Hunting Season Opens
Off on your holidays tomorrow, are you? Take a well-earned rest, go out and enjoy yourself then, but don’t forget that the holiday buying season is already sneaking into our pockets, and eCommerce businesses that want to gain some green on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday including such festivals as Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa are busy getting ready for their final run-through before the generous six weeks of annual influx of holiday shoppers.
Market research and advertising showed that retail eCommerce holiday sales are really hot this season and will grow to hit $1 trillion and eCommerce companies are expecting to make jack on one of the biggest sell-outs for the industry.
Well, of course success of this venture doesn’t only depend on hope, luck or things that are outside your control, it depends on which individual ingredients you choose to attract more buyers. Then, on top of keeping the holiday magic alive in-store and giving your website a merry refresh and redesign, you have other things to deal with if you expect to succeed during the holiday season. From maintaining and rebuilding your website to order fulfillment optimization to improving your content marketing.
So, take a look at our holiday shopping checklist and readjust to make sure your sales goals are clear, concise, and accurate and site is prepared for the holiday rush. Learn how you can increase traffic to your online business and generate increased sales this holiday season. Hurrah for the holidays!
Mobile Comes First
The ease and convenience of mobile shopping makes it essential to launch a mobile-optimized version of your website because your company may find itself losing customers if your website isn’t mobile-friendly during holiday season. You still got time to make your site mobile-dedicated and catch up with responsive design and emails.
The websites are receiving more than 50 percent of online traffic from mobile audience, therefore eCommerce retailers must respond quickly and effectively to customer needs in ways that benefit the mobile users. Using digital channels, eCommerce solutions become more accessible and capable of producing the high polished tailored brick-and-mortar experience.
God Dammit! Load the Funk Up, You Freaking Pages!
Having slow-loading product pages especially on holidays is the most effective way to watch users flee as fast as their legs would carry them, abandoning your ship. 40 percent of visitors will bounce if pages don’t load within three seconds, and 80 percent of your customers won’t come back any time soon if they’re unsatisfied with the loading time on the website.
You can handle it by implementing traffic management and optimization tools that notify you of slow and cumbersome performance, help you identify potential performance flashpoints and make a giant leap in productivity. If you want a fast, reliable and easily scalable web application, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN will give a boost to page load times while cutting down on bandwidth and creating redundancy necessary to functioning but included in case of failure in another component.
Personhood
There is no need to box in a customers experience, but you need to whitelist or rank or flesh out their world view based on their location, circle of interests, behaviors, transactions, stuff like that. Customizing your content and online experience to each individual user should go a long way toward breaking the ice and pushing up sales this holiday season. Make your user data work by determining your customers lifetime value thus you can apply it to customer segments and hit the right users with the right offers.
Room for the King!
You already know what I’m about to say. In this Golden Age of semantic case relationships and social search, content marketing rapidly grew to become one of the finest tools for doing business. You simply can’t ignore the benefits it brings to attract more qualified leads and convert them into most profitable customers. Provide consistent, high-quality articles, educate and entertain your prospects and you will discover an aptitude of content marketing and earn yourself a reputation as an authoritative source and expert on industry affairs and influence purchasing decision during holiday shopping.
A Clear Return Policy Anyone?
Gift is an extremely kind gesture, and it’s twice as likely to be returned to the suppliers. It can be because of the wrong size and shape, duplicate or simply not somebody’s cup of tea or appear to have no use. That’s why customers need to know for certain that refunds will be issued as smooth as possible. Provide a simple, readable, easy to navigate return policy.
Check Out of a Complex Checkout Experience
You will be able to escape the clutches of shopping cart abandonment rate this holiday season by looking into making the checkout process easy and tripping, brief and uncomplicated, stable and secure. This can be done by enabling guest checkout that doesn’t require a user to sign up, featuring a progress bar containing essential personal data. It allows you to make multiple payments in multiple currencies and payment methods, with autofill form fields, and reinforcing comfort by security systems to ensure a safe customer journey.
Soft Dollar Shipping
The UPS survey in 2015 showed that 67% of consumers planned to regift and this year won’t be an exception. So it stands to reason that they are looking forward to get free or discounted shipping, but most of them they just ready to add more items to the cart to meet the requirements of the free shipping minimum and sign up for the additional time given for delivery if shipping is free.
By putting these tips into action, you are in a fair way to have yourself a far merrier holiday season. It’s not only about boosting your whole holiday strategy and enhancing the odd chances that you will match or surpass your seasonal sales goals, but you will offer the very finest properties, and an unequalled level of service customers now are entitled and looking forward to.
