The Indian festive season is here!! If there’s one thing nobody can deny, it’s that Indians are second to none when it comes to celebrating festivals like Dussehra and Diwali, which inevitably loosen the purse strings. If you’re an online store owner, one should approach this festive season strategically, as it can bring in a large chunk of your annual revenue and improve your brand. Here are 10 tips that can help you maximise this opportunity:
Many sellers stock special festival-themed products during the festive season, however, to sell them like hot cakes, these products should have high visibility on the website.Most common ways to achieve this is by having well managed pop-ups and announcement banners in prime real estate of the website. These elements effectively attract the attention of your visitors.
It’s extremely important to have dedicated pages for specific collections. A dedicated page for festival-related products allows your visitors to view various products, offers and them all conveniently, which raises the chances of them making a purchase.
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Search is the gateway to understand what the customer wants. It is impossible to overstate the importance of your visitors’ search experience on your store as if the visitors don’t find any relevant results when they search for what they want, then they might leave your store and look elsewhere.
What’s more, in order to maximise the odds of making a sale, you must pay attention to aspects such as autocorrect, spell-check, and so on. You should also allow visitors to take more active charge of their searches by providing filtering and sorting options to them.
Lastly, your store’s search engine should also be able to provide automatic search recommendations, and should also be able to show visitors related and similar products when they search for something.
Thus, to sum up, providing highly relevant and personalised search results as quickly as possible will go a long way towards shortening your visitors’ purchase journey, which in turn will mean more revenue for your business.
For an AI-powered in-store search experience that provides all the features mentioned above and many more besides, check out Zevi.
Yes, discounts are probably THE most effective way to attract customers, but you should try to apply them in a strategic manner. For instance, sell the most basic products that matter to the consumer during festivals on discounts and not run discounts on auxiliary / add on products. This helps in attracting new customers and creates a perception for the customers that they are getting all products on your platform at a bargain.
In the current world of short attention span, it's crucial to create a sense of urgency for the customer to place their order. Common ways to do this could be to have timers displaying the short-term offer period on product pages, “few items remaining” tags, Sending personalised coupons to customers via email with limited period of validity etc.
One of the simplest ways to encourage higher average order values is to offer tier/step based discounting. Eg 15% off upto the purchase price of Rs 5000 (or for buying 2 products) and 25% off beyond the purchase price of Rs 5000 (or 4 for buying 4 products). This time tested discount structure along with free shipping beyond a certain order value will incentivise customers to purchase more.
All of us have had the bitter experience of receiving below par quality products from e-commerce companies and the struggle we had to go through to return the product or worse were not able to return it even after paying a hefty shipping fee. These experiences often make online shoppers reluctant to make a purchase.
One can not only mitigate this reluctance but also make it a powerful selling point to customers by having a very user friendly return and free shipping policy. It's a common practice to offer free shipping for orders that cross a certain order value. Thus, instead of doing away with shipping charges altogether, you can also reduce this minimum order value during the festive season to entice would-be customers.
We Indians love to send gifts to our loved ones, especially during Diwali. You should provide an option of “Ship the product to your loved ones as a gift”. With the right experience, this will improve brand loyalty for the satisfied customers.
And who doesn’t like receiving gifts? By simply auto adding a gift beyond a certain order value will improve customer delight and incentivise them to convert immediately.
To make your store visitors more likely to make a purchase, it makes sense to show them your best products (i.e. top-rated, those with the lowest price, or those with the highest discount) as quickly as possible. Thus, you should ensure that your products are always listed in such a way that your best products are right at the top: whether on collection pages or on search result pages.
Implemented correctly, these 10 tips should make a huge difference to your customers’ experience and your revenue in the coming few months. We wish you all the best, and hope you have a wonderful festive season!
It's very important for your storefront to meet the celebratory and cheerful mindset of your consumers. To reflect this your entire storefront should undergo a complete thematic makeover specific to the season. There are several ready-to-use themes available online, which can help you modify various graphical elements of your store in line with the ongoing festival.
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