How Can You Boost Your E-shop Sales Before Christmas?

Radovan Uhliar

People shop like crazy before Christmas. So, how do you bring them to your e-shop? And which form of advertising will be the most profitable for you? Look at these tips, of what our customers watch out for and what works best for them.

TOP THINGS TO CHECK BEFORE RUNNING THE ADS

Christmas shopping craze starts as soon as September, therefore start preparing your Christmas campaign as soon as possible.
Minimize the effort of your customers to buy gifts (and therefore increase your revenues) by creating a specific section for the holiday season, i.e. Landing Pages for Christmas or a Gift Advisor page.
Make sure that nothing is blocking your customers from completing a purchase. I.e. a shopping cart too long or too complicated, un-necessary registrations, e-mail verifications or required phone numbers.

HOW TO RUN A SUCCESSFUL FACEBOOK CHRISTMAS CAMPAIGN

Targeting

It’s paramount that you start your campaign as soon as possible because as time progresses, more and more advertisers will join the advertising competition. That will cost you up to several times more money in advertising costs. It’s nothing special for CPC to rise up to 2-3x higher and in the ad massage, your message may also be much harder to get to the potential customer.

We suggest, that you start with broad targeting with several target groups (you can utilize Facebook Insights to create them, by analyzing your web visitors for up to the last 180 days). In time, you’ll find out which target groups work and which don’t for your specific case. If you advertise in several countries, never deduce the performance of specific target groups in one country based on results from a different country.

If you’ve started early enough, in the next phase, when your competitors are trying to catch up on lost time (typically somewhere around October 30th), you should focus on custom audiences. Specifically:

Customers who purchased goods in the last year. These customers are a very valuable source and you should primarily reach out to them via email. You can, however, use them to create lookalike audiences which you can then narrow using segment related interests. Don’t forget to exclude customers who return goods often to secure the cleanest possible base data.
If you have enough clients, create lookalike audiences only from top customers - be that based on the number of orders or their size.
If you used a video or canvas in your previous campaigns, you can target people who viewed a certain part of the video, opened a canvas or clicked inside it (last 365 days); consider also creating custom audiences from people who engaged with your content

In the last phase just before Christmas Eve, we suggest focusing on communication towards super focused custom audiences. Don’t forget to mention your USPs and advantages compared to your competitors and what’s the soonest you can deliver the orders. You will, therefore, create a needed push on your customers, who know you already, to complete their order. On the other hand, in the last couple of days before Christmas, shoppers are less likely to compare prices.

ROI Hunter Pro Tips for Targeting:

Maybe you don’t have all your custom audiences on Facebook. Or you have better segmentation data available in your CRM (for example based on product sales, location or segment specific factors). Rather than manually downloading and uploading these lists to Facebook, you can use ROI Hunter to automatically connect to your CRM. Therefore, whenever data in your CRM changes, the change will automatically appear in your Facebook Ads Audiences as well.
Did you know, that 15-20% of visitors to your website bounce within the first 10 seconds? Imagine the countless budgets you spend on remarketing your website to these visitors, although they have a minimal to zero probability of returning and completing an order. With ROI Hunter Refined Audiences you can set up an advanced filter for remarketing and for example remarket only to those visitors who spent over 10 seconds on the website.

Creating beautiful ads

After setting up high-quality target groups you should focus on how your ad will look. Don’t be afraid to design your ads into a Christmas design or theme and use emojis to bring up emotions. Make sure to highlight your USPs and experiment with formats. Finally, don’t forget that by using Canvas or Videos you can create custom audiences for future campaigns! :)

ROI Hunter Pro Tips for Creatives:

We understand that turning ads for all the products in your Product Feed into Christmas design may be complicated. Further placing group-specific information into the visuals (i.e. discounts) makes this task straight up impossible. That’s why we’ve created ROI Hunter Template Editor using which you can create beautiful conversion-worthy ads dynamically for all of your products in a matter of minutes - yourself.
Sometimes it’s hard to say, which creative works best for which target group. Rather than spending large budgets and time on manually running A/B tests, why not utilize the ROI Hunter Dynamic Creative Ads feature and have us run the test for you, automatically?
A picture says more than a thousand words. And a video says more than a thousand pictures :). But creating a video for each of your products is implausible. Or, it was implausible. With ROI Hunter Video Editor you can create conversion worthy videos for all of your products in a matter of minutes and place them in Facebook Newsfeed, Instagram Stories, and various other placements.

Optimization of ads

It may be a huge time-killer, trying to optimize your running campaigns with dozens or even hundreds of ad sets. You should, therefore, use Automatic Rules in Ads Manager, using which you can free yourself from many manual tasks. A typical example of that is switching off Ad Sets with CTR falling below a set value or with CPC above a set value. If you think your campaigns are delivering well, don’t forget to check your ROAS, which should be the main KPI for your performance marketing campaigns.

ROI Hunter Pro Tips for Optimization:

Running large amounts of ad sets for various market segments or in various countries or regions? Analyzing and optimizing them in Ads Manager may be very clumsy. Using ROI Hunter Virtual Accounts you can create an additional layer on top of Campaigns to group them based on whatever criteria you decide.
Connect your 3rd party data into ROI Hunter, for example, Google Analytics data, your CRM data or Mobile Measurement Partners, if your e-shop uses a mobile app. This will allow to optimize your ads based on more advanced data.
Ever felt like native automatic rules in Ads Manager aren’t advanced enough? Than use ROI Hunter Advanced Automatic Rules which can run automatic tasks on your campaigns based on 3rd party data or only specifically when you want them to run!

The most important season is after Christmas

People with money left after Christmas, or those who saved money to purchase expensive products in the after-Christmas season are more and more. Therefore be ready to have offers in the post-Christmas period as well. Also think with the fact, that many people create “New Year Resolutions” and you may be able to connect your products to such resolutions.

This article was prepared in co-operation with SEO agency eVisions Advertising: Source