The holiday season is around the corner and eCommerce businesses have already started planning to capitalize on their online presence. Online presence requires investment and holiday season is the best time to get the return on this investment. Like other eCommerce businesses or online retailers, even print commerce or web to print businesses are also looking forward to making most of the holiday season. Here are top 7 ideas that will help print business to increase print orders for 2018 festive season:
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1. Cross Selling and Upselling
It’s definitely not a rocket science but stores or retailers are utilizing it to drive their sales during the holiday season. The average value orders go up when customers are presented with related items or orders that can be clubbed with already bought products. Also, clubbing of products makes complete sense. For example, someone buying candle lights holder can be presented with an option of buying t-lights, but make sure that you don’t make it compulsory.
2. Integrated marketing plan
Before holiday shopping season starts full-fledged, print online retailers need to put their entire 360-degree reach-out plan in place. Website visitors need to be tracked using cookies and send them reminders and notifications to buy gifts for the holiday season.
Engage them with on social media with content that helps them in reminding about your product. The content around social media needs to be fresh and according to the latest trends such as short videos, GIFs, and memes. B2C retailers can use Instagram stories, Snapchat, Facebook to promote various contests, offers and discounts. Web to print retailers can also use their website to put up various offer banners, discount leaderboards and promotional content to spice up their sales in the holiday and festive season.
Since email marketing is a very important piece of an integrated marketing plan, define objectives, type of content as per the objectives, and key metrics to be measured and improved for each campaign. It’s good to start awareness campaigns around three months before and keep on engaging the website visitors of this campaign with one or the other offering.
eCommerce technologies like Magento, Shopify, OpenCart, WooCommerce etc. also offers to provide various features in their Marketing and Promotional section. Some of these features like desktop notifications are very helpful in reminding customers about their shopping and increase sales.
Make sure your abandonment cart transaction emails are very well placed and working fine. According to a recent survey by Experian, transaction emails like pending shopping, order confirmation, shipping notices, tracking order receive 8th times as many opens as compared to the regular marketing emails.
3. Social Media Contests or Website Contests
Website contests are only effective if they are properly implemented and present something unique to the customers. web to print businesses should be engaged with Marketing agencies that have really good expertise in implementing such contests on various social media channels and other digital properties.
4. Leverage the Customer Generated Content
Customer generated content is a great way to advertise yourself and customer advocacy reassures that your brand is there to suffice customer needs with great products, services or another brand USPs. The customer generated content in form of testimonials, videos, photos etc. are a great way to attract more customers.
Customer generated content should be showcased in social media platforms such as Facebook pages, Instagram business, and website to make sure the audience reach is optimal. You can use customer generated from the last festive season or regular customer testimonials you receive.
To get more customer-generated content, you should give freebies or discounted products to make sure that customers give more reviews and testimonials. For instance, a customer buying or bought any product from your web to print portal should be sent mail to review about the products or services and if they provide a review, they should be given some freebies or discounted products or items useful for shopping season or thing they are looking to buy products.
5. Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs one of the most adopted methods to increase sales, get recurring customers, and to make sure that you are making most of the data your collecting from your customers. There are various kinds of loyalty programs being run by online retailers and the same can be replicated by web2print online retailers to make sure that customers keep on buying from them for every season. It is similar to the sales on the brick and mortar space which everyone keeps looking forward to stock up their wardrobe every new season.
Some of the examples of loyalty programs are – Someone signs up or makes a first purchase from the online web to print portal should be eligible for lifetime discounts during the holiday season. When a customer is presented with opportunities to maximize their loyalty award points with targeted communication based on their customer lifetime value, needs, preferences, they are more likely to become repeat and loyal customers and also work as word of mouth marketing for companies.
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6. Top notch customer service
It is very likely that customer service is going to increase very much during the holiday season, they all must be geared up to cater to increases customer queries, grievances on an immediate basis. Failing to do so, can actually result in a hampered brand image of your online retail and can be reflected in terms of decrease in sales impacting them in the long run.
7. Customized packaging
Ensure that you have customized packaging exclusively for holiday shopping season. These small knick-knacks woo customers to buy products from your web to print portal. Apart from using your own ideas to wow your customers from your packaging, provide them with the option of choosing customized packaging such as multi-box packaging or small note attached to gifts with calligraphy. Customers don’t mind paying a little extra if the vendor is ready to go beyond the limit to help them.
The windup
If you are already a web to print service provider, you have already tick marked things that are going to be in your plan of marketing for holiday season. The printers that are not still having web presence must be wondering that most of the ideas and tips are shared for the printers that are having an online presence. Yeah, you are right! The only tip or idea for printers that are not online is to get online first, and then start implementing online ideas that can help you in getting sales.
This article is written by David Singletary. He has completed his education in IT and started working in the web to print research & development segment at Design’N’Buy. He is having more than 5 years of experience in the web to print, Print commerce & product customization software development. Fond of writing about print commerce and related industry. Follow him: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn.
This article is written by David Singletary. He has completed his education in IT and started working in the web to print research & development segment at 
