Description: The holiday season is upon us! And holiday shoppers are headed your way. But will YOU be ready when they arrive? With new holiday shoppers coming online each year and return buyers coming back for more, NOW is the time to ready your store, listings, and marketing for prime time!
Please join Lisa Suttora, ecommerce strategist, and Founder/CEO of WhatDoISell.com as she shares 12 sales boosting marketing strategies that will get you ready for holiday buyers and put more jingle in your holiday sales!
After the material is presented we'll open the board for discussion and questions.
Visit http://certifiedprovider.ebay.com/ to learn more about eBay Certified Providers and the services and solutions they offer to help eBay sellers.
We're in the holiday selling season homestretch! And holiday shoppers are headed your way.
But will YOU be ready when they arrive?
With new holiday shoppers coming online each year and return buyers coming back for more, NOW is the time to ready your store, listings, and marketing for prime time!
I'm Lisa Suttora, ecommerce strategist, and Founder/CEO of WhatDoISell.com. I'm both an eBay Certified Consultant as well as an eBay Certified Provider.
And I'm here today to share my top 12 Sales Boosting Holiday Strategies to get your business ready for prime time!
You'll find the workshop content directly below.
After you've finished reading today's workshop, I'm here to answer your questions about holiday sales!
I look forward to talking with you!
PS: My answers tend to be detailed, (which is a good thing!) so don't worry! We'll get through all your questions today.
Sales Boosting Strategy #1: VISUALLY Open Your Listings and eBay store for holiday business.
The first thing your potential customer needs to see when they come to your listings or eBay store are strong VISUAL queues that you have holiday merchandise for sale.
If *I* (aka your customer) come to your store or listing and don't see any holiday graphics, holiday keywords, and no indication that you have products that might interest me for the holidays - I'm going to keep movin' on down the road.
Give your customers VISUAL queues that you are a holiday seller by using holiday graphics in your listings and retooling your titles with appropriate holiday keywords (i.e., is the classic red dress that you carry the perfect “red holiday dress”? ).
You don’t have to spend money/time/effort on a fancy holiday template either!
A few well placed holiday graphics for visual appeal, or that indicate a holiday promotion will tell your visitors that THIS is a place where they can find holiday gifts this year.
Sales Boosting Strategy #2: “Holidayize” Your Listing Titles and Description Keywords
Your listing title keywords are the maps that bring buyers directly to your products..
Using the right holiday keywords in your titles and descriptions will increase your traffic and your sales.
Even if you don’t sell traditional holiday products, can you reposition your products and incorporate holiday keywords?
NOTE: This does not mean keyword spamming! Which is a violation of eBay policies as well as a bad business practice.
Let’s look an example:
If you sell baskets adorned with red, green or silver trim that would fit napkins, silverware, bread and more – your “basket with red trim” can easily become a “Holiday napkin caddy”.
And what about your seasonal merchandise?
Are you using the most relevant holiday keywords to describe your products?
===> Which keyword garners more searches?
===>Which is right for your products?
===>Should you use Santa to describe your Christmas ornament or “Rudolf”?
The difference in the holiday keywords that you use can make a world of difference in whether or not people find your products.
Google Insights will enable you to track the keywords trends year over year, so you can be sure you are using exactly the right keywords in your sales copy!
Sales Boosting Strategy #3: Set Up Holiday Categories
When holiday shoppers come to shop in your eBay store, one of the most important factors in making the sale is to guide them quickly and effortlessly to your products.
Creating holiday related categories in your eBay store will draw buyers to the merchandise they are most interested in this season.
Your eBay store categories are your virtual store shelves. And you want your holiday merchandise front and center!
Customers coming to your store should be able to quickly and easily find your holiday items and that means merchandising it as such.
In the post below, we’ll talk about how to set these up!
For example, let’s say you sell “Brand Y” dishes in your eBay store. You carry several lines of Brand Y every day dishes, some fine china dishes for formal occasions and assorted styles of Christmas serving platters, plates and bowls.
Rather than group those products in generic catagories such as:
Brand Y Dishes Brand Y Serving Platters Brand Y Mugs
Create new categories and position them at the top of the categories list and highlight your holiday related merchandise!
For example you might create some categories called:
===> Brand Y Formal Dishes
===>Brand Y Santa Platters
===>Brand Y Ltd Edition Dish Sets
People who come to your eBay store will be thinking about buying formal dishes on which to service their holiday dinner, Santa platters on which to serve cookies and limited edition dish sets - the perfect holiday gift.
The key to setting up new holiday categories is to think about how your customers could use your products during the holidays?
Could they use them for entertaining? As a gift?
This is the merchandise that should be featured in new holiday store categories and positioned at the top of the list!
Sales Boosting TIP: Don’t Make Your Customers Work!
The fastest way to loose a sale is to make your customers work for it. If a customer has to dig too deep to find your merchandise, wade through hundreds of listings, or search through vague and confusing categories, they will leave your eBay store faster than you can you can say happy holidays.
When reviewing eBay stores, this is one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make. Store layouts that require time and patience on the part of the buyer to navigate the listings and find the item they are looking for.
And it’s an easy trap to fall into because you know your merchandise. In your mind it makes sense that a particular category is set up to contain certain items.
You customer however, if coming there without your organizational insight. Which is why you have to make is as simple as possible for shoppers to find the products they’re looking for.
Set up your categories so buyers can quickly and easily see what you have to offer.
Then have someone who isn’t familiar with your store layout take a look and test whether or not your store categories are set up intuitively.
The extra effort is worth it and you will be rewarded with higher sales when people can easily find what they are looking for!
Sales Boosting Strategy #4: Use Custom Pages to Creating 'Shopping Lists' for Your Customers
Every year the ecommerce surveys show that the top selling niche websites have something in common. They all create Shopping Lists by doing “pre-shopping” for their customers.
Pre-shopping is providing customers with a list of products based on a particular criteria that will engage the customer and give them a pre-chosen list of products to buy from.
Examples of Shopping Lists would be:
- Our 10 Most Popular Golf Accessories - Top 10 Gifts for Kids Aged 5 and Under - Our Customers Favorite Picks! - 20 Unique Gifts for the Eco-friendly Moms - Favorite Gifts Under $40 - 12 Unique Hostess Giftst
The possibilities are endless and can be tailored to fit your product line!
Each eBay store comes with custom pages that you can use to showcase your Shopping Lists!
Sales Boosting TIP: How to Create Pre-Shopping Lists
Pre-shopping lists can be created by simply grouping your products and showcasing them by the categories that will be most important to your customers.
===> Who are your customers? ===> What are they looking for? ===> What traits would influence them to buy? ===> What information would be helpful to them?
If you sell toys, there are millions of parents looking for top gifts for kids aged 5 and under!
Create a list of 10 or so items, add some photos of your product or include the listing itself and then write a short but powerful product description to SELL your products.
Tell your customers what is unique, special, or fabulous about the products on your list.
Tell them why this would be the perfect gift to buy this holiday season and who on their gift list would love it!
If you find yourself getting writers block, pull out a couple holiday catalogs that have recently arrived in your mail. You’ll find that many of them do pre-shopping lists.
Looking at catalogs to get ideas on how to write good sales copy on your custom pages can make this a fun and creative process!
Sales Boosting Strategy #5: Offer Special Promotions & Make Them an EVENT!
If you want to get your customers excited about your products and give them an urgency to buy, there is no better way to do this than by offering a time sensitive special promotion.
Special promotions such as free shipping, combined shipping, free gift wrap and gift card, rebate programs, or creating a product bundle by including something extra...
For example “This Thomas the Tank Engine Train comes with 2 pieces of train track!” gets your buyers excited about your offerings and can persuade them to make their purchase from instead of your competitors.
One of the most popular promotions during the holiday season is free shipping. But don’t just offer plain old “free shipping” - really sell it to your customers.
At the top of your listing, put a stellar customer service statement that says something like “As a way of saying thank you to all our valued customers this holiday season, we are offering FREE SHIPPING on all items purchased through December 4th.”
Promoting your free shipping this way accomplishes two things. First, it makes your customers feel connected to you. You are telling them that because you value their business, you are now offering something to them during the holidays.
Secondly, by putting an ending date on your promotion, you have given your customer motivation to buy NOW rather than wait a few weeks and look around some more.
Once that promotion ends, you can run another one for a different duration.
Sales Boosting Strategy #6: INSTILL Customer Confidence in Gift Delivery
When polled, the #1 thing that online shoppers want during the holiday season when making an online purchase is confidence that their purchase will arrive on time.
You can go a long way towards promoting this confidence in your buyer IF you clearly address this customer desire in your listing.
Don’t expect that your buyers will automatically know that you will ship in a timely manner and that you are dedicated to their satisfaction.
They don’t.
Unless you tell them.
Tell them Boldly.
Tell them Clearly.
This is NOT the time to be shy! This is the time to describe in detail and “shout from the rooftops” about your stellar customer service policies.
The confidence that you instill in your buyers will reward you with the sale.
Sales Boosting Strategy #7: Use Subtitles to Distinguish and Advertise
Sub-titles are the best (and cheapest) advertising on the web. They allow you to communicate the U.S.P. (Unique Selling Position) of your product or your business for far less than the cost of a banner or pay-per-click ad.
However, most people are hesitant to spend the extra money on sub-titles for fear they won’t make their money back.
But if you write your sub-title correctly, not only will you get a return on your investment, you’ll also attract potential customers away from your competitors and get higher click-through rates on the products displayed in search.
The problem is – most people use sub-titles for the WRONG reason.
They use them to communicate additional information.
However, that’s not what you should be using a sub-title for.
===> Sub-titles should be used to advertise any important information that will immediately set your listing apart.
===>For example, Is your product a limited edition? Put that in your subtitle.
===> Do you provide 2 hour customer response time? Let your buyers know via your subtitle.
===>Do you sell an exclusive version of your product. Your subtitle can relay this to the buyers.
===>Do you have 10 years experience in your niche? Tell your customers in your sub-title.
Your sub-title is designed to do one thing.
Get the click.
What can you communicate in your sub-title that will get your customers to click through to your listing to get more information about your product?
Do your listings really SELL your product? Or are they 'product pages'?
Stale and humdrum, leaving the decision up to the customer as to whether or not to buy.
Your listing IS your salesperson! Working 7x24 to sell your product.
But you’ve got to give “him” (or her!) something to work with!
===> What are the benefits of your product?
===>Why is it a good decision for your customer?
Don’t just rely on supplier catalogs to write your descriptions either. If you’re an expert in your niche, leverage YOUR expertise to add something extra to that listing description that your competitor won’t!
When people come to your listings, they should be excited about what they see.
A stale listing that hasn’t been updated in a while, doesn’t look fresh, and isn’t polished won’t sell your product as it should.
If you haven’t spruced up the look and description of your listings in a while, now is the time!
A lot of people don’t like to use Best Offer because the 'low ball' offers they receive from customers really tick them off.
But Best Offer is an excellent tool to use during the holidays (and all year around).
First, you have to get past being annoyed with the shopper who offers you $1 for your $100 product. Let that go - because MOST shoppers will offer you a reasonable offer for your product.
In fact Best Offer is not just something that’s happening on eBay.
Even brick and mortar stores in high-priced shopping areas are becoming more and more amenable to price negotiation.
The key to using Best Offer is to respond to the offers manually. Not setting up the automatic threshold response.
This gives you a distinct advantage because you can actually communicate with your customer (and once they’ve communicated with you, they are much more likely to buy from you) and you can also get insights into what your customers want and what price they are willing to pay for your products.
Consider Best Offer both a sales tool and a market research tool.
Sales Boosting Strategy #11: Supplement Your Product Line with Hot Seasonal Inventory
Just like clockwork, every holiday season brings with it a list of hot products.
Supplementing your inventory with in demand and hard to find products that you purchase retail and resell on eBay is an excellent way to bring in an additional stream of income during the holidays.
But the toy category isn’t the only category that generates hot, in demand, hard to find, products. Most every category or product line has it’s hot products during the holiday shopping season.
If you have access to these products in your local retail store, you can often purchase them at full retail prices and resell them very profitably on eBay.
Sales Boosting Strategy #12: Bring in Seasonal Help
During the holidays seasonal help is a MUST. If you’re a one person shop, your sales are limited by the number of hours you have in the day.
Seasonal help is the only way that retailers can survive and thrive during the busy holiday shopping season.
And whether that means you enlist your spouse, neighbor, kids or a high school or college work-study intern, you HAVE to bring in some to help with the increased volume of sales.
Consider this –
Do you know what one of the top reasons for decreased income for eBay sellers is during the holiday season?
Not being able to get all their merchandise listed.
Don’t let this happen to you!
You don’t need to hire a permanent employee – just bring in some temporary help to get you through December 25th.
You’ll be amazed at how much more time you have to sell your products and market your business when you have someone else keeping an eye on the operations (listing/wrapping/shipping) in your business!
If you’re in need help to get organized for the holidays, I’ve recently released my new 2009 Holiday Season Checklist audio class.
In this 90 minute audio, I walk you step-by-step through how to implement the top 10 holiday marketing strategies that you'll want to implement now.
These are manageable, doable, effective marketing strategies!
You’ll even get your own customizable holiday checklist!
With this 90 minute audio, it's like having me sit with you at your desk and walk through the MOST IMPORTANT things you need to do in your business this year.
A note from our Legal Department: The statements and opinions made in this discussion board are those of the workshop host only and do not reflect eBay policy or eBay's opinion with respect to such statements.
The workshop is open! Take advantage of this great opportunity to ask the Lisa Suttora, ecommerce strategist and CEO of WhatDoISell.com, how you can increase your holiday sales on eBay this season.
Workshops are interactive, so please feel free to ask your questions that directly relate to this topic. We will answer all questions!
Hi, I am really struggling with how to market my store items for the holidays. I have a good year round template, but I am not sure about how to draw in more holiday shoppers. What do you think of putting a "holiday message" in one of the promotional boxes on my home page? Thanks
I agree with your suggestions about having your holiday merchandise right there when a shopper comes to your store. I've always like to put my newest or most important listing first but my problem the past two weeks is that even though I have my sort order listed that way, it keeps reverting to ending first items. Not your problem I know, but frustrating because I feel people are not seeing my holiday merchandise as easily and have to search for it.
I agree about the categories and how important they are when a customer has to navigate your store. Didn't think about the subtitles in the fashion that you mentioned though, so thanks for that!
This is my 3rd Christmas season selling and find that my biggest months are Nov Dec & Jan....in my listings should I use Christmas or Holiday....in order to capture all ethnics celebrating groups
we don't have "holiday" items, we have fine jewelry and watches, each piece different. What would be the best way to promote thiings as a gift items. They all would make a great gift but I can't redo over 500 listings now or later, there's just not time. Any ideas would be helpful, thanks Angela
Well you are very luck in that you are an established business, with a vast selection of inventory in a solid niche, with hot products that have high demand!
And they lend themselves VERY well to the holiday season.
For your specific niche, my first suggestion is to participate in some of the top comic book collector forums/groups (Google groups and Yahoo groups) online and in your signature file (when you participate in these group) drive that traffic back to your eBay store.
You can purchase a unique domain name and redirect it to your store (using REF ID) and get 75% off your final value fees.
Your power is in hanging out where your customers hang out.
Also Facebook & Twitter are great ways to connect with your customer base.
You should have a Facebook Fan page set up as well as a regular Facebook account.
Google loves the SEO on the Facebook Fan pages. And you can use your Fan Page to market your products.
I'd also use Twitter to send out coupons - limited time coupons for your products.
Twitter is very effective for short term promotions.
If you don't, you should absolutely have a Wordpress blog.
One that you host at a web host like Hostgator. And blog about the comic trends.
You're in a market that is passionate about your product - so connecting with them about their interest is very important - and will lead to the sales.
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