The holiday season is actually considered to be the best time for increasing your eCommerce sales. The reason is pretty obvious. The people are in a festive mood and the holiday season involves a lot of gifting. So, the sales are bound to shoot up. An interesting holiday season store statistic is that certain businesses earn about 80-90% of the revenue during that time. Of course, the condition applies that you have the right eCommerce strategy for holiday in place.
The first thing in preparing for the holidays is making your online stores ready for the holiday. This blog is all about increasing your eCommerce traffic in the holiday season. If you are not able to figure out things on your own, then you can always ask your eCommerce development company to guide you with the same.
Before you prepare an eCommerce strategy for a holiday you need to know when does the holiday season starts. Here is a list of all the important holidays that you need to know!
- 27th November – Thanksgiving
- 28th November – Black Friday
- 1st December – Cyber Monday
- 9th December – Green Monday
- 16th December – Hanukkah
- 22nd December – Super Saturday
- 24th December – Christmas Eve
- 25th December – Christmas Day
- 31st December – New Year’s Eve
Now that you know all the important holidays, we will come down to the main point of discussion.
Top Ways To Prepare Your eCommerce Stores for the Holiday Sales:
1. Organize Your Inventory
As per the National Retail Federation, online holiday sales are expected to increase by 10-12%. It means that you will have to ship the increased number of products.
So, the first step of efficient retail sales planning is that you are properly stocked. Make sure that you can re-order your inventory quickly whenever needed. You definitely don’t want to lose customers just because your inventory is not sufficient.
If you want to have good holidays then make sure that you have a monitoring system with the warehouse. The monitoring system will show the right inventory available on your online store. Thus, organizing your inventory is the first step in preparing an eCommerce strategy for holiday.
2. Test Your Website for Traffic & Speed
Website performance is crucial for holiday preparation. You need to make sure that your eCommerce store is perfect in terms of stability and scalability.
Scalability and stability will be required to manage the increased traffic on your website. If you improve your website speed even by milliseconds, you can avoid shopping cart abandonment and site bounces.
Make your team check the page loads for every element – ranging from how long it takes an image to load to the speed of the checkout process. Thus, testing your website for traffic and website is again a crucial step for eCommerce strategy for holiday.
3. Optimize Your Site for Mobile
There is no denying the fact that mobile shopping has become an integral part of our lives. So, an important aspect of good preparation for holidays is to ensure that your site is mobile friendly.
The minimum you can do is to make your images and website design is responsive. A responsive eCommerce store has proven results if you want to increase eCommerce traffic. If you are not paying attention to this aspect, then your customers may get frustrated and look for other shopping options.
4. Send Relevant Promotional Emails
Good email campaigns are said to constitute two-thirds of total sales. The better the content in emails, the higher the chances of your audience taking action on the content. It can be said that good email marketing can help you achieve your goals of eCommerce sales.
One idea is to start sending out pre-holiday promotional emails that will trigger your audience to start thinking about holiday shopping. The other idea is sending emails designed for last-minute shoppers.
You can also have emails crafted for people who abandon their carts. If you show some urgency in the emails, there are chances that the transaction is completed. Again, a carefully crafted email marketing campaign is an important part of the eCommerce strategy for holiday.
5. Provide Free Shipping If You Can
If you are not providing free shipping right now, then that is something you can include now. The free shopping option has convinced a lot of potential buyers to complete the transaction at an eCommerce site. If you have just begun with holiday eCommerce planning, then free shipping is worth your attention.
One of the primary reasons customers abandon their shopping carts is the shipping cost.
If you remove this one hurdle from their way, you can increase your average order value and order volume too. Providing free shipping doesn’t seem to be a bad idea for your eCommerce strategy for a holiday right?
6. Improve Your Customer Service
Improved customer service can go a long way in making your eCommerce holiday season successful. Customers who are purchasing from your eCommerce store during Halloween and Thanksgiving will most probably return to you for further purchases.
Great customer service will make them come back. Here are some ways to improve your customer service and make it an integral part of your eCommerce strategy for holiday:
- Create self-help resources
- Clear communication with the customers
- Consider implementing a customer service software
7. Social Media Campaigns
An essential part of mobile marketing is the option of providing offers that are available exclusively on the app. Make your app the hub of exclusive content and increase your conversion rate.
Advertise all your content on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat. Once you have done that, redirect your users/visitors to your app to access the special deals. This will not only create urgency but also a sense of exclusivity for app users.
Social media platforms are considered to be an effective part of your eCommerce strategy for holiday. The reason is quite obvious. Social media is accessed through mobile devices and your audience is just a few clicks away from downloading your app and begin shopping.
8. Easy Checkout Process
In the eCommerce sites, most of the card abandonments happen during the checkout stage. People tend to lose interest when there are a lot of information fields to be filled out in the checkout process. In such a situation, apps provide relief to users. The app saves you from the long and tiring process of filling out the information fields during the checkout process.
If you want your eCommerce planning to be successful, then building a seamless app is the key. Give your customers the option to pay using digital wallets. Such convenient ways of checkout in the app will make your eCommerce strategy for holiday a hit!
Conclusion
This blog is not only about preparing an eCommerce strategy for holiday but also tells you how to market your online store. We have tried to provide you with some of the best and proven tips to create a successful holiday plan. We are not saying the list is exclusive, but it definitely covers the top tips to achieve success.
Most of the options that we have discussed here are to be done once your eCommerce store is ready. But there are some things that you can take care of at the development stage itself so that fewer efforts are required later on.
Moreover you can use banner automation software to create promotional banners at scale. Offers, coupons, announcements of top deals, a reminder on last few days, a banner for all using one simple banner template. This helps you save time on multiple iterations on banner based on promotional stage while also tripling your revenue by using a more personalized approach to woo customers
For instance, designing a site keeping in mind your target audience. Also, making sure that your site is scalable round the year and not just in the holiday season. These factors may not be visible immediately but they play a key role in the long run in creating a positive brand image.
If you hire Magento developer for your eCommerce store, they will also play a significant role in making it successful. Therefore, hiring the right developers is also a tough job. A careful selection of developers will reap you the desired benefits.
Do you want some advice from expert Magento developers? Want to discuss your eCommerce store idea with an experienced team of professionals? You have reached the right place! Discuss with us your idea or requirements on [email protected]!
