The holidays season is always a popular time for consumers to spend. Shoppers are constantly looking for offers and discounts to get the best deals for everything on their holiday gift lists. When building your holiday marketing campaigns, or a campaign at any other time in the year, shipping is an important factor you will want to keep in mind.
Customers often abandon their shopping carts when they discover shipping charges are higher than they anticipated. According to Visual Website Optimizer’s 2014 eCommerce Survey, 28% of shoppers will do exactly that. How will you prevent your customers from becoming a part of that statistic? It may be simpler than you think and it might not have anything to do with the actual product your are selling. Shipping could be the tipping point when a customer is deciding to making a purchase or not. Offering a shipping discount or free shipping has the potential to land you even more sales.
There are various ways you can use free shipping promotions to drive sales:
If you promote a campaign with free shipping at any point before or during Green Monday, you’ll be able to use standard shipping to deliver your product to customers in time for Christmas. After that, offering free or discounted expedited shipping will be the best way to attract last minute holiday shoppers. At any other time of the year, standard shipping is a customer’s go-to shipping method when shopping on a budget.
If you set a threshold to get free shipping, consumers are often willing to spend a little more on products in order to reach the spending minimum for free shipping. So where do you set this threshold? Above the price of your average order? At half the price of your average order? Keep in mind, the lower you set the threshold, the higher the conversion.
Offering free shipping with no minimum is also a great way to get customers to spend. You might make more sales with this promotion, but the average price per order could be lower than your average price per order during a promotion that doesn’t offer free shipping. Review your business goals and consider if the value of a “free shipping, no minimum” campaign is greater than the small profit you will lose.
Regardless of the type of promotion you choose to offer, it is very important that you test in order to analyse the best type of campaign for your customer base. Promoting a special offer on your product in addition to free shipping is also a great way to drive sales at this time of year. Show your customer that they will be getting the best deal by shopping with you. Even when you are not offering a free shipping promotion, it is best to be up front about shipping costs. Allowing customers to get a shipping estimate could prevent them from abandoning their cart at the last minute.
