The holiday season is here, and for e-commerce brands, it’s crunch time.
If sales so far have been slower than you hoped, don’t panic. Even at this late stage, there’s still room to make impactful changes that can turn your peak season around.
Following our successful webinar – How to Win Big This Peak Season: Expert Tips to Crush the Holidays! – we’ve gathered the best actionable tips from industry experts to help you maximize your holiday sales with last-minute optimizations.
From adding new social channels to extending your promotions, these four practical steps will help you make the most of peak season.
1. Activate a TikTok shop – and add ONE key product
TikTok can be a game-changing channel for retailers at this time of year. It offers a unique opportunity to reach new audiences, build brand awareness and drive sales – even once the holiday season is in full swing.
During our webinar, Ben Muir, CEO at Unsociable – one of the UK’s top rated TikTok shop partners – revealed that launching a single, high-priority product can be sufficient to start seeing results on TikTok, making it a viable last-minute strategy for peak season.
Ben said: “There’s a ton of brands and retailers that haven’t activated TikTok shop yet, and it’s just such an enormous opportunity – particularly during peak season.
“If you want to set up on TikTok shop, then there are quick and easy ways to do it. We launched one brand on TikTok in January which scaled within a couple months to more than six figure revenue.
“And the good thing is you don’t need to launch your full catalog. We recommend starting with one product.
“So think about one product that you want to push for Christmas and get that on there. If you go viral, you’ll get brand awareness too!”
2. Focus ad spend on high-profit products
When investing in advertising over peak season, it can be hard to ensure you’ll get good ROAS.
Hannah Herlihy Lowe, Head of Agency Partnerships at Conjura – an e-commerce analytics platform – emphasizes the importance of curating product feeds across your ad platforms to focus on high-profit or high-LTV (lifetime value) products.
This strategy ensures ad spend is directed toward items most likely to generate substantial revenue, maximizing return on investment during the busiest time of year.
Hannah says: “Ad platforms are becoming more and more unpredictable. You don’t necessarily know what Google, for instance, is going to spend your money on or which products it will focus on.
“My one tip for peak season would be to curate the products that you’re feeding into your ad platforms to focus on those which are highly profitable or get the most LTV customers, depending on your goals.”
3. Prepare an Overstock Management Plan for January
If your peak season sales have fallen flat, there’s a good chance you’ll be left with excess stock as you enter the new year.
At Inventory Planner, we know that excess stock is dangerous for retailers because it ties up cash and takes up valuable space before ultimately being liquidated, often at a loss.
Will Pritchard, Solution Adviser at Inventory Planner by Sage, suggests thinking about a discounting strategy for surplus items as a proactive measure to avoid carrying excess stock into January. This could form part of an Prepare an Overstock Management Plan for January.
Will says: “When you have excess product, it’s a good idea to sell it at a lower margin because it frees up capital that otherwise might be lost.”
Developing targeted retention campaigns should also be part of the plan, helping turning one-time holiday shoppers into repeat customers.
Hannah explains: “Customers that are acquired at peak are notoriously discount hunters that might not come back again until next year. My challenge to brands is to gather as much info as possible about that discount hunter so you can curate your follow-up emails to them in the coming weeks and months so they become that second time purchaser sooner.”
4. Extend Black Friday promotions to spread sales volume
Waiting for the 29th to launch your promotion? That could be a mistake.
James Ewens – E-commerce Director at Green Feathers – recommends his strategy of running Black Friday promotions over a longer period to alleviate operational pressures.
Starting promotions earlier can appeal to early shoppers while ensuring smooth logistics and better customer service.
James says: “I’m a big believer in trying to spread the pressure of Black Friday as much as possible.
“At all the brands I’ve worked with, we’ve extended our Black Friday window – so we might do the whole of November, or we might start it in the second week of November.
“It’s a great way to remove that pressure from our warehouse, from our supply chain, from our deliveries. It means our customer service team doesn’t have a crazy four-day period where everything’s on fire. We wanna transfer that pain out as much as possible.
“Customers just want a deal. They don’t care whether they get it on Black Friday or whether they get it on 14th November.”
Want more sales-boosting tips, plus insights on the latest peak season trends? Download your copy of The Festive Fix – our free guide to peak season for online retailers.