The holiday season accounts for as much as 30% of annual retail sales. Despite the economic hardship of recent years, holiday spending has continued to grow year over year, up about 8.5% from 2020, and it isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.
With the right approach, you can make this holiday season your most profitable yet by preparing for success and adapting to current trends. This guide covers the key strategies for making the most of your holiday opportunities so that this season can be a new high-water mark for your company.
Key Takeaways
- Holiday profits require proactive planning and increased inventory.
- Participate in the season of giving by donating to charitable causes and giving your customers opportunities to do the same.
- Technology changes every year—take advantage of trends by optimizing your site for mobile and implementing a themed landing page
- Hypersonix can help you optimize your profits all year round.
Plan for the Holiday Season Now
Just last year, nearly half of respondents said they started their holiday shopping before the end of October, and only about an eighth said they waited until December to start shopping.
In other words: the best time to start planning is yesterday.
Holiday planning encompasses two elements: preparing your strategy and preparing your inventory.
Prepare Your Strategy
Although motivational speakers and entrepreneurs have been repeating their own variations on the phrase for centuries, Roman philosopher Seneca was the first to record a version of the popular adage “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
The holiday season is a huge opportunity for e-commerce businesses across industries and locales, but it takes preparation to turn opportunity into fortune.
This guide lays out some of the best strategies for making this holiday season your most profitable ever. But to truly capitalize on this opportunity, you have to prepare for success before the opportunity arrives.
Prepare Your Inventory
Comicbook.com calls Disney+’s The Mandalorian a “merchandising gold mine,” but when Grogu (aka “Baby Yoda”) first captured audience’s hearts in 2019, the lack of holiday merchandise cost Lucasfilm millions of dollars of missed opportunities.
While Baby Yoda currently adorns virtually every physical and virtual shelf, this lack of inventory was a costly decision in 2019, whether intentional or unintentional.
The best strategy to make this holiday season profitable is to increase inventory now. Using tools like demand forecasting, e-commerce companies can start preparing for the holiday season today.
The Season of Giving
The holiday season is known as the season of giving, and for good reason: not only do many people exchange gifts over the holiday season, but over 30% of charitable giving takes place between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.
Offer Gifting Options
As people scramble to find gifts for Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Hanukkah, take advantage of your e-commerce site by encouraging visitors to buy gifts for others in addition to buying for themselves. There are several ways you can drive gifting:
- Personalization. People love personalized gifts. The holiday season is the perfect time to encourage personalization if your product can be monogrammed, engraved, or customized. Not only can this increase conversion, but it also increases the average value per transaction as customers expect to pay 30% more for customized products.
- Gift Wrapping. To some, gift wrapping is half the fun of giving gifts—to others, it’s a nuisance. Appeal to both of these people by offering gift wrapping options (or simply discreet packaging options) to encourage people to gift items to others.
- Certificates. “What do you give the man who has everything?” – E.L. James. Your answer may vary, but gift certificates are popular gifts for difficult-to-buy-for friends and family who may prefer to pick their own gifts.
Take Part in Charitable Donations
Consumers prefer to shop from brands that they perceive to be generous. Not only does this lead to the obvious benefit of helping charitable causes, but it can also help you make this holiday season your most profitable ever.
Take advantage of this trend by advertising your donations to charitable causes and by allowing customers to take part in the giving themselves (for example, asking customers to round up their purchase for a charitable cause or to add a donation to their purchase.)
Take Advantage of Mobile Shopping
Of the many changes brought about by recent years, perhaps none have been as explosive and influential as the migration to mobile. Increasingly, customers are using social media to shop, workers are conducting business via mobile devices, and shoppers are using their phones to buy holiday gifts.
Mobile phones generate 60% of web traffic, account for 50% of B2B inquiries, and cost 24% less per click while having a 40% higher click-through rate than desktops. The long and short of it is that mobile shopping outperforms desktop e-commerce while also growing in popularity with consumers.
Take advantage of this trend this holiday season by optimizing your e-commerce platform for mobile devices.
Holiday Season-Themed Landing Pages
It’s no secret that people love the holiday season. People enjoy holiday foods, giving and receiving gifts, seeing friends and family, and enjoying the holiday spirit.
You can participate in the holiday spirit by creating holiday-themed landing pages. Coca-Cola has a long history of capitalizing on the holiday spirit, from its iconic Christmas commercials to its Coca-Cola Caravan, and its holiday landing page reflects that strong branding.
Your holiday-themed landing page can highlight your most popular gift-giving options, your commitment to charity, your gift certificates, and any other strategies you employ to make this holiday season your most profitable ever. Your landing page is a prime opportunity to capture the attention of new viewers and funnel prospective leads into converted customers.
Profit Optimization with Hypersonix
There is no such thing as a “normal” year in e-commerce. Between pandemics, must-have gifts, economic upturns and downturns, unpredictable weather, and emergent technology trends, the only way to ensure consistent, maintainable success is to adapt to the market and roll with the punches.
That is where Hypersonix can help.
Hypersonix is an AI-driven profit optimization platform specializing in retail, e-commerce, and grocery. We use the latest and best AI tools to help forecast demand, optimize prices, identify critical risks and opportunities, and provide actionable intelligence throughout your e-commerce company this holiday season.
It isn’t too late to make this holiday season your most profitable ever—get a personalized demo today to discover how Hypersonix can help.
