In episode 9 of the ''Der Conversion-Hacker Podcast'', Germany's top conversion hacker Jörg Dennis Krüger explains how you can generate top sales for your shop from the Christmas business, even if you don't even think that your shop is really ' Has 'Christmas Potential''
TRANSCRIPTION OF THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST
Welcome to the Conversion Hacking Podcast. My name is Jörg Dennis Krüger and as my number boy just said: Yes, I'm the conversion hacker. And the number boy, the number boy just walked around with the big number 9 and I'm really excited that I even managed to publish nine episodes of the Conversion-Hacking Podcast.
For the tenth episode I will think of a little surprise, or have I already thought of it and everyone can be curious what that will be like. It will only be something very, very small. But something everyone will notice. And this episode will be the conversion hacker's Christmas episode, because it's November now and we have to start thinking, how can we use Christmas in our online shop to sell a little more?
Because Christmas is of course the time for gifts, the time for e-commerce sales and there are many online shops for which the Christmas season is the most important thing. They hire 20, 30, 40 additional people in the warehouse in order to be able to deliver everything and so on and so forth. In this respect, you just have to see how can I use Christmas?
And that's where I always have the funniest discussions, because of course there are many different ideas on how to use Christmas. There's someone who says: No, Christmas, the end of the year is completely uninteresting for us. We actually mostly do B2B or something, we somehow come there, we don't need it. You have to say; Yes, wait a minute, maybe you don't have to do a Christmas campaign with some nice gift wrapping or something. But the end of the year is very interesting for B2B to make more sales. The secretaries fill the closet with office supplies again because the budgets expire at the end of the year.
Every consulting company knows that at the end of the year the companies, the customers come around the corner and say woah, I still have 10,000 euros here that I could spend this year, you can write me an invoice, we can also use the quota in January what we bought there and such. So there's a lot of potential and in the B2C area it can't be that people think about gifts. What are we giving our customers this year, at the end of the year? Can we make a coffee cup or something? moment, moment; you want to sell!
It's not about throwing out gifts that aren't of any interest to anyone. A funny giveaway like a pen, a coffee cup, a calendar or something like that. That's quite nice, but it's not really a driver either, so that I'm somehow really buying something because of that, it must be something very special.
And then there's also the third faction, they go out with discounts and say now we're offering Christmas discounts! Wait a minute! What's that about? No discounts for Christmas after all. Everyone wants to buy for Christmas. We don't have to give discounts now, we just have to make sure that customers who want to spend their money anyway spend it in our online shop. And in principle it's not that difficult. You just have to think, how do you do that?
How do you manage that the customer first becomes aware of my shop, maybe he hasn't really pictured me so far, to buy Christmas presents from me. So you can go out aggressively and say: Hey, hey, hey here! Christmas gifts from us and so on. And then you have to think, what are the drivers that would make someone buy Christmas presents from me? Okay, the one thing that I can sort of give away in this release is the assortment.
What gifts are there for which target groups, maybe a few unusual things that are great for Christmas, or a few emotional things where people say: Hey, that looks great, I like that. I'll buy that, I want to give it away. But there are a few other things that are just great to push the Christmas business. On the one hand, it's natural to say: "The whole thing will arrive before Christmas!" That's of course elementary, I can start early, depending on what kind of products I'm selling, it could also be that my competitors and so on also have long delivery times.
And I can say four weeks before Christmas: "Guaranteed delivery before Christmas!" That simply creates massive trust. Of course I have to keep it too, but the further away I am from Christmas, the easier it is to keep to it.
And then, of course, another topic is not only the guaranteed delivery for Christmas, but perhaps also the gift packaging for Christmas. That's great for many customers if they can get it ready-packaged, maybe even for an extra charge, I can generate even more sales there, you can try it out a bit. But offering a gift wrap is a great thing.
You can do that very easily, perhaps by simply ordering a few gift bags somewhere from a large, yes, packaging mail order company and then simply packing everything in, or adding it, so the customer can pack it in there himself. Maybe put a small name tag on it and then write your name on it, you can see at a large American department store how they have optimized their process better and better and don't even wrap everything in gift paper.
Or you just wrap it in gift paper, that's okay too. Depending on what kind of products you have and the like. But the gift wrapping can be an absolute Christmas pusher. And of course I should also address the topic of Christmas in my shop from a certain point onwards and I can also incorporate a few pushes.
"Have you thought about gifts?" - "Find the right gift here!" This is simply a topic that very, very many people are dealing with, where I speak to very, very many people and where I just manage to do it with the customers better get in touch. In order to build trust and break down hurdles, I can also consider whether I should actually look at the big American department store again and say: man, okay, I'm extending the return policy for the time around Christmas.
Why not? Or I actually offer something that the big American department store also offers, so that the recipient can exchange the product without finding out how expensive it actually was. I can print out a gift confirmation from Amazon.
So you can deal with that. And the closer it gets to Christmas, the more interesting it gets with "Oh gift, can I really deliver this by Christmas?". This year 2019, Christmas Eve is on a Tuesday, which means I will probably only be able to ship goods until Thursday or Wednesday, i.e. well before the 20th so that realistically Christmas Eve is still there.
So I have to think about whether I might also have a digital product, which I can then promote accordingly after December 19th and say: Hey, here's giving away our digital product, our voucher in the simplest case, because you get it you guaranteed before Christmas.
Of course I had to print it out myself and so on, but well that's always a welcome gift as an emergency gift and then you can just do it again, when everything has actually come to a standstill and everyone has already cleaned the warehouse, again a little turnover do by selling such vouchers to the customers here, for example. Or, as I said, any other digital product that you can give away as a gift. I myself, for example, have often received an e-book as a gift for Christmas like this: Here, I'll give you an e-book on Amazon, lalala.
That's not the coolest gift, to put it bluntly, but it is a gift and if you can simply offer customers added value with it, that they still have something they can give away in the last few meters - why not? The important thing is that you have to get started, you don't have to put in so much work, you don't have to plan weeks or months in advance. But the beginning of November is really high time to plan the marketing campaigns for Christmas.
Then you can only step on the gas and tear something, because things are not that complex. You can quickly do an A/B test, you can see how you can get these elements really nicely integrated, you can simply deliver it via JavaScript in the shop you can look at the previous episode, where it a lot of small, cool JavaScript hacking.
I think Episode 7 is how you can build something like that into the shop without having to rebuild the shop. Yes, fine, or maybe you can ask someone how to do it on the last few meters. I, in particular, am always happy to receive one or the other request shortly before Christmas, once again realizing a real conversion boost for a customer. But the most important thing is: do it! Because the competition is big, there are a lot of shops out there that are just screaming Christmas around a bit.
Clicks are getting more expensive, because of course everyone is now turning up their Christmas budgets a bit and then you have to make good use of the traffic and only if everything works together properly will it be a really successful Christmas business for you and not for the competition.