Back in 2018, one of the largest online retailers measured its performance – during the holiday season – in buildings, mountains, and animals. Yes, that’s true; and we are talking about none other than Amazon.
After the Great Festive Sales, here’s what Amazon said:
“If all the Lego Bricks bought from Amazon India during the Great Festival Sale were stacked, the tower so formed would be taller than Burj Khalifa.”
On the other hand, Walmart experienced a massive spike in its sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday:
- For Black Friday alone, sales neared $76 million on the 2020 Friday after Thanksgiving, compared to $38 million in 2019, showing a 100% year-over-year increase for the day’s eCommerce sales.
- For Cyber Monday alone, sales reached $69 million on the 2020 Monday after Thanksgiving, compared to $44 million in 2019, showing a 57% year-over-year increase for the day’s eCommerce sales.
Isn’t this both absurd and astonishing?
While eCommerce businesses struggle to sail through the holiday season and expect to reach the shore with boosted sales, giants like Amazon, Walmart, and other eCommerce players witness a sky-rocketing spike in sales. The question is: how do they manage to enhance their sales?
Well, the answer lies in-store optimization.
As soon as the holiday season approaches, online businesses start optimizing their stores. The holiday season brings incredible opportunities for merchants where they can grow their business, build brand identity, form customer relationships, and most importantly enhance their sales. While customers want to buy unique products, both for themselves and their loved ones, it’s your job to help them buy the same by facilitating a smooth, quick and easy shopping experience.
The good news is: with Halloween around the corner, it’s that time of the year where people are not only excited about costumes or candies but shopping as well. According to Statista, in 2021, consumers in the United States are expected to spend an all-time high of ten billion U.S. dollars for the Halloween season.
What does this mean for you? Well, it clearly means you have a higher chance of boosting your sales and revenue. However, you must ensure to do it the right way otherwise you might end up degrading instead of upgrading; which is why we have put together a set of proven Halloween marketing ideas.
Halloween Marketing Ideas to Enhance Sales Despite The Pandemic
It’s time to make the most of Halloween and gain enormous benefits in the form of sales, customers, revenue, and conversions via a list of Halloween sales ideas.
1. Optimize Your Website
Whether you own Magento, PrestaShop, WooCommerce or a Shopify store, your website must be fully optimized for the holiday season. When users land at your store, they expect a seamless, hassle-free, and quick shopping experience; and that’s where website optimization comes into the picture.
Statistics show 57 percent of shoppers will abandon if they have to wait for more than three seconds for a page to load. Therefore, even a few seconds of downtime during the shopping mania can be detrimental to your sales graph. This is perhaps one of the reasons why website optimization tops the list of Halloween sales ideas.
Don’t forget your audience has several options to buy similar products like yours – they won’t wait for your page or website to load when they can get similar products from your competitor’s website.
We suggest you avoid any such technical difficulties by prepping your website for heavy traffic and spikes via:
- A/B testing
- Stress testing
- Updating the software and hardware
- Optimize your images
- Reduce HTTP requests
- Use a CDN (content delivery network)
- Look over product data entry
- Reviewing performance and SLAs
- Ensuring the right bandwidth and capacity
- Monitoring SSL certificates
All these together can considerably improve your site performance and enhance customer experience without any hindrances or technical glitches. Optimizing your site, thus, has to be one of the topmost Halloween promotion ideas for expanded sales.
2. Stock Up Halloween-related Items
When talking about Halloween, spine-chilling costumes, candies or decorative items immediately come to our mind. However, the chances of you selling any of these products might be relatively low. But what if we tell you that you can still sell and meet your customers’ demands with smart order processing and management?
We have enlisted some exceptionally creative Halloween promotion ideas to help you include products that compliment Halloween, regardless of what you sell. Let’s have a look:
- If you own a fashion/apparel store, you can either sell Halloween-themed t-shirts or provide shoppers with an option to customize according to their preferences. For instance, one customer might like a Dracula on the t-shirt while the other might like a spooky pumpkin. Give them various options. You might also give complimentary ghostly masks on every purchase to retain the Halloween feels and arouse eagerness.
- In case you sell electronics or other accessories, you may offer Halloween-themed skins on items. For instance, a mouse with Halloween-themed removable skin, themed mouse pad, earphones, or for that matter laptop skins.
These sales ideas for Halloween, and others that you can think of, will give shoppers a reason to buy from you. However, make sure you provide them superior quality products at competitive prices so that they not only purchase from you during the sales but beyond that.
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3. Run Unique Promotions
No wonder, customers love discounts, especially during the festive season.
Now, you and your competitors might already be providing offers, coupons, or running promotions but you must go unique in order to beat the competition.
Here are some unique Halloween promotion ideas you can implement to multiply sales this year:
- Issue a gift based on purchase amount
- Run a lottery
- Point-based sale
Set an amount and offer gift cards, packs, or freebies to customers who buy more than or equal to the set amount. It’s up to you whether you want to reveal the gift pack or keep it as a surprise; either way, you will be encouraging customers to buy.
You can arouse excitement among buyers by issuing a lottery draft. Let’s say anyone who purchases equal to or more than a particular amount (decided by you), is eligible for a special code. Once the Halloween sale is over, you can announce one or more winners and send them a special gift.
You must have seen and experienced how credit card companies offer point(s) on every purchase you make. You can do the same. Run a scheme where buyers can earn points when they buy from you – you can distribute the points either on the basis of the amount or any other policy that suits you. After the sale, provide discount coupons, a special gift, or gift card to the top three or five with the highest points.
These Halloween sales ideas can do wonders for your store when implemented in the right way. To add effectiveness, you can display these as pop-ups when a shopper enters your site so that they are aware of the ongoing offers. Alternatively, you can send emails or create a separate offer section on your website to boost eCommerce sales for Halloween 2021.
4. Put the Mobile Experience First
Among other Halloween marketing ideas, going mobile is indispensable. Smartphones have become a preferred choice among people, especially when it comes to buying online due to obvious reasons.
- In 2021, mobile eCommerce is expected to account for 72.9% of all retail eCommerce, up from 58.9% in 2017.
- 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last 6 months.
These promising statistics are perhaps enough to nudge your business in the right direction. However, many businesses still fail to understand the importance of mobile and eventually miss out on optimizing their website for mobile. Whereas, providing a worthwhile user experience means having a website that’s easily navigable and delivers a seamless, consistent experience across multiple devices including phones and tablets.
Considering the hectic lifestyle, people aren’t always in the position to access their desktops or laptops. In such cases, mobile-optimized websites can help them shop from anywhere, anytime — whether they are traveling or simply sitting on a couch. Therefore, optimize your website for mobile to boost sales for Halloween 2021 without missing any potential leads. Having said that, keep in mind the following:
- Use HTML local Storage specification
- Avoid pop-ups and sidebars
- Offer a full site option
- Match branding with that of the standard desktop site
- Remove unnecessary distractions and spaces
- Optimize images and videos for faster load times
- Ensure intuitive checkout process
- Insert a proper search bar
- Integrate social media
- Add relevant, visible CTAs
- Facilitate eye-catching, responsive design
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5. Offer Personalised Experience
The Internet, unquestionably, has given humans a new (and better) way of living. From shopping to paying bills to ordering food to traveling, the internet has spread its roots in almost every sector.
Talking about online shopping, a more convenient and easy option in comparison to offline shopping, but at the same time a less personalized one. What we mean is, we’ve lost some of the touches of traditional brick-and-mortar stores – ones that we enjoy such as friendly greetings, immediate and personalized help, and definitely being heard.
But the good news is, you can offer all of this online as well. So, along with other offers, give your customers the gift of personalization this Halloween.
Before we proceed, let’s have a look at some statistics:
The statistics clearly depict how effective and fruitful personalization has been or can be for eCommerce businesses. You can create a unique customer experience by:
- Understanding your audience and their behavior
- Identifying and recommend products based on content similarity
- Creating different experiences for defined user segments
- Indulging in 1:1 personalization (if possible) by creating different user-profiles and uniquely tailoring the experience.
Now that we have mentioned some of the most effective and trending sales ideas for Halloween, it’s important to answer the whys. Here’s an insight:
Why Should I Optimize My Store for Halloween 2021?
1. Huge Market Share
Goes without saying but eCommerce has taken the retail market by storm. It is no longer a luxury but a necessity for businesses that seek to grow. According to Statista, retail eCommerce sales worldwide amount to 3.53 trillion US dollars and will reach 6.54 trillion US dollars by 2022.
With such a vast share, it is important for you to expand your business online and adopt sales ideas for Halloween that increase your customer base, enhance your brand image and enhance profits.
2. Ease of Time
With hectic and packed schedules, people are always running out of time. Whether it’s business meetings, work timings, family gatherings, or simply household chores, the majority of the people barely get time to visit stores and shop. In such cases, online shopping can be the savior as it can provide them with the relief of shopping from anywhere, anytime.
Whether it’s 2 in the night or a bus ride, people can connect with you and buy anything they want online; only if you optimize your store well with Halloween sales ideas. This, in turn, benefits both the parties: customers with an easy, quick, and hassle-free shopping experience and you with a great customer base.
3. Customer Retention
Having dissatisfied or unhappy customers might be the worst nightmare for you. Your business stands nowhere without customer retention. Fortunately, with festivals such as Halloween, you get a phenomenal opportunity to serve your customers with their favorite products. In other words, you can have an opportunity to fulfill your customers’ needs and demands – which is the key to customer retention. Luckily, implementing result-oriented Halloween promotion ideas can place you steps closer to your goal.
In addition to products and services, you can facilitate easy navigation, quick checkout, and secure payments to enhance user experience. Once customers are happy with your brand, they will return for another purchase – yet another factor to boost sales for Halloween 2021.
Besides, brand identity, business reputation, or customer satisfaction also form a part of the whys. It entirely depends on how you perceive each benefit and work towards it. Not to forget the sky-rocketing sales!
So, it’s your time to work hard and make it big. Halloween is around the corner, so don’t let store glitches hamper your holiday joy!
FAQs
Q.1 Not even a month left for Halloween; can I still prepare and optimize my store?
The answer is a big YES. You can still optimize and prepare your store for Halloween by following a set of Halloween promotion ideas and taking assistance from eCommerce experts who employ proven methodologies as well as tools to multiply your sales.
Q.2 Why should I optimize my online store for Halloween?
Optimizing your eCommerce store for Halloween is critical to enhancing your sales and revenue, along with other reasons, such as:
- Staying competitive
- Increasing conversion rates
- Enhancing customer satisfaction
- Building brand identity
- Retaining customers
Q.3 How can I encourage boost eCommerce sales for Halloween 2021?
You can adopt a bunch of Halloween sales ideas, including:
- Introduce unique, high-quality products
- Offer discounts or run promotions
- Personalize customer experience
- Provide seamless customer support
- Optimize your website
- Bring in Halloween themed products
Q.4 Do I need expert assistance?
Well, this entirely depends on your skills and requirements. However, it’s always a good idea to take assistance from experts as they take the load off your shoulders, implement proven sales ideas for Halloween and deliver exceptional outcomes at affordable prices.