E-Commerce Sales Strategies During Off-Season Slump: 8 Best Tips to Adapt
7 Oct 2016
E-Commerce Sales Strategies During Off-Season Slump: 8 Best Tips to Adapt
Wondering how to cope with the off-season dip and smoothly function towards the e-commerce store optimization?
Every business is exposed to a slump during the off-seasons. Whether it is small or a huge branded e-commerce website, the sales are meant to fall when the peak seasons recede.
Keeping this in mind, you need to work on some e-commerce sales strategies to knock out the off-season slump and promote the e-commerce website.
Making a successful e-commerce website involves few tricks to adapt with the off-season slump and boost the sales. What are they? Let’s discover them in detail.
1) Take full opportunity of the peak season and grow your customer database
Your e-commerce website tends to veer maximum online traffic during the peak seasons. So it is this time when you should focus on growing your customer database. You can make a long list of the past customers and the ones who have expressed their interest in your website, which in turn, would enable you to remain in their minds for all seasons.
Insert calls-to-action (CTAs) in your website for better e-commerce store optimization which could enable you to stay in touch with your customers by the subscription to an email list or blog. You can also keep them glued on to your website by releasing some offers or hot deals that would retain the customers throughout, irrespective of the off seasons.
You can add these CTAs to your e-commerce website homepage, blogs, social media accounts, service/product pages and your resource center. Trying to grow your customer database when the so-called peak seasons prevail is much easier than striving to maintain a weaker customer list in the offseason slump. So basically your entire off-season sales depend on this trick of growing the customer database.
2) Add unique content to your website with an off-season twist
Add content to your e-commerce website that is unique and has an off-season twist in it. In order to boost the off-season sales of your website, you need to create content that would portray the off-season marketing in it.
Your content should be compelling enough for captivating the customers, whether it is the peak season or the off-season. Suppose you are the owner of a berry farm, winters are definitely going to slow down your business a bit. But you still have an opportunity to keep your customers engaged. Some unique blog posts on ‘a quick recipe to making a smoothie with frozen berries’ or ‘how to make your fruit last all year’ is sure to pull the crowd. This way you can nurture long-term relationships with your prospective customers that are sure to last irrespective of the season!
3) Customize your e-commerce website according to seasons
If you want to steer the maximum online traffic to your website even during the off-season, then you need to customize your website according to the seasons of the year. The website designs should be altered depending on the seasonal impact. If you do not wish to change the total setup of the e-commerce website, you can at least add seasonal pop-ups to your site.
This considerably affects the consumer behavior. They tend to visit your website often to keep a tap on the seasonal pop-ups, seasonal offers, and deals.
4) Go social
Definitely, your customers do not vanish during off seasons. So it is extremely important for you to maintain your social media pages throughout the year in order to keep a grasp on the consumers. They might not be shopping from your e-commerce store but would definitely love to see any updates from your store in their Facebook news feed, makes sense?
You can post blogs, images of few new products, launch seasonal offers and hot deals on your brand’s social media pages so that the customers are aware of the fact that your company has not become obsolete yet.
Defend the off-season slump by keeping your users engaged and updated on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn throughout the year.
5) Keep in touch through e-mail
Emails are a great way to keep in touch with your customers! Since off-season brings down the instance of frequent e-mails, you can stay in touch with the consumers by e-mailing some new offers, sending some newsfeed, sending the launching information for some new products, etc.
Obviously, this is not a peak season, and so keep it limited and respectful.
6) Create off-season hype
You need to create off-season hype to increase your e-commerce sales during this phase. No one wishes to buy fancy leather boots during the summer season. But people would kill to have a pair of those in the winters.
So you can create off-season hype by announcing such off-season sales or discounts which people can look forward to. This way you somehow manage to maintain the sales of your e-commerce website during the off-season.
7) Sale, sale, sale…
This trick always works. If you find your sales of the e-commerce dropping down, announce a sale. You will find consumers flocking your website within minutes and your e-commerce sales bounce back to the right place.
People tend to purchase more during any sale announced by the website, irrespective of peak season or off-season.
8) Loyalty program to the rescue
Loyalty program works wonders in pulling your old customers back to your store. It enhances the relation with the past customers and continues to maintain it. The implementation of a loyalty program would ease off stress a bit from your shoulders while you are trying hard to acquire new customers.
So now you have 8 best tips to adapt to the off-season slump in your e-commerce website. By implying these tricks you can build a successful e-commerce website. And when it comes to the sales strategies to build and implement, you should opt for the professional e-commerce website development services for your e-commerce store optimization.
Use the tricks and knock out the off-season slump!!!
