Episode 9: Christmas in e-commerce:Recognizing potential and using it correctly

In Episode 9 of ''The Conversion Hacker Podcast'' Germany's top conversion hacker Jörg Dennis Krüger explains how you can generate top sales for your store from the Christmas business, even if you may not even think that your store has real ''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 am the conversion hacker. And the number boy, the number boy has just been running around with the big number 9 and I'm just really excited that I've managed to publish nine episodes of the Conversion Hacking Podcast.

For the tenth episode I will think of a little surprise, or I have already thought of and everyone can be curious what it will be. It will only be something very, very small. But something that everyone will notice. And this episode will be the Christmas episode of the conversion hacker, because it's November now and we have to start thinking, how do we get Christmas used in our online store to sell a little bit more?

Because Christmas is of course the time of gifts, the time of e-commerce sales and there are many online stores for which the Christmas season is absolutely the most important. They hire 20, 30, 40 extra people in the warehouse to be able to deliver everything accordingly, and so on and so forth. In this respect, you simply have to look at how can I use Christmas?

And there I always lead the funniest discussions actually, because there are of course many different thoughts how to use Christmas. There's the one who says: No, Christmas, the end of the year is completely uninteresting for us. We actually do mostly B2B or so, we come somehow, we do not need. So you have to say: Yes, wait a minute, maybe you don't have to do a Christmas campaign with any nice gift wrapping or anything like that. But the end of the year is mega interesting for B2B to make more sales. The secretaries fill up their cupboards with office supplies because their budgets run out 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, wow, I still have 10,000 euros here that I could spend this year, you can write me an invoice, we can also use the contingent in January that we bought there and so. So there's a lot of potential here, and in the B2C sector it can't be that we're thinking about any gifts. What do we give our customers this year, at the end of the year? Do we maybe make a coffee mug or something? Wait a minute, wait a minute; you want to sell!

It's not a question of now somehow getting rid of gifts that are of no interest to anyone, such as a funny promotional gift, a ballpoint pen, coffee mug, calendar or something like that. That is quite nice, but is now also no real driver that I buy now again somehow really something because of that, that must be then already something quite special.

And then there's also the third faction that goes out with discounts and says now we're offering Christmas discounts!Wait! What's that all about? No discounts at Christmas. They all want to buy at Christmas. We don't have to give discounts now, we just have to make sure that the customers who want to spend their money anyway spend it in our online store. And in principle, that's not so difficult. You just have to think about how you can do that.

How do you get the customer's attention to my store first, maybe he hasn't even seen me in the picture so far, to buy Christmas presents from me. So you can also go out quite aggressively and say: Hey, hey, hey here! Christmas presents with us and so on. And then you have to think about, what are the drivers why someone would buy Christmas presents from me? Okay, the one thing that I can sort of go with in this give out at us gibts Weihnachtsgeschenke make 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 another topic is then of course not only the guaranteed delivery at Christmas, but perhaps also the gift packaging at Christmas. That's great for a lot of customers if they can just get it pre-packaged, maybe even for an extra charge, I can generate even more sales there, you can try a little bit. But offering gift wrapping is a great thing.

You can do that quite simply perhaps by simply ordering a few gift bags somewhere from a large, so packaging mail order company and then just pack everything in there, or put it in there, so the customer can pack it in there himself. Makes perhaps a small nameplate dran where you then write the name on it, you can look at a large American department store, as they have optimized their process there better and better and do not even pack everything in wrapping paper.

Or you pack it just in wrapping paper, is also okay. Depending on what you have just so for products and the like. But the gift packaging can be an absolute Christmas pusher. And of course I should also overall the topic of Christmas from a certain point in my store also calmly thematize and I can build there so a few pushes also.

"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 like what the big American department store also offers, that the recipient can exchange the product without finding out how expensive it actually was. I can print out such 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 that I can then promote accordingly after December 19 and say: Hey, here's still our digital product, our voucher in the simplest case, because you're guaranteed to get it before Christmas.

Sure had to print out themselves and so on, but well that's always so as an emergency gift also quite gladly taken and there you can then simply also again, if actually everything is already still if all have already cleaned through the warehouse, again make a bit of turnover by selling the customers then here such vouchers, for example. Or, as I said, any other digital product that you can give away. For example, I myself have often received an e-book as a gift at Christmas: Here, I'll give you an e-book on Amazon, lalala.

It's not the coolest gift, but it is a gift, and if you can offer customers added value, that they still have something they can give away in the last few meters - why not? It's important to get started, you don't have to put in so much work, you don't have to plan for weeks or months in advance. But at the beginning of November it's really high time to plan the marketing campaigns for Christmas.

Then you can only step on the gas and tear a little bit, because the things are not so elaborate. You can quickly do an A/B test, you can see how you can get these elements integrated really nicely, you can also simply deliver them via JavaScript in the store, you can watch the previous episode, where it was about a lot of small, cool JavaScript hacking.

I think Episode 7 is how you can build something like that into the store without having to rebuild the store now. Yes, well or you can ask on the last meters maybe someone else how it goes. Especially I'm always happy about the one or the other request again shortly before Christmas, again so right conversion boost for a customer realized. But the most important thing is: Do it! Because competition is great, there are a lot of stores out there that just scream now Christmas so a bit around.

The clicks are getting more expensive, because of course everyone is increasing their Christmas budgets a little bit, and then you also have to take advantage of the traffic properly, and only if all of this works together properly, it will be a really successful Christmas business for you and not for the competition.