Although Black Friday and Cyber Monday mark the official start of the holiday shopping season, many shoppers began to cross off their Christmas checklist long ago and will continue to look for deals and discounts as long as they can. Customers have been trained over the past few holiday seasons to expect last-minute marketing promotions and holiday sales up until the last minute. It is a veritable jungle out there when it comes to attracting buyers.
Succeeding in the world of holiday online shopping means setting up a strategy to attract potential new customers, designing an efficient ecommerce platform and providing a memorable customer journey that will help you retain customers. The strategies we outline below will help you not only profit during the holiday season, but continue that success through the new year.
Make a Holiday Sales Plan or Strategy
The first thing you need to do is to determine your goals for the holiday season. Are you looking for increased sales? More customers? Higher average order value? How you lay out your tactics will help you determine which statistics you will use to define success. For example, if you are looking to attract more customers, you can focus on advertising and providing discounts that will drive customers to your site. If you would rather focus on higher order value, you can focus on upselling and promotional strategies to drive customers to increase the number of items on their cart. Once you’ve decided what your ultimate goal is, the decisions on how to move forward should be easier.
Prepare your eCommerce Website for Online Visitors
If you owned a brick and mortar store, you would prepare your shelves, displays, and advertising for the holiday rush and the expected increase in foot traffic. Having an online retail store is no different. Being ready for holiday traffic, online or otherwise, means creating a website that is mobile friendly, fast, and able to meet the needs of every visitor.
Optimize Your Online Store for Mobile Use
Everything seems to be moving at a faster pace these days and most people’s solution for that is to use their mobile device to catch up. Whether they’re browsing from their couch or from the store aisles, shoppers will most likely visit your site from their smartphone. This season, almost half of mobile users are expected to use smartphones to compare the pricing of the products or services. This means that you should check your website for mobile friendliness and optimize your ecommerce store for Google and other search engines so your brand can be there when the customer is looking for you. It is also important to ensure a smooth mobile browsing experience and an easy journey to the shopping cart.
Ensure Speedy Performance
Holiday shoppers don’t have time to wait around for your images to load or for too many clicks to get to the shopping cart. If you frustrate your visitors, they may click away or have something else get their attention while they are waiting for your site to load. If you need, test out your website on various platforms and different devices. the best way to keep a customer is to not make them wait.
Ensure Security for All Shoppers
Not only is it important to make your online retail store safe and secure, you also need to let your customers know that it is. There are many scams during the holiday and trust is a valuable asset that you can easily lose. Implement security checks, use trusted partners for payment methods and make sure the customer is aware that their transaction is safe.
Make the Checkout Process Hassle-Free
One of the biggest concerns for ecommerce professionals is their abandoned cart rate. Many a customer has been lost when a visitor gets to the final stage of the shopping process only to leave the website without making a purchase. While this happens for many reasons, you can reduce this rate by making the checkout process as straightforward and easy as possible. Collect only the information you need for the sale and create a quick checkout process.
Update Product Photos and Pages
Just like you would decorate a brick and mortar store for the holidays, shoppers expect fresh content and updated images during their online shopping experience. Even if you aren’t selling anything different from what you had the rest of the year, updating backgrounds, descriptions, and promotions can give potential customers a sense of the holiday shopping season. Use social media as a tool to create a buzz around your new images and descriptions.
Get Your Inventory in Gear and Prepare for Shipping Issues
Once you start getting holiday orders it will be too late to restock or to reorganize. Make sure your warehouse and shipping departments are ready to get orders out the door quickly and efficiently. Make sure the entire customer journey is geared for customer satisfaction. This includes the execution of shipping product. Also, errors in shipping can cause your returns to increase decreasing the revenue you though you had gained during the holidays. Customers will remember any shipping delays or order errors and choose to buy from your competition.
Don’t Forget About Customer Retention
The holiday season isn’t just about increasing sales and making money. The increased traffic you get between Halloween and Christmas is also an excellent opportunity to create loyal customers. If you are a small business, you may not have the marketing budget to run marketing campaigns throughout the year so the last quarter of the year could be used to acquire customers and retain them throughout the new year. Providing your customers with an excellent customer journey and with a world-class post purchase experience, like using a branded tracking page, will help you retain customers and keep them coming back after the holidays are over.
You can also create loyalty programs and offer coupons for future purchases that will incentivize shoppers to come back to your store.
As an ecommerce retailer, the holiday season is the most important time of the year. Make sure you set yourself up for success. WISMOlabs has been helping online retailers optimize their post-purchase solutions and use customer analytics to increase their retention rates and lower their costs. Contact WISMOlabs today to see how we can help you implement a post-purchase solution in as little as a few weeks.
