How seasonal your sales on your eCommerce store is?
I am pretty sure it’s very easy to find it out, when you have very low sales compared to other months and the pattern continues to be same for every year it means your store does have a seasonal effect on it. Working with dozens of stores in UK, I found out Oct to Jan is their peak season due to Christmas and Gifting others but July & August are their low sales period, it might be due to schools starting up after summer and your target audience might have came back from their vacations and don’t want to spend it unless it’s completely necessary.
Let me show you some data pulled over from one of our store’s
In Aug ’15 we had 110 orders and in Dec ’15 we had 1238 orders, which is 11 times fewer orders when compared to our peak times. We did see the same pattern over many years.
Following are the actionable steps that you should implement right away to increase your off-season sales
Engage with your existing customers
During your off-seasons, it’s very hard to acquire a new customer, so let’s focus on existing customers. We need to understand their behaviours and actions on our store before and after their purchase. You can collect all those data using Metrilo, once installed, import your historical data and allow it to a week you would be able to see your existing customers actions and behaviours. For eg., We had someone purchased from us six months before, and they came back to our store recently (within 30 days) and viewed a product and even added it to cart then they never moved up in our sales funnel. We segmented these type of customers and started our email campaign which addressed our new offerings and incentivized them with a 10% discount code for them to complete the purchase.
We have got nearly 2% conversion rate on our targeted email campaigns to our existing customers which are excellent.
Always segment your customers based on their behaviour. Following are some ideas which we have implemented on our store
- You can segment customers who have failed orders (Probably due to their payments failed but they might not have tried again, or in the best case we had a customer who tried 6 times using PayPal Express checkout which seems to have a timely issue and customer is desperate to buy but couldn’t buy due to it.) These customers are low hanging fruits who have gone through placing the order but couldn’t do it due to numerous reasons, you can activate them by engaging through email and incentivize them with an offer or coupon code.
- Segment One-time buyers, When you launch an email campaign to ask for a referral from them and incentivize them with referral coupons both the advocate who is referring, and the person who you acquire gets a 10% off. You can go one step ahead and stack the referrals they bring in and give them a product for free to the advocates if they bring in enough orders. You get two things by doing it, one you motivates your advocate to share this reward with more people and in turn more exposure to your business and another you get sales and you acquire customers.
- Segment customers who might need a new product, the customers who have purchased a year before and they might qualify for a new product from you if you have introduced a new product during that time and they might not be aware of it. Target them with an email campaign to promote your new offerings and take a chance to ask how the product is working with them even after a wear and tear of using it for a year. They would be mildly surprised to hear from you because no e-commerce store owners I am aware of emailing them to their one year old customers asking how their product is doing, so it’s another chance to engage with your customer.
- Customers who have bought more than once, In this digital age and if you are offering a product for a niche and if someone buys from you more than once you should treat them as a VIP. Does your store identify them and treat them differently and provide more offers or give them the exclusivity? It’s complex to implement but getting the system to handle them differently is far better than no customers during off-seasons. You can launch the VIP system during the off-season and let your customers know about it. They would be delighted. How does launching an exclusive store within our site for our loyal customers does help in sales? The moment when you tell them they are treated exclusively, they would spread about your store to their friends or even better if you provide a pre-written widget for your store that can share to Twitter & Facebook with just a click of a button would help get your site to their friends & followers and increase referrals.
Conduct Events for your customers
Conduct exclusive events for your customers during your off-season. Yes, your customers might be from different locations or may be from different country, so it’s always better to choose a location where most of your customers are located.
Objective for conducting an event is to thank them and upsell your products, you can also launch exclusive new products during the events. Give them an additional ticket to bring in a friend or partner with them. Tell them it’s a must to accompany someone with you, but don’t force it as a rule.
Why should you conduct an event?
1. Increases your brand awareness
When you market your exclusive event right, you just had increased your brand awareness in your location. Your event can be very personal like social summer barbeque, a personal retreat for your customers or a business event. If you provide a great experience and create a buzz around your event right from the email invites you to send to your customers to the door they walk in and providing even greater experience at the event would create a great brand awareness. Invite local media people for this event to cover this event on the press. If done right it definitely increases your brand awareness.
2. Lead generation
You have issued two complimentary tickets to your customer, so you are getting to know about their friends or family when they brought them to your event. All you have to do is treat them well and collect their email address. If possible ask for the attendee’s email even before the event and explain to them what to expect from the event and why should they attend it.
Once the event is completed. Set up a drip campaign to the attendees (who are not yet your customers) and provide your most valuable content free for 4 weeks. It can be about your product, or it can be how your product solves a real pain, or it can be just a simple fun video make sure your audience loves it. Occasionally offer them your product and collect feedback on it. The above activity definitely would help you convert a sale from the lead.
3. Customer engagement
Engage your customers at the event to find out how your product helped them, Do they love your product? Do they have any feedback on how to improve your product? Find out the topics that would interest your customers, let’s say if you are selling gaming consoles or controllers your customers love to hear about Pokemon Go even though you don’t have a product on that or anything, but still, these topics are a great way to initiate a conversation.
Make customers part of a team. Ask them whether they would be able to help test out a new product idea. If you notice that your customer launched a new product or idea of their own help them. By promoting it on your social media accounts, or you can just highlight “Customer of the week” on your social media accounts. You can take a selfie with each customer along with your product and ask them to share it on their social media account to get a bundle of offers from different vendors and pack yours along with it. Even better run a social media contest for all your customers to post their selfies along with your product on Twitter & Facebook, Select someone randomly to give them your new products.
Events are the best way to engage with your customers. Make it count.
Partner with vendors who have reach to your audience
Partnering with other vendors who do serve your target customers would create an inflow of leads and orders. Let’s say you sell gaming consoles, you can partner with another ecommerce store who sells Gaming Chairs, or with another ecommerce store which sells PC, XBox & PS4 Games or with someone who makes customised gaming PC. By doing it, you can always increase your brand awareness and sales.
You can also create a custom bundle offers with each of these partners. For eg. Create a bundle which you can name it as Gaming bundle which includes a. High configuration PC, b. Gaming Chair, c. XBox One Controller / PS4 controller, d. 10 custom PC games DVD (You can choose from any of those 10) and sell this bundle across all your partner stores (Since all of their products are in the bundle, and they would be excited and happy to see how it converts) Promote these bundles on your social media accounts and ask them to do the same. This activity would definitely lead you to sell more during your off-season as combined effort from all your stores is much bigger than an individual effort.
Partnering with other e-commerce stores and cross promote your products is one of the best way to get your sales.
Steps to find out your partner e-commerce store:
a. Write down your customer avatar
First and foremost step is to know deeper about your customer. I have listed out major elements which we need to know about our customers:
- Describe them. How old are they? What are they wearing?
- What is their marital status? Do they have children? If so, how old are they and what are they doing now?
- What do they do for a living and what is their income?
- Where do they live? What sort of house and area do they live in?
- What do they spend their money on?
- What do they enjoy doing in their spare time?
- What are their likes and dislikes?
- What do they want? What are their hopes and dreams?
- What are their really big hopes and dreams?
- What are their top fears and frustrations? What keeps them awake at night?
- What is the pain they have that your product is solving?
- What do they really want in relation to what you have to offer?
PS: Customer avatar questions was created by Kate you can see his original version here
Yes getting the above deeper details on your customer is a big challenge. I would suggest to start with very less personal ones and then move towards collecting more personal ones. I am pretty sure it might take its own time but definitely it’s worth it.
On the other hand, you can also collect most of these insights either by Facebook Insights if you own a facebook page or by Google Analytics Audience Reports. Following is how it looks in Facebook Insights
Once we have all the data, it’s just the matter of time to partner with other products which they would be interested in and start cross promoting our products.
b. Find out complimentary products that your customers use
Let’s take one of our client’s store Audience reports
From the above report, we did understand that 5% of our audience are Gamers / Hardcore gamers no surprise here because we sell gaming consoles, a big surprise is though 4.61% of our audience are TV Lovers & Movies Lovers which we never expected it. Also, We did have our customers love Travel & Hotel Accommodations, Travel Tips and anything related to Travel. This is definitely a great information.
We can partner with e-commerce stores who sell Movies, or with high traffic Movie blogs who share details about movies. We can provide an exclusive discount for their audience ask them to promote it on their blog. We can create a new bundle which consists of 10 movie collection, your controller can be either XBox One or PS4, one PC game of their choice and 2 tickets for any movie in Imax. This bundle would definitely go well with the above audience.
Similarly, you can partner with Travel blog and create a bundle which consists a. 2 Air tickets for Norway during summer, b. Virtual Reality headset, c. Travel guide to Normal (Recommendation on to places you shouldn’t miss to visit). By creating this bundle you had unwrapped more potential customers and increased your brand awareness as well.
c. Promote their products on your site and your social media accounts & ask for reciprocity
Now that you have created the bundle and started promoting your products onto their store. You should start promoting the bundles on your store and social media accounts as well. Why should you have these bundles on your store? Because your customer’s interests are Movies & Travel, when they see something new on your site, they would start inquiring about it, and if the bundle is positioned as a great value for money, you would definitely get a sale.
June to Aug is off-season to the store according to the data above mentioned, but now you have uncovered your audience loves Travel where the peak season is during June to Aug, if you promote aggressively you can break your off-season sales and turn it into a more profitable season. Likewise, Movies are seasonable depending on what type of movies that are getting released but having a leg on to a different category by partnering with vendors gives you a mileage during the off-season.
Sell across different channels
You might be already selling your products across different channels like Amazon, eBay. But if you had not, now is the time to sell it across. Identify new channels like game.co.uk or new platforms where you can start selling your products. If you had already been selling on Amazon, eBay, please email eBay and get your products to Deals of the day section or best deals that they email to their mailing list (customers) every week or every day.
If you understand how Amazon ranks their product for any customer queries and if you can fine tweak your product and offering to get the maximum exposure you would be able to sell more of your products. If you know how to win BuyBox in Amazon you just had hit gold! To learn more about how to Win BuyBox and how does it really helps you to sell more on Amazon please head over to Will’s one of the popular articles on StartupBros. I highly recommend Will’s strategies.
You could even find out private Facebook groups where your target customers hang out and don’t just spam the group, if you do you would be kicked out, rather give them some value or help them with their problems by just answering the questions they have posted in the group. Once you have earned a good karma, usually when you help them within a month you get recognized and now is the time to pitch your product or even better the bundle you have created, don’t pitch for sales but just ask their feedback and ask them to share it with their friends, this again would give you more exposure to your product.
Now it’s your turn, Tell us what had you implemented already and how did it perform? How did you plan to tackle this off-season, What is the number one strategy that you are going to implement it on your store?
Cheers & Let’s remove off-season from our store 🙂