BFCM: 20+ Ecommerce Tips for Your Holiday Marketing Campaigns

16 min read

Oh my, it’s already November!

You get what it means for ecommerce merchants. The holiday season is coming. Sales. More sales than in the years before. So skipping the curtsey: let’s get ready.

Here are 20+ ideas for nailing your holiday marketing campaigns. If you have an online store with Ecwid by Lightspeed, all of them can be easily implemented, so make sure you’re using your store at full tilt.

Add a Scrolling Message to Your Homepage

Offering a great deal? Declare it immediately as someone comes to your online store.

To grab customers’ attention and bring the website to life, add a dynamic block with a scrolling message on the front page. By default, these messages showcase reviews, but you can customize them to highlight any promotion. Here are the step-by-step instructions.

A scrolling message on the New-Gen Instant Site

Keep in mind that this feature is available to New-Gen Instant Site users. To try out the New-Gen Instant Site, contact our Customer Care team.

Add a Special Offer Section to Your Homepage

To make sure your offers grab attention, create a special section to highlight exclusive deals. That way, when customers land on your home page, they can easily find seasonal sales, discount coupons, or even free delivery. This ensures they won’t miss out on any limited-time deals.

New-Gen Instant Site users can choose from various layouts of special offer sections — here’s how to do that.

If you’re using the legacy version of Instants Site, contact our Customer Care team to try out the New-Gen Instant Site.

Adding a “Special Offer” section to Ecwid Instant Site

Add a Slider with Offers to Your Homepage

A slider, or carousel, is like a cool little slideshow. It shows off one big image at a time, and you can make it go automatically or swipe through manually. Plus, there’s a snippet of text and a fancy call-to-action button. You can use a slider to really show off your special products, brag about all the brands you sell, or convince customers why they should pick your brand.

An example of a slider

Here’s how to add a slider in your Ecwid store.

Adding a slider is available to New-Gen Instant Site users. To try out the New-Gen Instant Site, contact our Customer Care team.

Add Special Offers to Category Pages

You can also add special offers to your category pages if your discount applies to a certain group of products. Go to your Catalog → Categories, click on your desired category, and add a description.

Deal description on the category page

Show Sale Prices in Your Store

If you’re going to offer steep discounts, make sure all the store visitors are aware of them. Show them what the price used to be before the sale and how much they can save now with “Compare to” prices.

Discount prices in Ecwid

Go to Settings → General → Cart and set up the manner your “Compare to” price will be displayed.

To set up the discount for each product, take the Catalog → Products route. Navigate to your product, find the “Pricing” section and set up the “Compare to” price. Save the changes.

Learn more about sale prices in Ecwid →

By the way, if your store is located in the EU, the EU Omnibus Directive requires you to display the lowest product price within the last 30 days. Such transparency enhances the shopping experience for your customers. If you’re not sure how to comply, we’ve got you covered! Here’s how to show customers the true value they are receiving during a sale.

Display a Promo Bar

If you’re using the New-Gen version of our Instant Site, you can easily add promo bars to its front page via dedicated announcement bar blocks — here’s how to do that.

A promo bar on the New-Gen Instant Site

To try out the New-Gen Instant Site, contact our Customer Care team.

Or, you can use apps like 20+ Promotional Sales Tools or Announcements bar. The apps offer numerous customization options, like colors, texts, fonts, and styles.

Run “Buy One, Get One Free” Promotions

There are many fans of the Buy-One-Get-One(-Free) type of sale. Ecwid makes it possible with the BOGO app from the Ecwid App Market. Get the app and set up the rules.

BOGO settings

We’ve talked about BOGO sales in detail in another blog post:

Offer Free Shipping

Free shipping is a bulletproof marketing strategy:

Source: eMarketer.com

You can set up free shipping for every order or for specific regions in Settings → Shipping & Pickup.

How to set up shipping in Ecwid →

To make the most of your free shipping offer, use it strategically. For example, offer it on orders over $50 and/or on nationwide shipping only.

At Ecwid, you can use apps like AOV Progress Bar or Free Shipping bar to encourage shoppers to add more products to their carts to get free shipping.

Encourage shoppers to buy more with the AOV Progress Bar app

Learn more: 6 Free Shipping Strategies and Their Alternatives

Add Popups and Banners

Imagine a lot of salespeople would work for your online store during the holiday sales. They’d push your deals right when a customer needs it:

welcoming newcomers with a special offer
catching those who are about to leave without a purchase with a nice discount
navigating customers to your bestsellers.

It’s great that you don’t need staff to do this job in your online store. Set up pop-ups for different customer actions: exit intent, scroll, time spent in store, etc. The 20+ Promotional Sales Tools will do the sales work for you.

A discount popup made with the 20+ Promotional Sales Tools app

Pop-ups can even hold an engaging contest. Launch the Scratch and Win pop-up to capture leads and grow fans in a fun way.

Offer Discounts on Order Subtotal

This type of sale is based on the expectation that people will buy additional stuff to reach a certain threshold to get a discount.

To run this promo successfully, you should have a good portion of repeat customers that already know your product and are open to ordering more of it.

Set up discounts on order subtotal in Promotions → Discounts.

How to set up discounts →

Set Up Bulk Discount Pricing

Give a hint to your customers that they can buy several gifts of the same type for good money.

Bulk discount pricing

To do that, set up bulk discount pricing. Every next item will be cheaper and Ecwid will automatically calculate the total discount in percent for even more impressive deals.

Create Discount Coupons

Ecommerce merchants love coupons for their flexibility. With their help, you can run a promo on many different terms:

Give a discount to repeat customers only
Give a discount depending on order subtotal
Offer free shipping on specific conditions and more.

It works like this: you set the rules when the coupon can be applied, Ecwid generates the coupon code (or you can create it yourself, for example, BLACKFRIDAY). Then you share the code on your website, on social media, personally via email, by chanting it in the streets, by dropping a bottle in the ocean — the distribution really is up to you, depending on who you want to reach.

rockabilly-bowling-shirts.com

You can limit coupons in time (e.g. active for 24 hours only) to run flash sales and last-minute deals.

How to set up discount coupons →

Tip: It’s so handy to create, enable, and stop your discounts on the go with the Ecwid Mobile app.

Offer Gift Wrapping

For free or for sale, gift wrapping offered together with a product is a time-saver. You can sell it as a separate product, or include it in Product Options.

Wrapping in Product Options

Push Your Deals at Checkout

Share offers and gift ideas at checkout with the Checkout Notices app. Use it also to notify customers about important shipping terms or holiday business hours.

Promo at the checkout

Offer Flexible Discounts Based on Cart Contents

Depending on what you sell and your holiday campaign goals, you may need to create more sophisticated discounts than just “50% off on everything”. For example, you probably want to offer a special price on shoe care products if they are bought with shoes in your store.

To make your discount apply only to certain products or product combinations, categories, cart amount, local customers, date, customer groups etc., check out the Advanced Discount Rules app.

Create flexible offers with the Advanced Discount Rules app

Highlight Items for Sale with Labels

With Product Ribbons, you can add labels to the products on sale and customize them as you want. Use “Hot”, “New”, “Sale”, “Sold Out”, or other custom labels to draw your holiday shoppers’ attention.

Learn more and set up: Get More Eyes on Your Store with Product Ribbons

Show Related Products

Showing related products on product pages or at checkout can increase the time customers spend in your store and result in a higher order value. If you sell supplementary products (e.g. razors and shaving cream), a ‘You May Also Like’ section is your sales machine.

Remind Visitors of Recently Viewed Products

The holiday sales frenzy can make customers distracted easily. There are so many deals out there, so many products to choose from. Follow them with the reminder of what products they just checked out as they are browsing your online store.

The Recently Viewed Products app is a free extension that helps you do just that. Choose where to show this section and the number of products you want to display.

Enable Social Selling Tools

Use social media to spread the word and drum up more people. Open a storefront on your Facebook page, sell on Instagram or TikTok to allow customers to buy without leaving their favorite social media.

To quickly share your product pics on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, turn to Ecwid Mobile.

Add a Linkup to Your Social Media Bio

Linkup is a free user-friendly link-in-bio tool. It allows you to create a mobile-friendly page with links to all your social profiles, work, content, and products. The latter is especially useful during the holiday season so that your followers can quickly find the products they need.

An example of a Linkup page

If you already have an Ecwid store, you can easily add any product from your catalog to your Linkup page — no need to create it again.

Plus, Linkup comes in handy if features like Facebook Shop or Instagram Shop are not supported in your country. This way, you can still sell on social media!

Create Urgency and Scarcity

There is a number of ways to cheer up your customers while they are browsing.

Add a countdown timer — because no one wants to miss a great deal. The Ecwid App Market offers the Countdown Timer Popup app. You can display such popup immediately, after a set period of time, on a page’s scroll down or upon site exit.

To create additional scarcity, show customers how much (or not so much) you have left in stock. Go to Settings → Design and enable to show stock to customers in the “Sidebar” section.

Last, choose not to hide products that are out of stock; seeing that some products are sold out creates additional Fear-Of-Missing-Out (FOMO). To show out of stock products, turn off the “Hide out of stock products” in your Ecwid admin, in the Settings → General → Cart & Checkout page.

By the way, you can also enable pre-orders for sold-out items. To start accepting pre-orders for a product, you need to indicate its stock in your Ecwid admin and set pre-orders as the out-of-stock behavior for this product. Once the stock hits “0”, the product automatically becomes available for pre-orders.

Advertise

If your marketing budget allows you to run paid ads, here’re some tools to help you out:

Remarketing and dynamic ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network with the Facebook Pixel (free!)
Automated Google Shopping Ads

Offer Gift Cards

A gift card is the single most requested present. Plus, 59% of gift card recipients will actually spend more than the amount on their gift card.

You can set up gift cards in your Ecwid admin → Catalog → Gift Cards. You can customize your gift card by changing its name, amounts, or image that will be used in the storefront.

Use Product Subtitles

With Product Subtitles, you can describe a product’s advantages right on the product list, for example, a special offer or services available (say, free shipping or free gift wrapping.)

Free offer in product subtitles Ecwid

With subtitles, a product’s benefits are visible right on your storefront, so that customers don’t have to open a product page for details. That helps your customers find the right product faster and brings attention to items with special offers.

Learn more and set up: Highlight the Value of Your Products With Product Subtitles