How Alcohol Brands Can Boost On-Site Conversion Rates
There’s no secret to converting customers in this industry, so borrow from tried-and-true tactics across parallel e-comm categories. With a clean website and a clearly defined funnel, customers will convert, regardless of whether you’re an alcohol brand or not.
As the holidays approach, expect an influx of gift purchases across the next few months — an annual event that’ll only be heightened by the post-COVID e-commerce shopping boom.
Even more so, broader delays in global supply chains are trickling down to affect availability and shipping for e-commerce brands across all segments. Our recommendation? Beat this year’s slowdown by getting a head start on your seasonal campaigns, promotions, and more.
We’ve laid out four steps below that every alcohol brand should take to beat the annual gift rush, while also maximizing the profitability and potential of this concentrated shopping period.
Step One: Time Blocking
First, you can start building out a major messaging campaign by looking ahead on your calendar and selecting key dates to lay out a time frame from early November up until Christmas.
Specifically, we recommend blocking out three primary phases for your campaign delivery.
Pre-Black Friday
By pushing messaging campaigns out as early as mid-November, you’re gearing folks up for the holiday season around the corner, as well as letting potential buyers know to keep an eye out for a promotion in the works.
More importantly, you’re setting your brand up to start the season on a strong note — and to not get caught unprepared by the sudden arrival of Thanksgiving crunchtime.
Thanksgiving & Late November
From Thanksgiving onward, particularly that first weekend including Black Friday, you’ll want to host and advertise some kind of actionable event, i.e. a special release or promotional discount, to jumpstart customers into their seasonal shopping cycles.
Cutoffs for Christmas
Finally, you’ll want to round out the season by selecting a cutoff date for placing new orders.
Seven to 10 days before December 25th is a safe bet for buyers to receive a bottle at their door by Christmas Day, and reminders should be sent out in the days leading up to this cutoff.
In terms of the broader time crunch that’s anticipated due to global supply chain slowdowns, you should emphasize the convenience of purchasing from a domestic brand paired with the reliability that you offer for a timely, safe delivery of your product.
Step Two: Spice Up Your Specials
Once you’ve laid the initial groundwork, it’s time to elevate your campaign by crafting it into something creative and exciting for the spirit of the season.
In other words, your buyer’s inbox may be flooded by holiday deals, but you can capture their attention and help them recognize the thoughtfulness through your core brand messaging.
For instance, Far North Spirits is offering a holiday two-pack for drinks that’ll warm you up in the colder months. Imagine a whiskey, rye, or bourbon for your spicy cocktail or mulled wine.
Ultimately, you’re working with the inventory you have and considering which themed products can play into people’s holiday spirit — even better if it’s in a bundle to boost your AOV.
On the other hand, this period offers a practical opportunity to look back at the year’s releases and offload any remaining inventory through a unique discount or exclusive holiday promo.
Step Three: Ramp Up Your Promotion Game
Next, consider the tactical logistics of your promotions. After all, it can be tricky to time promo launches, depending on whether your customer pool skews toward early or late gift grabbers.
There are two general approaches you can take: 1) offering enticing deals early on to preempt other sales or 2) holding off until late in the buyer’s window to pull the trigger on your promo.
The former can snag early shoppers, or at least convince late shoppers to try an early purchase, but could also lose its appeal by mid-December when fresher deals are dropping every day.
The latter can appeal to buyers who play the long game and wait it out for the most optimal deal, but can still ultimately result in you losing out on early or average shoppers.
Ultimately, there’s no gold-standard method and you’ll need to use your judgement depending on what aligns with your brand’s target demographic, metric goalposts, and even inventory.
For instance, returning to your campaign calendar, you can skew discounts away from marking down products and toward offering cheaper, faster shipping as Christmas creeps closer.
Step Four: Email Marketing On Deck
As we pointed out in our advice for email marketing, setting up your email flow so your comms can run seamlessly is a simple yet essential step of the process that’s easily overlooked.
We recommend starting with a quick info sweep: pull last year’s seasonal purchase data and make sure that customer cohort is consistently re-engaged early on.
In turn, your team won’t be stressed out and frantically attempt to piece together the perfect layout in MailChimp just a few days before Thanksgiving — which circles back to our larger point: the holidays are a time of year with promise of high ROI for your alcohol brand.
You can utilize this opportunity to the max by planning thoroughly and creatively, not stressfully executing a last minute, makeshift campaign.
If your brand has these moving parts staged within the first weeks of November, you should be ready to hook the earliest seasonal shoppers and take full advantage of the holiday rush.
Sit Back and Enjoy the Holidays!
Once you’ve got these steps locked in — a killer campaign calendar, creative promos, and ready-to-launch email marketing — you’ll be the one leading the holiday rush, not falling behind.
Whether your user base is composed of individuals shopping for friends and family or corporate customers with high-volume needs, Accelpay is the platform of choice for your alcohol brand.
To get access to our instant storefront setup and stress-free bulk ordering, get started here.
At Accelpay, our most frequently asked question is, “How can alcohol brands increase their on-site conversion rates?”
After all, there aren’t many useful examples of best practices to follow in the alcohol space, yet emerging brands are always in need of actionable resources and recommendations.
Our advice? Design, build, and market your brand as if you weren’t in the alcohol business.
There’s no secret to converting customers in this industry, so borrow from tried-and-true tactics across parallel e-commerce categories. With a clean website and a clearly defined funnel, customers will convert — regardless of whether you’re an alcohol brand or not.
Through our platform, we handle the backend of compliance and fulfillment so that you can focus on making your product as attractive and sticky for customers as possible. Schedule a demo to see how it can free up time that you can invest in boosting your on-site conversions.
3 Steps to Ramp Up Conversion Rates
A range of proven practices have yielded consistent conversion upgrades for DTC brands across verticals and come recommended by veteran investors and founders alike.
We distilled the three steps that have driven some of the best results.
Clean Website
Designing a clean, uncluttered, and fluidly navigable site will be the first step to ensuring potential buyer conversion. Consider Far North Spirits.
A lot of brands tend to lean too heavily on overly designed elements. GIFs and oversized visuals may be eye-catching, but they don't always drive conversion. Rather, they overpopulate your site, slow down speeds, and cause browsers to churn from your site.
Instead, we recommend limiting your landing pages to the most relevant and necessary data customers may need to understand your brand and what they’ll find if they keep clicking.
In the e-comm world, your digital presence is everything, so keeping a simple aesthetic and clear navigation can do an enormous amount of legwork for you. Ultimately, you want to create a home on the web that is educational, functional, and helps customers intuitively checkout.
Crisp Products Page
After ensuring your homepage is uncluttered, you’ll want to focus on building or optimizing a clean page that lists your hero products or your bestselling staple items.
This page should be kept pretty simple since it’s near the top of your customer acquisition funnel; where visitors can start to browse, choose from, and compare your selection.
When laying out your hero products, make sure to limit what you list. It’s important to avoid detailing your whole stock or seasonal SKUs which won’t be available for long. We recommend listing four to six of your bestsellers, alongside concise descriptions and purchase options.
Core Product Descriptions
An efficient product page is crucial, as it’ll help us successfully navigate the buyer towards the bottom of the funnel by going from product browsing to hitting the “Add to Cart” button.
Like Far North Spirits, you’ll want to establish a hierarchy of information.
Remember why your shoppers are motivated to look at your product in the first place. Maybe they’re connoisseurs looking to expand their collection or they just want a classy present for their in-laws. Whatever category they fall in, place the information most relevant to their concerns up top.
Our final recommendation is one not to do — the mistake we see most often while working with brands at Accelpay: splitting the purchasing funnel at the bottom.
Many brands can successfully drive traffic and educate their customers up to this point, but fail to establish a clear and compelling call-to-action to add to cart and purchase.
With this misstep, you’ve gotten your customer all the way down the funnel but then drive them off your website by hiding your core CTA. As a result, you’ve forfeited that buyer conversion and revenue event at the very last phase of the customer funnel.
Simple Funnel, Simple Conversion
To boost on-site conversion, you should focus on the three steps outlined above.
At the core of each step is your ability to maintain a streamlined customer journey up and down the funnel, without interrupting user flows to final purchase.
After your customers successfully convert, Accelpay can take care of the rest. To start selling online and drive conversions on day one, get started here.
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Braxton Freeman
Grolsch