3 Amazing Tricks To Beat Low Sales Season On Online Ecommerce Stores

By |Updated Date : May 06, 2021 | 1842 views | Sep 11, 2016
  • 3 Amazing Tricks To Beat Low Sales Season On Online Ecommerce Stores

As an online store owner, what is your most sought after goal?

“Conversions and more conversions!”

Right?

Whether you are running a small online ecommerce store or an enterprise ecommerce website, to be successful you need a constant flow of customers and regular conversions.

And how do we achieve this?

Simply by making our customers buy more often! But is this as simple as it sounds?

Definitely not!

We know for a fact that you need to prime and polish your offers constantly to make them appear psychologically more rewarding to your customers. If your ecommerce marketing and sales strategy is not planned with due diligence and after careful calculations, you might end up burning your profits despite getting higher conversions.

Add to this the fact that no business can keep getting the same volume of sales throughout the year( unless you are selling daily necessities, but there too you have peak and low sales seasons). So, what’s the trick to turn slack periods into opportunities to boost your online sales? How can you devise an ecommerce marketing campaign that incentivizes your customers and tempts them to order immediately?

How To Get More Conversions On Your Ecommerce Website During The Slack-Season

Be it your loyal customers or the new one, a well-planned ecommerce marketing strategy can engage them better during your low-sales season. All you need to do is to have a mix of plans and strategies in place to engage and convert the visitors on your online ecommerce store.

Wonder how can you entice your customers to buy often and purchase bigger order sizes? 

How about using a bit of psychological hacks?

Yup we are talking about using a combination of:

  • FOMO(Fear Of Missing Out)

  • Loss Aversion( what your customers might lose if they don’t accept your offer)

  • Scarcity 

Simply put, incorporating time-limited offers in your ecommerce marketing strategy can compel your customers to respond immediately. What’s more it also helps you get rid of your old inventory and makes room for the in-season fresh stock.

Let's explore the best marketing hacks to set your cash counters ringing even during the slack season

1. Deal Of the day

Offering “Deal of the Day” on limited products for a limited time period has become one of the most used ecommerce marketing tactics by online businesses. Also known as, Flash Sales, these types of deals are most clickable and have the best conversion rate.

You can create a page exclusively to promote a fresh deal each day on your ecommerce website. Restricting your deal for a limited time (a day or few hours) psychologically attunes your target audience to buy during the given time frame.

Yup, you are playing on the FOMO and Loss Aversion sentiments here!

How To Implement

To implement a successful flash sale or limited period offer you need to do the following;

  • Create a variety of single-use coupons with end dates

  • Offer specific discount codes on products, categories or order volume

  • Give an additional early-bird discount to a limited number of buyers

  • Offer assured gifts on certain order volume for a limited period

  • Announce price increase after a specific date

  • Offer personalized discounts on abandoned cart items

These are some time tested marketing tricks to boost sales during any season. However, to implement these you need an advanced e commerce platform that offers the features and tools to implement your plans. Also, these tools should be easy enough to be used and offer the scope of customization for your unique requirements. 

StoreHippo top ecommerce platform comes with a host of inbuilt marketing tools to help you launch a successful marketing campaign. Using the powerful discount engine and the intuitive admin dashboard of StoreHippo you can easily set a variety of discounts and limited period offers within minutes. You can even build dynamic marketing pages for different user groups on your online ecommerce store.

What’s even better is that you get inbuilt drag and drop tools to customize your design themes according to your latest offers. You can even analyze how each of your discount or coupon codes worked during a promotion.

The whole idea is to make it easy for you to plan and execute your marketing strategy, analyze the results and change the marketing mix to get maximum ROI and higher conversions even during the slack-sale periods. All your online ecommerce store needs is an innovative marketing strategy and StoreHippo tools to support them.

2. Time-specific free shipping

There is something about the word “FREE” which instantly glues humans to explore the offer in detail. 9 out of 10 customers say that free shipping is one of the top incentives to buy from an ecommerce website. Also, 93% of online customers buy more if they get a free shipping offer.

No wonder FREE SHIPPING has been a favourite marketing policy for the online ecommerce stores. To make it even better and to pack a punch to this offer it can be made time-limited. Yup, we are playing with scarcity again;)

Let us see some common ways to make this work for your business:

How To Implement

  • Offer Free shipping on orders beyond a certain threshold value

  • Get more orders by advertising limited period free shipping

  • Offer free shipping during slack hours like orders placed early in the morning or before 12 a.m.

  • Offer free shipping on certain products, categories or merchants

  • Upsell products by offering free shipping on buying additional products

  • Offer geo-location specific free shipping on your ecommerce website

This offer can be enhanced further by offering same-day delivery for free. Just remember to add a time frame to make your audience act on it immediately. A combination of these offers would help you get a bigger order within a short time frame. If you use this strategy frequently in your  online ecommerce store’s promotions, you can ensure frequent conversion whatever be the season.

However, a word of caution here, this strategy can boomerang if you do not have a streamlined supply chain in place for your ecommerce website.

To make Your FREE shipping a success you need to collaborate with trusted ecommerce logistics partners that offer seamless deliveries. Alternatively, you can also build your fleet of delivery boys to manage super fast hyperlocal deliveries. 

Not sure how you can achieve it ?

StoreHippo advanced e commerce platform has you covered! StoreHippo has 60+ integrated logistics partners and  shipping aggregators to help you streamline your supply chain. The automated logistics solutions help you reduce manual work and automates your shipping process end-to-end. You can sell omnichannel and ship your orders from various customer touchpoints using the simple one click logistics solution ShipKaro. 

StoreHippo advanced ecommerce platform also offers you an inbuilt delivery management module to help you onboard and manage your own fleet of delivery agents. StoreHippo’s discounted shipping solutions(with selected partners) enables you to offer FREE shipping without compromising your profit margins.

3. Limited stock offers

We have seen umpteen real-life examples where shortage of certain products creates a beeline for the purchase of that commodity. Wonder why? Yes, it's our fear of missing out at play yet again. Similarly, you can use stock shortage as an effective selling technique during the slack-sale season on your online ecommerce store.

You can easily create an illusion of stock shortage which makes your customers perceive the commodity as dearer and hence more rewarding to purchase. All you need to do is do a bit of analysis of your sales patterns and show the limited stock offer to the right customer groups.  

How To Implement

You can use one of the following methods to achieve this:

  • Show the reducing stock quantity for a product e.g. “only 3 left, buy now”

  • Show Limited edition products, it in itself implies the stock is not going to last long

  • Offer best selling products with a low stock warning on the product pages of your online ecommerce store

  • Create dynamic marketing page advertising your catalogue of low stock products

  • Create mailers around low stock products to keep customers informed

  • Show a products as “already in cart of 26 customers”, to indirectly create a sense of shortage

Sounds very interesting? But to implement this you would also need an advanced e commerce platform that has inbuilt tools to action out these strategies. StoreHippo advanced e commerce platform comes with inbuilt tools to help you implement these strategies on your online store. 

With StoreHippo you get inbuilt “out of stock” feature. You can also tweak the customizable backend and create new entities or extend the existing ones. By tweaking the backend you can implement these marketing tricks to urge your customers to complete their checkout quickly. 

StoreHippo fully integrated ecommerce platform also allows you to integrate seamlessly with the best-in-class marketing software to build innovative ecommerce marketing solutions for your brand. 

As mentioned earlier, you can create dynamic marketing pages in no time and promote a group of products as going “out of stock” soon. You can notify your customers about these products by sending mailers with a link to the page or send real-time notifications while they are browsing your site.

Conclusion

Creating urgency and scarcity are undoubtedly the most powerful marketing tools to increase your sales. However, when you use it on your online ecommerce store to plan a regular income even during the slack season you can get some wonderful results. 

However, to make it work really well you need to have various aspects of your business like product stock, supply and delivery chain etc. well coordinated. Do not create a scenario where you are unable to timely deliver the orders that you receive during the sales. Use scarcity wisely and you get the desired outcome from this tried and tested ecommerce marketing strategy.

StoreHippo, the next-generation e-commerce platform brings a host of tools and features to help you grow your business. Along with the above mentioned tools, StoreHippo advanced e commerce platform also has 300+ inbuilt features to help you run and grow your business.

Want to explore the features of StoreHippo? Explore them now by creating your 14-day free trial store.

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