For retailers, the holiday season is always known as the busiest and the most wonderful time of the year. The retail sales happen between Black Friday and Christmas. It is the shopping occasion that most people look forward to. 

According to “The 2021 Holiday Shopping Outlook” released by  PYMNTS in October 2021, 87% of U.S. consumers plan purchases online in 2021, 13% more than they did in 2020. 58% of the surveyed consumers are interested in shopping with online merchants that offer consumer rewards. That means the holiday season will be unlike any other. eCommerce merchants should consider planning the marketing campaigns in advance to succeed in driving more sales throughout the festive season.

Shopify Apps are awesome tools for busy entrepreneurs as it only takes minutes to integrate. They help delight consumers and boost sales with great impact. This guide shares key Shopify Apps, trusted by thousands of leading brands,  to ensure your next holiday marketing campaign grows your ecommerce sales in the season.

Discounts - Driving Force behind the Sales

The festive season is the best time to attract new customers to your eCommerce store and retarget the customers who had abandoned their shopping carts. Set up a sales goal for the holiday season by choosing the products you would like to highlight and label it with a discount. They could be the best-selling items or festive-only specials. 

When you plan your discount strategy, please make sure it is easy for customers to choose what to buy and how to use it. There are two Shopify Apps for setting up promotions:

1. Selly

Selly enables easy setup of promotions that can offer multiple discounts, not only with a price cut, but also options of offering free gift and free shipping. Bundled offers are popular in festive promotions. You can do it with the Selly Shopify App with their bundle-sell widgets by displaying products in bundles and adding all products to cart in one click.

What is so powerful about Selly is that it increases your sales with an up-selling function that the customers will see more products popping-up after adding the first product to the cart. Offering quantity breaks with Selly also creates the driving force to purchase more with “Buy 5 get 10% off” or “Buy 10 get 2 free” promotions. Cross-selling functions with tags of best-sellers, new arrivals and recently viewed displays are useful tools to influence purchase decisions as well. 

To target the right customer with the right plan of products, Selly enables various discounts for different groups of customers that you can schedule easily offer a special discount to your VIPs. 

• Easy setup with multiple and stackable discounts and discount automation.
• Boost sales with up-sell popups, quantity breaks and cross-sell displays.
• Target different customer segments with different offers and landing links.

2. Discount Ninja

Literally Discount Ninja is a Shopify App to help you master the promotion setup process like a ninja!  You can arrange free gifts, combined and stackable offers in a single cart by building smart rules depending on customers’ actions, cart status and cart value.

Discount codes are one of the driving forces behind a successful conversion. Discount Ninja’s setup of promotion code is easy and it even allows the customer to enter multiple codes for the final price. Upon the festive season, discounts can be triggered automatically to boost purchase conversions with Discount Ninja.

Your online store will continuously grow with Discount Ninja’s tailored promotions such as VIP thank you message, dynamic pricing, retargeting  and unlocking the incentives for specific seasonal products.  

• Diverse offers of free gifts, BOGO, BXGY, free shipping based on smart rules. 
• Highly flexible in setting up multiple promotion codes in one cart. 
• Increase customer loyalty and AOV with automatic discounts and private sales.
  

Marketing Automation for the Season 

When talking about festive campaigns, holiday email marketing campaigns are a must. You can include a holiday shopping  guide, exclusive discount codes or giveaways and even personalised seasonal gift ideas. Automating your marketing with powerful Shopify Apps is essential to drive tons of potential and existing customers to your holiday marketing promotions. 

3. Privy

Supporting Shopify and Shopify-Plus, over 100 high-converting templates are available at Privy, helping you to grow your email and SMS  lists and to improve the conversion rate by various marketing tools including automated email marketing, exit-intent driven popups, banners, spin-to-win wheel, free shipping bar, flyouts, announcement bars, auto-respondonders, reminders and embedded forms. 

Merchants can target campaigns based on customer’s website behaviour such as exit intent, cart abandonment and cart value. Automated A/B test function is available to optimize your store conversion rate. You can closely monitor your revenue generation and key metrics with the real-time dashboard for further improvement.

To incentivize your customers and re-engage potential customers who abandoned their carts, you can automate your email marketing in one place with Privy where you will find professional looking email templates with automated rules to arrange welcome emails, follow-up emails, newsletters, cart abandonment emails, autoresponders, and customer winback emails.  If you are using your favourite marketing services such as Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Bronto, Conversio or 50+ other renowned providers, Privy supports contact sync to them with your online store! 

• Improve conversions with 100+ high-converting design templates and campaign triggers. 
• Increase sales by incentivizing and re-engaging customers with marketing automation.
• Grow your email and SMS list with contact sync to 50+ email services.  

Celebrate the Seasons with Holiday Decorations

Have you noticed the Google Doodles which are spontaneous changes made to the Google logo to celebrate holidays? Search users are thrilled to see the minor changes that the tech giant does and notice that the seasons are coming. This also applies to your online store that holiday decorations are necessary to align with your marketing campaigns for the season. There are Shopify Apps for decorating your website without redesigning the entire website:

4. Christmas Snow Decoration

Changes made to festive themes on the online storefront matter a lot to intensify customers’ feelings to cheer up and they will be reminded to prepare for the gifts. Pick a holiday themed Shopify App such as Christmas Snow Decoration to add Christmas emotions to your online store with subtle snowfall decorations with just one-click. 

Don’t forget to highlight your festive promotions and bundled gift offers. Remember to design banners for seasons with call-to-action buttons to boost last-minute orders of gifts. 

• Decorate the online storefront with beautiful and subtle snowfall.
• Drive success by putting your customers into the Christmas mood.
• Hassle-free holiday decoration without coding. Just one click to let it snow. 

Landing Page Design for Special Occasions

There are always debates on whether we should spend effort on designing a landing page for an occasion. The answer is Yes! It is a sentimental season for many people associated with family, reflection, and the year's end resolutions. A highly relevant landing page in festive themes will contribute to promising conversions. The only concern to the merchants would be the time spent on building up the landing page. 

5. Shogun

Shogun is a landing page builder for Shopify that allows busy entrepreneurs to easily control website widgets with the drag and drop layout control. You can design exclusive offers for the holiday seasons with custom product pages, collections, charts, clickfunnel-style pages, FAQ and any other page types.  The A/B test and designing tools are impressive yet easy to use.

An all-rounded library with website elements such as  video background, carousel, icons, button, html, CSS, table, tabs, sections and more are available for merchants to design effortlessly.

The landing pages that Shogun builds are SEO-friendly ensuring your pages’ loading speed and on-page SEO are well optimized to drive more traffic for even better performance.

• Easy drag and drop widget control with a vast number of website elements and media displays. 
• Promising landing pages with potential to scale up with sales funnel, promotions, A/B test, email opt-in  and clickfunnels-style pages. 
• Driving traffic with optimized on-page SEO and fast-loading storefront. 

 

 

Optimize your Customer Experience at Seasons

Holiday seasons are the best timing to create and strengthen your bonding with your customers. No matter you choose to do price promotion, a highly personalised marketing and SMS campaigns, online frontstore skin decoration to light up the emotions, or a killer landing page to evoke customers’ emotion to purchase, please focus on the customer experience that you wish to create and build connection with your customers for long-term growth. 

We hope the picks of Shopify Apps are right to ignite your store to succeed throughout the season. 

About InsCoder

InsCoder is the first-choice Hong Kong Shopify Agency and Certified Shopify Plus Partner for eCommerce companies. Our Shopify expertise has successfully assisted more than 200 local and overseas SMEs and enterprises launch their eCommerce site using Shopify.

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