8 Shopify Growth Strategies For Holiday Season 2024 (With Examples)

Introduction

The holiday season is an excellent time to grow your Shopify store. Most shoppers have a budget and the intention of purchasing something.

Your task?

Bring them to your store and deliver an amazing shopping experience so they buy from you instead of your competition.

This article will give you strategies for doing that. From making your store ready to handle the visitors to exploring new sales channels, we’ve covered it all.

Let’s discuss how to grow your store and ace the sales numbers this holiday season!

Why Invest In Shopify Growth Strategy For the Holiday Season?

Now, many store owners may feel that preparing for the holiday season is a daunting task.

Some may even avoid making store changes or implementing holiday season strategies, fearing the additional costs.

But that can be a mistake. Here are 6 reasons why you shouldn’t ignore your store’s growth this holiday season:

Boosted Sales & Conversions	This is the core benefit of all the efforts – utilizing the season to boost your immediate sales. With store revamping, you enhance the buyers’ experience and help them push their carts through the checkout page.
Growth On Social Media	Aggressive marketing on social media platforms can help your businesses big time. It can even reduce your reliance on search engines and contribute to the brand’s growth.
Data Collection	The high digital footfall is your opportunity to gather data that you can use for business growth. You can even increase conversion rates by using our popup tool, Wizpop . Use it to create engaging popups and offer discounts people can avail of by entering their email and/or mobile numbers.
Increased Brand Loyalty	Holiday season is your chance to hook visitors with stellar customer service and turn them into loyal customers. If you deliver a great shopping experience, there’s potential to convert one-time shoppers into long-term revenue.
Understanding Holiday Season Behavior	Preparing for the season will give you insights into seasonal consumer behavior. This can give you valuable insights into better serving the customers and being even more prepared for the next season.
Competitive Edge	Investing in the holiday season strategy will give you a significant edge over your competitors. Shoppers today have many options. They’ll prefer a store offering the best shopping experience and services. Let that be yours.

Truthfully, the benefits are many. A strategic approach can significantly boost your sales and set up your store for success even after the season ends.

Let’s explore how to do that.

Boost Shopify Sales With These Proven Strategies!

The holiday season is around the corner. Implement these changes to ensure that your store makes the most of it.

Check Your Store’s Speed

Slow load times will KILL your sales.

You can lose 32% of the traffic if your site’s load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. That’s a heavy loss for your store. Hypothetically, if you could do just one thing for your store, it should be this – reducing your load time. Ideally, getting it under 1 second.

There are several tools to audit your site’s speed. You can use Shopify’s site auditing tool to know your site’s current standing.

Enter the necessary details, and you’ll know about website’s current standing.

This tool comprehensively analyzes your site’s load time on different devices. It will also tell you how your competitors are performing and suggest ways to increase your site’s speed.

Generally, here’s what can help you lower the speed:

• Compressing the images.
• Implementing lazy load for your store.
• Minify the store’s codes where possible.
• Check for broken links and dead pages.
• Removing outdated and unnecessary apps.
• Disable fancy features that you don’t need – (animations, heavy videos, etc.)
• Build accelerated mobile pages for faster load times and improved mobile experience.

The good thing → Shopify stores load faster than other platforms, such as WooCommerce or BigCommerce.

However, sometimes, things can get tricky because of a heavy theme or certain customizations. In such scenarios, you should consult the experts to get things on track.

Also, test your store thoroughly for 404 error pages and load times – these problems can severely damage your sales during the holiday season.

Once these basics are handled – it’s time to jump to other important things.

Display The Holiday Spirit

If you have the budget or expertise, consider changing your store’s design for the holiday season. This plays a role in improved user experience.

It’s attractive and a fantastic opportunity to make your brand design stand out.

For example, if you tweak your site for Christmas and put a simple animation for snowfall, it’ll look so good.

Ultimately, the changes will depend on your business model and your products. To give you an idea, here are some examples:

You can look for inspirations online and make the desired changes for your Shopify store.

Caution : Some design changes can impact the store's functionality. It’s highly advised that you avoid eleventh-hour changes without professional supervision and ensure everything is tested thoroughly to avoid any mishaps.

Plan Out Unique Promotions

Make “value for money deals” that people can’t resist.

As mentioned – people are ready to purchase and already have a budget. They'll buy from you if they see something worthwhile in your store.

And focus on the big picture → Holiday season discounts aren’t for one-time sales. They can help you get repeat buyers if you plan the long game.

Decide your deals and discounts, then post promotional content on your website.

Here are some examples:

These are examples of promotional posters. They are put on the front page to immediately generate buyers’ interest.

You can even offer flash discounts via popups, as shown in the example below.

Surprise discounts via popups can really motivate people to make a purchase. For instance, someone visits your store and, 30 seconds into browsing, sees a popup saying that the first order is flat 30% off. They’d immediately get excited to buy something.

Use our tool, Wizpop, to create interesting discount and promotional popups to get the emails & contact details of visitors.

These details can help you with newsletters, email marketing, and even sending promotional offers after the holiday season ends.

What deals you offer depends on your budget and the products you sell. But here are some ideas:

• Discounts on the final bill
• Incentivize the first purchase
• Limited-edition gifts for the occasion
• Free delivery for a certain order value
• A percentage discount on specific products
• Bundle offers (a good way to clear out stuck inventory)

Incentives are a great way to encourage people to purchase from you.

If the budget allows nothing, at least try offering free delivery. Statistics show that delivery charges can influence 80% of buyers' decisions to purchase something.

Quick note : You can also offer discounts for positive reviews on Google, app stores, or review platforms like judge.me

Highlight Trust Signals

Your store should appear credible to the shoppers.

Understand this – even though people are willing to purchase, they are still cautious about spending money online.

Stats show that more than half of European citizens are concerned about their online data. They fear it could be used in harmful ways.

So, your store must appear credible enough for shoppers to punch in their card details with your store.

Some common indicators of trust include:

• Legitimate customer reviews.
• Ratings on different platforms.
• Credible payment gateways like Shopify payments, Stripe or Paypal.
• Clear return policy for people to know they won’t be scammed.

Your page designs must clearly display these trust indicators so people can purchase with peace of mind.

Social proof is one of the easiest ways to make people trust your Shopify store. If you have positive testimonials and ratings, put them on your landing pages.

From the home page to the checkout page.

It will help your store big time, especially during the upcoming holiday season.

Attract Traffic From Multiple Channels

Don’t rely solely on organic traffic for sales, even if the store is ranking well.

And if your store isn’t ranking high on SERPs, it’s unlikely that you’ll rank in a couple of weeks.

So, utilize other platforms for more sales in the holiday season. Market your products on Facebook, Instagram, or even LinkedIn, and share links to your landing pages. Traffic coming in from multiple sources can significantly boost your sales.

The key here is to make your messaging attractive. Share exclusive deals and offers that’ll motivate people to visit your site. Check out some examples below:

Your attractive ads can drive traffic to your website, generating revenue. If the budget allows, a paid ad strategy can also increase sales.

Clean Checkout Page

Don’t let a complex checkout process turn potential sales into abandoned carts this holiday season.

Make the process as easy as you can. For example – allowing guest checkout instead of making account creation mandatory.

It’s important because 22% of visitors can abandon carts if the checkout process is complex or long.

For most products, the ideal checkout page should only require basic details like name, contact number, email address, and shipping details. It should then move to payment options.

So, unless your product requires more details, you should avoid adding extra fields.

Several stores give shoppers options to change their choices. This can backfire because end-moment indecision can make people back out and you’d lose your sales.

If you absolutely have to, you can add a “Commonly purchased with this item” section where people can easily add complementary items. But make it super easy and limit the choices; otherwise, you could end up with abandoned carts.

Some helpful tips for your checkout:

• Offer multiple payment options
• See that there’s nothing suspicious about the page
• Set abandoned cart alerts – if people leave, they’ll immediately get notified

Checkout this example below:

Glossier is a cosmetics store. See how simple the page is and only has necessary fields. It also offers Express checkout which preloads all the information so the shopper can just pay and book the orders.

Remember, the checkout stage is where you can lose your shopper forever. Don’t put any hurdles in the way that can make the purchase difficult for your visitor. Simple checkouts is also one of the customer retention methods, so don’t ignore them.

Automate Email Marketing

This is your way of remaining in the minds of your shoppers and visitors.

Your email database is your goldmine for repeat sales and upsells. Set up automated email sequences to welcome clients and share promotional offers.

Also, set up an abandoned cart email sequence – whenever someone leaves at the last stage, try to bring them back via automated email sequences.

We’ve developed Wizpop to help stores build an email list in fun and engaging ways. Email is super important and can bring you some good last-minute sales.

For example – rolling out the end-moment Christmas offer can attract busy shoppers who forgot to buy a gift for some relative.

Key tip : Your email messaging should be on point. Convincing and interesting messages will help you convert people.

Stock Up For The Season

Stores often focus on getting orders but don’t manage the inventory. Result → order mismanagement.

The holiday season is crucial, and delays can result in someone’s event getting spoiled. Eventually, that puts your business reputation at stake.

It’s best to avoid that situation altogether.

Ensure that you have the necessary stock arrangements in place. Ideally, you should have some idea of demand based on previous years' data.

Implement all these strategies, and you will have a successful holiday season this year.

Final Words – Your Holiday Season Success in 2024

Your Shopify store’s growth in the holiday season relies on how strategic you are about it.

Numbers show that people can make anywhere between 4x to 10x of their routine sales in this season. However, you have to be well prepared.

And the most important thing is that your store loads fast and without glitches. Think of it this way – all the design and marketing efforts will flop if your store’s functionality is disturbed. Or it crashes unexpectedly because it wasn’t properly tested.

To ensure your Shopify store’s success get our experts to back your project. We help Shopify stores with whatever they need – from designing to optimization for conversion.

To discuss more and prepare for the holiday season, reach out immediately!