Holiday Sales: 5 Quick Strategies to Prepare Your Online Vape Shop
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Is this your first year as an online vape retailer, and you want to know some strategies to outmaneuver the competition this holiday season? Are you an established online vape shop that wants new marketing tips to implement during this years' holiday sales? You're in the right place.
In this blog, we give you five different holiday eCommerce tips for vape shops ranging from creating excitement about your holiday sales to preparing for the influx of new customers. We're sure that by the end of this article, you'll pick up a couple of strategies that will help you win big during this holiday season.
If you're ready, let's get started.
Table of Contents
- Let Your Customers Know About Your Holiday Sale in Advance
- Have Complete Control of your Vape Inventory
- Adapt Your Digital Strategy as the New Normal
- Stay on Top of Customer Service
- Prepare for Spikes in Website Traffic
- Conclusion
Let your customers know about your holiday sale in advance
A great strategy to implement during the holidays is to let your customers know about your deals and discounts weeks in advance. In the United States, advertising before Thanksgiving and Christmas is a great strategy, since this way you won't compete with larger retailers during the exact date of the holiday.
To supplement this strategy further, you can implement time-sensitive deals to create hype for the actual holiday. You can also change your online store's themes to reflect the holiday deals that will be happening.
Implement time-limited deals for your vape products to create hype
A great way to ramp up sales before big holidays is by creating time-limited deals to generate hype around the actual sales event. You can do this with:
- Flash sales: Sales that only occur for a brief period, usually a couple of hours. For example, you could have a flash sale every Monday in November until Cyber Monday to ramp up the excitement.
Even if your customers do not spend money on your pre-holiday sales, by naming your flash sales, for example, “Pre-Christmas Sales,” they will notice it earlier when making their budgets for holiday spending.
Update site, email, and social media themes.
To build the hype even more, why not put out the holiday decorations early this year?
Start creating social posts with motifs and holiday themes, create posts that use the respective holidays' hashtags, and select dates. Decorate your online shop's logo, put some holiday cheer on it, update the images that come up on the front page, or create pop-ups reflecting the holidays.
Most importantly, make sure to communicate with every aspect of your website the holiday savings your customers will experience at least one month in advance.
Have complete control of your vape inventory
Another critical aspect of preparing your online shop is to take full stock of your inventory. With the holiday shopping season in full swing, you’ll need to predict which products will be moving out of the shelf and which will remain static.
To do this, make sure you revisit last’s year inventory analytics and see which products were the bestsellers. If box mods or pod systems moved the most during November and December, make sure to order a fair amount of both from suppliers.
Adapt your digital strategy as the new normal.
Although it is crucial to revisit last year’s data, you must also understand that 2020 is exceptional. With Covid-19, the new standard means more online shoppers. Recent data showed that online retail sales in March 2020 saw a growth of 74% in average transaction volume compared to last year.
That’s why a holiday eCommerce strategy is essential this year. Many people will be shopping online, especially when buying vape Christmas gifts. Retail will have to focus on online marketing presence since this is where most of the sales will be happening. At least for this year. If you don’t believe us, here are some stats to consider:
- Covid-19 has sped up digital shopping and eCommerce by five years.
- United States eCommerce sales increased by 44.5% year-over-year as a result of Covid-19.
- A recent study showed that 80% of US consumers do not feel comfortable engaging in out-of-home activities.
Stay on top of customer service.
With added shoppers this season, there will be an added need to cater to them. That’s why our fourth strategy is staying on top of customer service. You can easily do this by using software, allowing the customer to answer without a physical person answering them.
For example, using customer relationship management (CRM) software that will send automated email responses to clients allows for online chat. Also, it provides for a ticketing system to help you organize your customers’ questions, which is a must during the sales season.
If you’re a smaller online retailer, making sure your contact information and FAQ section is visible and updated is extremely important. If possible, make sure to update your FAQ to include as much information as possible, so there’s no need for customers to call you or reach out. Finally, you can always add free Facebook chat plugins to your website that will allow you to communicate with your clients.
Prepare for spikes in website traffic.
We have already said it, and you’re probably tired of reading it, but this year there will be more online shoppers than ever before, which is why you need to prepare for the spikes in your website traffic.
At the very minimum, for this holiday season, you’ll want to do a performance test like a load test to see if you need to up your infrastructure. You should check your website’s speed to see if it needs to be optimized.
Perform a Load Test
A Load Test is a performance test done on your website, simulating various users accessing your website to see how your website responds. Several online services can do a load test. Your web hosting can often do it for you, and if you fail in any area of the load test, they can advise you on how to improve your website (usually by investing in a better plan).
Optimize site speed
Another critical test to perform is a speed test. You can do this for free on a large number of websites. Ideally, you’ll want your website to load in less than three seconds. If it takes longer than that, it’s time to call in a web developer to help you make your website faster.
Conclusion
We hope you can put these five different holiday selling eCommerce tips for vape shops to fair use and win big this holiday season, which is sure to bring in new customers. Even if you find this later on in the year, the strategies discussed here are sure to be relevant in the coming years, so remember to implement them every holiday shopping season.
