-app mobile ads – there are plenty of ways to reach your target audience. For eCommerce, Google Shopping is of particular importance as customers turn more and more to image-based results.

You can also choose to reach potential customers within a few kilometers of your business if you only deliver locally, or broadcast ads to entire regions and countries.

The best part? Sign-up is free and AdWords only charges you when someone clicks your ad, views your video on YouTube, or calls your business.

You aren’t charged for running ads or signing up.

You control the amount of money you spend, what ads go up, and when the promotion ends.

Use your secret marketing weapon… social media!

Social media is a powerful weapon when it comes to marketing. Right now, there are 15,000,000 Aussies on Facebook, 9,000,000 on Instagram, and 3,000,000 on Twitter.
And that’s just Australia.

Close to half the world’s population (3.03 billion people) are on some sort of social media platform.

With traditional methods of marketing like direct mail and television advertising becoming less effective, more and more businesses are turning to social media to connect with their customers on a more personal level.

However, the average social media user’s attention span is dropping by the minute – attention spans have decreased to 8 seconds for most social media users – so if you’re going to reach customers on Facebook and/or Instagram, you’re going to have to make your content engaging.

Offer a discount code

60% of consumers abandon their online cart because additional costs like postage are too high. You have the power to reduce your abandonment rate through the use of coupon codes and exclusive discounts.

According to ecommerce platform Shopify, business owners with an active discount code are eight times more likely to make a sale.

Entice your social media followers with a sweet little discount. It will make them feel like they’re being rewarded for their loyalty… or like they’re wasting money if they don’t use the discount code!

Promote your fast (and possibly free) shipping

A recent survey found that 69% of consumers consider one-day delivery as an incentive to shop more online.

For the purpose of the sale, consider offering reduced shipping rates or free shipping. Alternatively, offer new customers a free shipping code to use in the checkout. This has been proven to reduce abandoned cart rates.

Make sure you’re sharing your amazing shipping practices all over social media, too. Your customers will be more inclined to shop the sale if they know their parcels will arrive tomorrow!

Advertise on Facebook and Instagram

You can reach more potential customers by advertising to customers who are like those who already engage with your brand.

Facebook advertising also includes Instagram advertising these days, so you can reach an even wider audience with different types of ad creative.  Growing your Facebook audience in a highly targeted way is more likely to improve sales both in the short and longer-term.

To get the best results, create a variety of highly engaging (but short) ad creative including images, videos, and carousels of your products. Then once you’ve set your audience targeting, sit back and allow Facebook’s AI to do the work in determining which creative works best for which audience.

Streamline your shipping for fewer headaches later

American philanthropist, Warren Buffett, once said “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

If you think about that, you’ll do things differently. Don’t let disorganised shipping ruin your reputation with customers, old and new.

Successful shipping is critical to the success of your online sale. Customers expect faster parcel delivery today, and ensuring that their orders are received on time means an increase in your customer satisfaction and repeat business.

Transdirect can help ease the stress associated with shipping after a sale – and even help you prepare beforehand with our easy ecommerce shipping integration.

We offer fast, affordable parcel delivery throughout Australia. Our goal is to provide a range of services to suit all individuals and businesses, ensuring reliability, timeliness and affordability.

We have more than 11 associate couriers under our wing, so we’re guaranteed to have a courier who can help speed up your deliveries.

Whether you’re looking for fast metro delivery, postage to regional areas, heavy package delivery or want to give your customers the cheapest, fastest delivery available, we’ve got a courier for you.
Transdirect Members can save up to 30% on Shipping and access a whole range of features that makes shipping even simpler.

So what are you waiting for? Don’t snooze on shipping – open a Free Member’s Account today and start saving!

*BONUS* Key online shopping dates

There are so many different incentives and themes for online shopping sales, there’s bound to be a whole range of opportunities here to treat your customers.

Here’s a brief rundown of key shopping dates in the ecommerce calendar that highlights the key online shopping dates for Australia.