Tips to Outshine your E-commerce Competitors During St. Patrick’s Day

Every so often, it becomes challenging to dedicate time to prep for a festival/event. Online shopping offers customers the luxury of choosing from a wide range of products in the comfort of one’s homes. St. Patrick’s Day is the time to celebrate Irish culture. What’s better than cashing in on the thriving e-commerce industry to get into the festive spirit?

The Irish Diaspora only adds up to 0.06% (80 million) of the global population but recent trends have suggested that one does not have to be Irish to celebrate St. Patrick’s day. Hence, one can expect upwards of 80 million potential customers. E-commerce stores have a golden opportunity to reach new heights for sales figures by cashing in on St. Patrick’s Day. So, e-commerce players, it’s time for you to gear up and embrace the incoming sales rush.

Historic and Cultural Significance:

St. Patrick’s Day plays a crucial role in maintaining the Irish heritage of Ireland’s patron saint, St. Patrick’s life. The colour green holds an unrivalled prominence due to its cultural and political ties.

Categories to Look Out for:

Typically, the main event on this day is the feast filled with Irish delicacies and tank loads of beverages to set a festive tone! On the public front, one can see waves of people dressed in green, actively taking part and enjoying the world-renowned St. Patrick’s Day parades.

The ones who celebrate are all decked up in green clothing and accessories. Based on cultural beliefs, green makes you invisible to mischievous leprechauns. The most sold products during St. Patrick’s Day are mentioned below:

1. Shamrock – Stickers, Keychains, Bottle Openers, etc.,
2. Beer Mugs
3. St. Patrick’s Day-themed T-shirts and accessories.
4. Milk Chocolates in the form of Gold Coins filled in green pouches.
5. Jewellery – Shamrock-shaped earrings, green beaded chains, etc.
6. Green Top Hats
7. Party accessories – Green plastic cups, shamrock decorations, shamrock glasses, bracelets, etc.

The categories that contribute the most are food & beverage, clothing (green clothing), and party supplies.

This festive period provides e-commerce stores with a great opportunity for market growth. Sales forecasts of the past report optimistic figures of upwards of 5 billion USD in the United States alone.

How can Your e-Commerce Business Rake in Impressive Sales Numbers During the Busy Festive Period?

Look no further, as here are the nine different ways e-commerce businesses can gain traction in their stores:

1. Create an appropriate landing page:

   A landing page for an e-commerce store aims to entice a potential customer into doing business with them. Vendors with e-commerce websites can customize their landing page to a St. Patrick’s Day-themed page by using green. Another way to incorporate the Irish tradition is using the Leprechauns’ pot of gold instead of a shopping cart as the pot of gold represents the treasure at the end of the rainbow. Avoid using navigation bars on landing pages as they possibly distract customers from any call to action (CTA).

2. Use the Omnichannel strategy to build your presence:

   Potential global customers will have access to either a desktop or a mobile device. With technology improving daily, one can expect human dependence on e-commerce to increase heavily. However, e-commerce stores face the issue of providing seamless product access to their customers. Extending your e-commerce service from a website to a mobile application and retail store will instil a feeling of increased accessibility, brand growth, and reliability among customers.

   Thus, it is a need, rather than a luxury for online shopping stores to adopt an omnichannel approach.

3. Launching Targeted ad campaigns on Social Media and OTT Platforms:

   St. Patrick’s Day was a festival restricted to countries such as Ireland, the United States, Australia, and Canada as the Irish population prominently resided in these regions. Over time, people across the globe began going bonkers over this fun-filled festival. Due to the large demographic, selecting the right channel to publicize your products and services is crucial to maximizing sales.

   Social media users have been on the rise ever since its inception and there are nearly 4.59 billion social media users today. Due to this, running ad campaigns on social media stores such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter will be highly beneficial as these social media stores offer ad spaces. People between the ages of 18 – 25 get into party mode. But people between the ages of 30-45 are the ones who make the most purchases, allowing you to run targeted ad campaigns on social media stores.

   The number of OTT platform is on a steady rise since COVID-19. Some of the major platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Disney +, and HBO+ have begun running ads to generate additional revenue. Even lesser-known and budding OTT platforms have started tie-ups with brands to run ad campaigns that too at nominal fees as ads are an essential revenue for their functioning. E-commerce Stores and vendors should capitalize on this opportunity to gain brand recognition.

4. Optimizing your Store & products based on relevant keywords:

   Grasping a customer’s attention is of prime importance, even more so when you run an e-commerce store. Customers have umpteen options in terms of Stores/websites/apps to choose from due to the huge number of ecommerce stores/apps that are mushrooming each day. But not all stores are optimized for keyword, content performance. So, their existence is not known to Optimizing the e-commerce store or the product based on the high-volume keywords based on the festive season will drive customers to your e-commerce site. Using tools such as SEMrush, SEO Power suite, KWFinder, and google keyword planner will help you choose the best keyword to boost sales. Keyword tools use parameters such as average monthly searches and competition to help you choose the best keyword. Refer to the most sold products to gain insight into the possible keywords for St. Patrick’s Day sales.

5. Inventory planning and management by Integrating an ERP system into your e-commerce Store:

   Tracking the existing stock and preparing for order surges is critical for a successful sales campaign. Inventory planning and management become even more essential during St. Patrick’s Day as your business is likely to experience a spike in orders in the days leading to this jolly festival. Employing sales forecasting tools and past shopping guides will help you brace for an intensive festive period.

   In addition to the forecasting tools, integrating an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system into your e-commerce Store will give aid you in the following ways:

   1. Maintaining adequate inventory by notifying you when it slips below the critical limit.
   2. Automatically gather order data and customer information to ease the manual burden on data collection.
   3. Provide real-time order tracking updates to customers.
   4. Offer customers multiple shipping options based on cost variations.
   5. Providing financial analysis of the sales campaign.
6. Create interactive digital catalogues to keep potential customers better informed:

Printed catalogues have been the go-to marketing tool for small businesses. However, this age-old technique has drawbacks as it will only increase costs as your business grows. Creating a digital catalogue rather than a printed catalos will help you access a larger customer base. An added benefit of providing a digital catalogue is keeping the circulation costs bare minimum. Inaccuracies can quickly be edited and re-uploaded in the system in the case of a digital catalos giving you an edge in communicating effectively with your customers. Digital catalo’s can also get designed for access across various devices. It is necessary to keep navigational complexities bare minimum to enhance the user experience.

7. Cultural Sensitivity:

With the cancel culture thriving, your PR and the marketing team need to be cautious of how you publicize your product. A tiny blunder could land your e-commerce business in hot waters. Refrain from posting anything offensive to the slightest of degrees.

8. Create exclusive promo codes for recurring customers to enhance brand loyalty:

Everyone likes to be rewarded, even more so when the reward is monetary. Reward your loyal customers by providing exclusive promo codes and early access to products. Doing so will help you boost your reputation, retain customers, and potentially gain new ones as information about a reward spread like wildfires!

9. Manage traffic surge by optimizing your website and mobile application:

Traffic on your e-commerce is at its peak during sales festivals. Equipping your e-commerce store to handle large traffic leads to a smooth user experience. A smooth user experience leads to a happy customer. Here are three ways to prepare your e-store to withstand these surges:

• Testing the website capabilities: 

Simulating traffic onto your website before a sales festival will help you understand the technical limits of your e-commerce store. Sales festivals of the past suggest that the footfall to the website increases considerably on the days leading to the festival. Prepping to manage traffic well ahead of the sales festival is key to executing a seamless campaign. Load testing/Performance testing tools such as Webload, LoadNinja, and HeadSpin are a few of the many available tools to help gauge your e-store’s performance.

• Refresh Rate and Loading Speed:

Make sure your e-store is quick to respond to the CTA’s as online sales are stressful for the customer. Failing to do so will most likely push a customer to find an alternative store. Keeping the loading speed under two seconds will help keep the customer interested by enhancing user experience. Ensuring this will assist you in securing a better SEO ranking compared to an e-store with a longer loading time. A simple technique to increase loading speed is by compressing your files (both text and images) as large files take longer to load.

• Prioritize website security and user data protection:

Personal data protection is of utmost importance to any internet user. Selling customer information for financial gains is unethical and a major red flag for e-commerce websites. Assuring your customers that you refrain from this unethical practice will increase the legitimacy of your e-store. Having an SSL certificate will ensure customer data protection and boost your credibility as it encrypts the data in transit from the website displayed in the browser to the web server.

Integrating a firewall and an antivirus should be mandatory to minimize security breaches. Additionally, offer and stress upon using 2-step authentication to ensure an additional layer of security.

• Use Caching Plugins:

Caching Plugins are secret tools to optimize your e-store. They speed up the website and improve user experience. Cache plugins store data and files and resulting in a static HTML page. Doing so will result in quickly loaded pages and reduced burden on the servers.

Leverage the gaps left by the retail market and facilitate the needs of the festive season by focusing on the above-mentioned suggestions and target categories. Following them will you gain loyal customers and build a reliable e-commerce store.

If you are looking to optimize your ecommerce store or mobile app ahead of St.Patrick’s day sales season, our digital consultants can help you. Drop an email at sales@embitel.com and schedule a one-on-one call so that our consultants can help you with a customised ecommerce roadmap for successful sales this year.