You must plan a holiday sale for your WooCommerce store as it’s the best time for your business. A huge chunk of your yearly sales will likely take place during the week leading to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and throughout the Christmas and New Year holidays.
So, it’s evident that you need proper preparation to meet the massive customer needs during this time. Create sales banners, make sure your store gives off a holiday vibe, and ensure a hassle-free shopping experience for your customers. All of these, however, can become overwhelming if you do not plan them thoroughly.
Read right through this article to learn how to plan a holiday sale making this season a successful one for your WooCommerce store!
Why Plan a Holiday Sale for Your WooCommerce Store?
One of the Reddit users recently shared that one of his blogs got a cosmic hit on the brink of a Black Friday sale. And the surge went all the way till the next day earning him $950!
So, imagine, if his blog (OLD) site can make this much alone from Adsense, how much it can bring your eCommerce store? You get the picture!
Nevertheless, most customers wait for the holiday season and Black Friday weekend all year long hoping to get the Best Holiday Deals and generous discounts on products. And every online store wants their share of this huge revenue generated in the holiday season.
But if you do nothing on your part, you are simply missing out on this huge opportunity.
Even being able to lure a small percentage of these customers can contribute immensely to the store’s yearly growth!
Holiday sales are, however, a great way to improve the site’s visibility even if the sales do not increase exponentially. Boost in sales leads to more traffic, increases your SEO score, and eventually reaches out to a larger audience.
10 Tips on How to Plan a Holiday Sale in WooCommerce Store
Just running a sale on your online store isn’t enough. Everybody is offering something all year long, especially, the online stores. So, you need to seize all the attention and differentiate your WooCommerce store from others.
From holiday banners, and coupons to exclusive discounts, you need to take a creative yet effective approach to attract the audience.
Below, find some ideas you can implement on your WooCommerce store for the holiday shopping season.
This is not a comprehensive list in any form. Maybe you can come up with an even better idea which is not explained here, and that’s even better. The main goal is to stand out among thousands of sites that are fighting for the same audience.
So, here it goes:
1. Create a Sale Landing Page on the WooCommerce Store
When it comes to holiday decoration, you must plan and adorn your WooCommerce Store with a stunning landing page.
The holiday Landing page shows all the offers your store is running on a single page. You can showcase all the discounts and coupons here. Thus, when a user clicks on something, it will take them straight to the offer page ensuring user experience.
However, WordPress has some great plugins for creating landing pages and banners for your WooCommerce store easily. Seedprod, Elementor, and OptinMonster are some great examples. All of these use a code-free approach, meaning you can drag and drop the page’s elements and customize them.
Here, I will show you how to use Elementor to quickly create a landing page on your WooCommerce store. You will find it in WordPress’s plugin directory. So search for Elementor and install it first.
If you’re confused about installing a plugin, then read our step-by-step guide on how to Install a WordPress Plugin.
Anyway, after successfully installing the Elementor, add a new page. To do that, click on Posts > Add New Page.
The default WordPress post editor opens up. But we want to do this on Elementor, right? Don’t worry, we’re not lost!
Just click on Edit with Elementor and the page builder’s customization panel will appear.
Now, click the folder icon and that opens all the templates built-in Elementor. Search for Landing Pages, and choose the design that you like.
Select the design and then press the Insert button to use it.
The tab on the right has many options to customize the individual elements of the landing page. You can add images, videos, blocks of a page, text size, colors, and many more. Elementor allows adding banners, and timers from other plugins using shortcodes. Add those too, to entice the users.
When everything looks okay, click the Update button. After this, the landing page will be ready.
That’s how easily you can add an attractive holiday landing page to showcase the sales and discounts of your WooCommerce store for the holidays.
2. Run Holiday Sales Email Campaign
Your WooCommerce store may already have an email newsletter, right? Then utilize that and take it a step forward by informing the users about the holiday sales event. You can let them know about existing products that they bought or items that remained in the cart and have yet to see the checkout. Or it can be items similar to what they were looking for!
MailChimp, WP Mail SMTP, Omnisend, and Automate WOO are some popular plugins that can run these campaigns for you. All of these come with eye-catching templates, integration with WooCommerce, powerful automation capability, and a user-friendly email editor.
When you make this specific recommendation, the customer will know you care about them. That can be a deciding factor behind their next purchase. and they are likely to purchase from you.
Above all, give them a constant reminder about the big sale on your site. Just do not send these emails too frequently. It may end up in the Spam folder or even worse, a user unsubscribing the email newsletter.
3. Create a Sales Countdown
You can also add a sale countdown on your WooCommerce store to show how long until the sale is over. Place the timer on a banner throughout the store or on the landing page.
Try to make it catchy and stand out. But do not make it too large or obvious that it will distract the users from the site’s products. You don’t wanna lose a sale for a banner hampering the user experience, right?
Anyway, creating a timer for your WooCommerce store is easy thanks to plugins like Thrive Ultimatum, OptinMonster, and Countdown Timer Ultimate. You can use a free plugin too, but the customization options will be limited.
So, let’s learn how easily you can create a countdown timer using a paid tool such as OptinMonster:
First download and install the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory.
Open the OptinMonster app page on a separate tab and click on Create a New Campaign.
Next, you have different options to put the counter on such as a banner, an inline block, or as a popup. Select that and then choose the design of the timer from different designs.
Name the timer and press Start building.
OptinMonster’s editor window should open now. Select a block and click on Countdown. Select the counter as Dynamic or Static depending on your preference. Give it a start and end time. Under the action tab, choose the timer’s action when the time runs out.
Press the Publish button and set the timer as Live. Then press the Save button.
When you reload your store, the timer appears. You can go back to the plugin’s page and make customizations if you feel the need to do so.
4. Offer Time-Limited Discounts
You can increase the customers’ intrigue by offering exclusive discounts for a limited time only. The products can be segmented to offer discounts on particular days, such as Black Friday. This increases the customers’ anticipation of a particular product.
Depending on how much discounts you are providing, this will definitely boost the revenue on the WooCommerce store.
However, e-mails and site-wide banners are helpful tools for marketing days before it leads up to an event. Some sites reveal the products that will be on sale while others maintain ambiguity. The latter is great when you want to build up an interest among your audience.
5. Add Holiday Themed Banners
Banners and pop-ups are a great way to get attention about the sales running in your store. Place a counter, discounts, and the last date of the sale to make the audience take notice. Giving the banner a holiday theme puts the icing on the cake making it perfect for the holiday season.
But make sure you are not making the banner too distracting. That can ward off potential first-time customers.
OptinMonster and Thrive Leads are some good WordPress banner plugins for eCommerce stores. They have a visual editor that makes the designing process effortless.
6. Prioritize Existing Customers
This is a great strategy to make recurring customers. If you provide additional discounts to those who are existing customers, this is sure to boost up the sales. You can send personalized emails to only those who have remained with your store over the years. This also helps build up a strong relationship.
Likewise, you can give a flat discount to first-time shoppers. This will encourage them to shop from you. Giving bonus goodies such as free shipping is a must during this season.
7. Offer Coupons
Even if you’re offering sitewide discounts on all products, giving away discount coupons will only increase your sales. Imagine someone casually visiting the site and seeing that you’re offering coupons when they sign up. They’ll be more likely to register and make a purchase from your WooCommerce store using the coupon!
Apart from that, introduce tiered coupons. Offer bigger discount coupons to those who brought more frequently from the store in the past year.
There are many good plugins for implementing coupons in your store. Advanced Coupons, Sellkit, and Smart Coupons are some of these.
Nevertheless, integrating a coupon plugin into your WooCommerce store is quite easy. Let me show you how to use Advanced Coupons to set up a coupon for the WordPress site. Just search for Advanced Coupons from the WordPress Plugin directory and install it.
You should see a Coupons tab on the left of your WooCommerce dashboard. Click on Add New and a form should open up.
Here, enter a coupon title to generate the coupon code and a small description of the discount.
Then, select Percentage cashback under Discount Type and enter the discount amount. Then click on Publish. Now you will have the coupon published in your store.
But that’s not all. You can set the coupon expiry date, products on which it can be applied, selected email accounts, and many more from the plugin options. There are even options to schedule the coupons, where they only show up at a certain date such as on Christmas or New Year.
So, explore it and customize the coupons according to your needs.
8. Provide Express and Free Shipping
People expect the products to reach them before the start of the holidays. As a store owner, you must make sure the shipping process is fast. This is a key to building a reputation for your store. If you can maintain this, people will know you have fast shipping time. This will convert the first-time buyers into recurring customers.
Even better, you can offer free shipping. Believe it or not, there are such audiences who will be more interested in buying products if the shipping fee is waived. A majority of these users are completely new to your site. So, you are getting a great opportunity to build a new user base.
All the coupon plugins we named earlier have the option to configure free shipping. Just go into their settings and enable the option next to Free Shipping. This will no longer add a shipping charge for your store’s products.
9. Run Holiday Ads for Your Store
The Adsense for your online store must reflect the offers that are going on. If you can show the store’s discounts and coupons, this increases the chance that a user will click on the ad. Compelling ads are more likely to increase the click-through rate (CTR) compared to something boring.
So, ensure that you have already prepared separate ads for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year Holidays. There are advanced scheduling options that enable these ads to go live on the assigned dates. Once properly configured, you don’t even have to worry about it. The target customers will know when a sale is going on.
10. Give Your Store a Holiday Makeover.
It’s the holiday season. And it’s obvious that you decorate your site with a holiday vibe!
Changing the store’s outlook to reflect the holidays will give off a good vibe to anyone who lands here. This will amplify the user experience when browsing the entire store.
Do a small makeover like changing the background, adding a Christmas-themed logo, adding jingle music, Santa Claus, changing the font color with something fun, and so on.
However, avoid changing the entire look of the store, as that can be detrimental. Existing users may not relate to your site anymore and you will lose valuable customers.
Instead, use a Christmas variation of your existing theme if that’s available. Thus, the changes will be subtle and the site will retain its original look. You can easily implement this by going to Themes from the WordPress Dashboard and activating the festive design.
Christmasify or Christmas Greetings are two of those plugins that can help you spread the holiday spirit and bring festive to the web!
How to Prepare Your WooCommerce Store For Holiday Sale?
You add a holiday landing page, decorate banners, set a sale countdown, spread the holiday spirit, and such. And all of these paid off and your site gets a massive traffic hit! But what if your site isn’t ready to handle all the extra traffic during the holiday season?
That would be the worst holiday nightmare for your WooCommerce store, right?
That’s why it’s important that you also work on the site’s maintenance. Make sure that every little feature is working correctly. In short, your store needs to be running to the best of its abilities.
So, here are some checklists that you need to work on for your store before the sale starts:
Scale up Hosting
Since you’re running a holiday sale, your site may get hit by sudden traffic boosting. If the servers cannot handle that, the store will crash frequently.
So, switching to a higher-tier hosting plan with more bandwidth is what you need.
Hosting providers these days allow you to scale up to a higher plan with more powerful servers. Check if your hosting provider has this option available and make the switch days before the sale starts.
If you’re confused about the hosting choice, I recommend learning how to choose the best WordPress hosting.
However, you would normally want to check how the store performs on the new plan and see if everything is working properly as before. If the test drive goes well, then your store will handle the extra traffic with ease.
Test the Checkout Process
Ensure that the store processes the coupons and discounts properly. If these work, you will retain valuable customers. Otherwise, you’ll lose them!
Also, try keeping the popular payment gateways such as Paypal, Venmo, Google Pay, Apple Pay, etc. available for checkout. That way someone having a different mode of payment won’t go shop somewhere else.
Lastly, don’t forget to check if your SSL certificate is valid and working properly. These are critical for making secure transactions and gaining customers’ trust. So, double-check them.
Optimize Store Speed
Sometimes websites load slowly. You must identify what causes your website to load slowly now more than ever during the holiday season. The site should have fast loading times. To ensure this, make sure the site is running the latest versions of WordPress, PHP, and WooCommerce. All the plugins and themes need to be updated as well. Finally, make sure the CDN and cache servers are configured properly.
All of these are critical to the responsiveness of your store. Once these work correctly, your store will super fast load and cater to audiences worldwide without major hiccups.
Secure Your WooCommerce Store
People sometimes worry whether WordPress is secure or not for online stores. That’s a valid concern. And during the holiday season when your store gets the maximum exposure, the concern becomes fear. For that, you need to secure your WooCommerce store to its highest.
For that, Firewalls and security plugins must be installed and need to be running the latest version. The same is true for Malware scanners. Run scans regularly and check the security score every day. If any issue pops up in the app, resolve it immediately.
Read our useful guide on how to remove malware from your WordPress website to learn more about securing your website during the sales peak!
Let the Holiday Sales Begin!
Now you know how to plan a holiday sale for your WooCommerce store. One thing is clear, proper planning and preparation will ensure you will be prepared for the huge influx of orders that will be on your way. If you can keep up the customer satisfaction throughout the season, no wonder your profits will continue to soar.
So, waste no more time and get the preparations started. Wishing you all the best and may you have a remarkable holiday season ahead.