E-commerce Christmas strategy and campaign ideas to boost sales [2024 update]
Last updated: 06.11.2024
Christmas may be months away, but you can plan ahead now to beat the competition. What are the top marketing campaign ideas your online store can use to boost sales? Read more below.
Key takeaways
- Start your Christmas marketing campaigns early to beat the rush, as 22% of Australians shop 2-3 months before the holidays
- Optimize your checkout process by offering flexible payment options like BNPL and digital wallets to reduce cart abandonment
- Update your store’s visuals and promotions as soon as Black Friday ends to reflect the festive season and excite customers
- Use Christmas-related keywords and product descriptions to ensure your e-commerce store ranks higher in search engines
There’s plenty of opportunity for your e-commerce store to increase sales over the holiday season. In 2023, Australian customers were expected to spend over 67 billion Australian Dollars during the pre-Christmas sales season, with New South Wales customers spending over 21 billion.
More than 45% of Australians aimed to complete their shopping by the end of November 2023.
Another survey revealed that 1 out of 3 Aussies turn to online shopping for Christmas
So, how can your business get a good slice of the festive online shopping pie? A great e-commerce Christmas campaign is the answer. As the holiday rush starts, you’ll want to ensure that your holiday strategy is focused on making it as easy as possible for customers to buy from your e-commerce business.
This means your Christmas marketing campaign needs thorough planning and preparation to attract customers to your online store, so it’s time to get creative with unique and fun e-commerce Christmas ideas. And, it also means that you’ll need to have the fundamentals in place to make sure everything goes to plan and you end the year on a sales high.
Table of Contents
Christmas e-commerce fundamentals to get your store ready
Here are some simple but crucial behind-the-scenes preparations to boost your e-commerce store sales during the festive buying season.
1. Stock up early
It goes without saying that you can only sell the stock you have.
With 22% of Australians starting their Christmas shopping 2-3 months in advance and 28% doing it 3-4 week before Christmas, it seems like it’s never too early to prepare your inventory for the holiday shopping season. While you’ll need to consider warehousing and logistics, getting your products shipped before the busy period means you’ll be beating the holiday rush and avoiding skyrocketing shipping costs.
2. Turn off your Black Friday campaigns
As soon as Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are over, it’s time to make sure your website, store and socials have moved on to reflect the upcoming festive season. Make sure any BFCM promo codes are switched off and all your touch points are now showing some festive spirit with Christmas animations and wintery graphics, which are in line with customer expectations.
3. Update your returns policy
Your customers may worry about buying the wrong gift or the wrong size for their loved ones. You can help put them at ease by offering an extended returns policy and making it clear when the final return date is for items bought during the holiday shopping season. It’s wise to choose a date that will allow for returns to be made in the new year—especially helpful for those seeing family and friends after the big day.
4. Add more payment options to your checkout page
As Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) is increasingly popular, you’ll want to ensure your store offers this to encourage more sales from younger consumers. It’s also worth checking that you have a variety of payment options to give your customers maximum flexibility, such as digital wallets.
1 in 4 Australians have used BNPL at least once, a 7% year-on-year increase from 2022. Clothing and accessories are among the most popular verticals for BNPL usage, with 14% of Australians using this payment option. The category is closely followed by Computer and Electronics at 10%.
Some of the more prominent BNPL providers in Australia include Zip and Afterpay.
Once you have this in place, it’s a good idea to test out the online shopping experience yourself, especially with newly added payment methods. This way, you can launch your Christmas campaign with full confidence in a seamless checkout experience and minimal cart abandonments.
5. Find and use Christmas keywords
What are your customers searching for when they’re shopping for gifts online?
Almost half of consumers (47%) use search engines to find products for their holiday shopping.
As part of your e-commerce Christmas campaign preparation, it’s important to do your keyword research for popular products based on your customers, what they’re searching for and how they’re searching for them in the run-up to the festive season. Incorporating the same keywords that they’re searching for in your campaign and product descriptions is crucial to making sure customers find and land on your online store.
Using tools like Semrush and Ahrefs will help enormously to increase your search engine rankings and can help guide your wider Christmas campaign, such as offering a practical holiday gift guide, writing Christmas-related blog posts or knowing which products to advertise.
6. Use influencer marketing
If your product niche is especially geared towards those under 34, then influencer marketing should be part of your marketing efforts. 41% of Gen Z and millennials prefer to consult social media platforms before making a purchase.
Product recommendations from user-generated content offer social proof for your products, something you can’t replicate yourself with your product ads. Find the social channels where your ideal customer is most active and start there.
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How to improve the Christmas shopping experience for your e-commerce store
You want to make the user experience in your e-commerce store the best it can be for potential customers. This includes making it simple, inspiring and fun right from the moment they enter, all the way through to the delivery.
Show off your Christmas deals
Given the current global economic pressure and uncertainty, consumers are looking for deals and offers more than ever.
To help your consumers save, highlight your Christmas deals and discounts in a banner on your homepage or as soon as they enter your e-store. You can also create a dedicated Christmas deals landing page so customers can see all your offers in one place.
As 37% of shoppers resort to social media for gifting inspiration, it goes without saying that your social media accounts should also be showing off your Christmas offers and deals.
Consider budgeting for paid advertising and video campaigns on the most popular channels—Facebook, YouTube and Instagram—because it could really help to boost your sales numbers.
Create gift guides
Sometimes we need a bit of inspiration when it comes to buying gifts. You can help your customers with a simple gift guide that showcases product recommendations from different categories. It’s even more helpful if your guide gives them the option to filter the gift guides based on different attributes, so they can find their ideal gift more quickly.
Some filtering options and product tags you can consider include:
- Price ranges
- Age ranges, especially if you’re selling products for children
- Gender, such as “Gifts for women”
- Relationship to the recipient, such as “Best gifts for Mum”
Offer gift bundles
Gift bundles are a great way to give your customers more value and make their buying decisions easier with some thoughtful touches. It also allows you to move some old stock and make room for the new as you come into the new year.
You can bundle together complimentary items at a discounted price, or offer a small add-on at a discounted price for a quick, last-minute addition to the shopping basket.
Provide gift wrapping and personalised notes
For those buying and sending gifts directly to their loved ones, offering a gift-wrapping service can be the perfect solution so they don’t end up with a plain cardboard box to open. Of course, this will take extra resources and time – but you can save time by using pre-made gifting bags, tissue paper and a simple festive decoration as your gift wrap.
For those having their gifts delivered from your store, another nice element to consider adding is personalised notes. Before the customer completes their purchase, you can give them the option to write a short note so you can print and add it to their package before it ships.
Use the 12 days of Christmas promotion method
Nothing gets customer engagement up like a festivity related promotion. The 12 days of Christmas promotion is one that many online retailers use for its simplicity: a different item on offer each day for one day only.
This advent calendar-style discount encourages customers to pull the trigger to buy the item and get that gift ticked off the list.
If you want to avoid continuous discounts, there are other ways to use the 12 days of the Christmas campaign. You can:
- Introduce seasonal products
- Launch a surprise giveaway
- Run a buy-one-get-one-free offer
- Offer double or triple loyalty points
- Offer free shipping
Get inventive and creative for your campaign to keep loyal customers excited and engaged and curious to see what the next day holds
Remind customers of shipping deadlines
While a lot of Christmas shopping is done in early December or before, there are still plenty of people who tend to leave it to the last minute as they need more time to figure out what they want to buy. To help your customers purchase in time, you should clearly show the shipping deadlines for your store.
You can do this on your main page so the information is clear and easily visible to them. Additionally, as Christmas day gets closer, you can display a countdown timer for your main shipping deadline.
Offer free shipping and alternative shipping methods
Research shows that the top reason for shopping cart abandonment is expensive shipping and extra fees. To counter this, consider offering free shipping on purchases over a certain amount.
(Source: Baymard Institute)
It’s also useful to offer alternative shipping methods too, such as curbside pick-up and Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store (BOPIS). These give your customers more flexibility and add convenience so that the whole shopping experience fits into their own busy days and weeks, as well as potentially saving you some costs.
For those without a brick-and-mortar store, pick-up lockers are a good option for customers who aren’t often home to receive a delivery.
Get interactive for more customer engagement
When it comes to e-commerce, part of the fun for many during the holiday season is having an interactive experience. Introducing a gamified element like a Christmas quiz can add more fun for your customers, keeping them more engaged with your brand.
If you’re not up to creating a quiz, you could do something simpler, such as creating a daily Christmas email as part of your email marketing strategy for customers to sign up that enters them into a prize draw or competition each day.
Sell gift cards
Finally, for those last-minute shoppers who are trying to secure the perfect gift on Christmas Eve, digital gift cards could offer a lifeline. As per the Australian Retailers Association, almost 18% of customers prefer to give or gift card, which is more personal than cash.
Online marketplaces during the Christmas season
Often, marketplaces have their own Christmas campaigns and holiday sales to help their sellers drive revenue and get more visits and views. Also, their own marketplace sellers’ sites and platforms can have useful research and data on trends that will help guide how you organise your campaign.
Amazon
This year, Amazon surpassed eBay to become the top marketplace in Australia. It is expected that Amazon will have the highest growth rate for any marketplace in the country this year, with 63% of Australians planning to make a purchase from it.
You can add things like Amazon Brand Registry to your marketplace and Enhanced Brand Content to your listing to help customers feel confident they’re getting high-quality products.
Etsy
Etsy helps its marketplace sellers in early November with its #EtsyGifts campaign, which shares creative gift ideas through its own Christmas Gift Guides that are curated by Etsy merchandisers and its own social media channels. Getting involved is easy: simply use the hashtag on your own social media accounts and gift idea posts.
Etsy also created a tool to make it easier for sellers to customise and share promotional posts, taking away the hassle of additional third-party tools and software.
eBay
As per eBay, the first Sunday of December has historically been one of the biggest shopping days of the Christmas season–or rather, the entire year. In 2020, eBay saw 92 million searches and 158 million views globally on the first Sunday of December.
This is followed by Green Monday–a term coined by eBay. It is one of the biggest sales days of the holiday season since it’s the second Monday of December and customers only have 10 days until Christmas. In 2020, eBay had 81 million searches and 143 million items views on Green Monday.
Your checklist for a strong e-commerce Christmas campaign
To skyrocket your Christmas sales from your online store, preparation and starting early is key. Here’s a quick checklist to make sure your business is ready for the holiday shopping boom:
- Turn off old campaigns and turn on your new Christmas one
- Check your payments are set up to include as many payment methods as possible
- Make sure you’re using responsive web design—more e-commerce purchases are made on mobile devices than desktop
- Optimise your website by testing load times, the mobile experience and the checkout process
- Get into the holiday spirit with your website and marketing—invest in a graphic designer if necessary
- Encourage customer engagement through fun games, holiday promotions and promotional emails
- Inspire your online shoppers with blog content, gift guides, bundles and strong social media campaigns
- Use different marketing channels to reach your customers, whether that’s email marketing, Google Ads, search engine marketing or social media marketing
- Check your marketplace to see if there are any promotional campaigns you can participate in
Getting your store ready for Christmas with WorldFirst
With these tips, you’ll hopefully see your sales increasing. The next question is: How can you manage all your sales income from different sites and online marketplaces—and in multiple currencies—all in one place? Here’s how we can help.
Meet the World Account: a multi-currency business account designed for making and receiving payments in different countries. The World Account allows you to open 15+ local currency accounts and connect to 130+ leading marketplaces and online payment service providers, including Amazon, Etsy, AliExpress, Shopify and PayPal.
With local sort codes and account numbers, you’ll be able to set up local currency accounts in minutes without having to open and manage several foreign bank accounts.
This means you can receive your Christmas sales income in your customers’ local currencies for free, with no transaction or exchange fees. You can hold the funds until you’re ready to convert or withdraw them, keeping more of your profits. It’s the perfect way to unwrap extra savings this festive season.
Disclaimer: The information contained is general only and largely our views. Before acting on the information, you should consider whether it is appropriate for you in light of your objectives, financial situation, or needs. Although information has been obtained from and is based upon multiple sources the author believes to be reliable, we do not guarantee its accuracy and it may be incomplete or condensed. All opinions, estimates, mentioned products/services and referenced material constitute the author’s own judgement as of the date of the briefing and are subject to change without notice. WorldFirst shall not be responsible for any losses or damages arising from your reliance on such information.
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