Improve Your Conversion Rate Over the Holidays

If you have a popular product at a low cost, you can use that as your gift online. For example, if you know your customers love your signature foldable tote bag and it only costs you $2 to make you can include it as a great gift with purchase item. 

To maximize your cash flow, you can pair your low-cost gift with purchase with a high margin item. In my online store, I like to match the high margin best sellers with popular low-cost products. 

Typically I will do a promotion like this:

Buy a Recycled Brass Necklace (My cost ~ $5 with the selling price of $57.50) and get a Gemstone Bracelet (My cost ~3.33) for Free!

When it comes to my business, it is worth the $3.33 decrease in revenue to delight my customers with a gift, increase my conversion rate, and sell more items over the holidays!

BOGO Deals

The best feeling ever is landing on a website and seeing buy one get one free or 50% off! Running a BOGO promotion is a great way to improve your conversion rate because customers visiting your website feel like they are winning when they get something for free.

Running a BOGO promotion is not unlike a gift with purchase, however, you have less control over the items that people get for free or at 50% unless you are using the Fera Social Proof App where you can give specific products for free or 50% off as part of your promotion.

If you have relatively consistent costs and margins for your products, you should be okay with any item being free, but if you have specific items that are best sellers or part of a new collection, you can exclude them from the sale.

Shopify has an excellent automatic discount feature that I have used in the past for a BOGO sale where I chose to exclude our new collection of jewelry from the sale.

The critical thing for BOGO sales is to be transparent. There is nothing worse than spending 30 minutes shopping for a BOGO sale only to discover that half the things you want were never on sale to begin with. 

Make sure that you are very clear about what is on sale and what isn't when you are promoting the sale or when customers visit your website.

Offer Free Shipping

Adding on shipping is a conversion killer. Where possible, build shipping into your price. If you are mostly shipping domestically, this should be easy. I use Canada Post, and our jewelry is pretty small, so I can get away with letter mail.

If you can't make shipping free, try and make it a flat rate like $10 shipping on all orders. That way, customers will know what to expect before they hit the dreaded ‘shipping step’ of check out.

Again make sure you are transparent. When you are offering free shipping, you want to make sure that you are clear about the length of time the item will take to arrive and if it comes with tracking or not.

Create Urgency

Create FOMO with Inline Social Proof

When the holidays are approaching, everyone is filled with anxiety about getting the right gift and getting it on time. That is where creating urgency on your online store comes in. 

You can create FOMO on your store by displaying how many items are left of a product and couple that with how many people are looking at it. 

This is what giants like eBay and Amazon are doing to help move people along the buying process. They create urgency around a particular product when they make it clear that 67 other people are looking at 5 Elmo stuffies. Even in a non-retail space, this type of in-line social proof works. 

Airbnb does a great job of this when they tell you that 47 other guests are considering these dates. It makes you want to make your vacation decision quicker!

Countdown Timers

1. Get It By
2. Sale Ending In

You can also improve your conversion rate by creating urgency. 

Create urgency by having a "Get it by" timer on your website. Letting people know that they need to purchase product X in the next 20 minutes to get it by Friday is another Amazon type tactic.

When you display the time it will take to get an item; you are helping your website visitors move quickly to check out. Around Christmas, this is especially important because most people don't want to be guessing when their package will come. 

They want to know that they will get that baby blanket before they take the plane back home to Arizona for Christmas.

You can also have the "Sale Ends In" Timer. To create urgency around a promotion, you are having. This can work wonders around Black Friday and Cyber Monday when flash sales are not expected to last.

Utilize Social Proof

You can improve your conversion rate by 108% just by utilizing social proof on your website. This holiday season, you can try things like testimonial carousels and reviews right on your product page to add social proof.

Having social proof on your website helps to improve your conversion rate because they see that people just like them have enjoyed your product. 91% of customers online look at reviews with the majority of them looking at between 5 and 10 reviews to make a decision.

When you have reviews and testimonials on your website, you can overcome objections right on the page. Reading what other people think about your product helps them to answers questions like

• Will I like it?
• Is it high-quality?
• Will this product meet my needs?

If you want to make sure that your advertising dollars are going as far as they can this holiday season, make sure you implement conversion-boosting tactics on your website like the ones mentioned above.

The Promotional Stuff

If you are looking to improve your cash flow and hit high ROAS numbers, try Klickly for commission-based online advertising! P.S. Fera users get a special discount when they sign up! If you want to try to add social proof like reviews and testimonials to your website make sure you download the Fera App.