Sashank RavindranathThe festive season is always a golden time for eCommerce store owners – online holiday spending broke records in 2021 and is poised to go even higher in 2022.
Shoppers are in a spending mood. They have long lists of items they wish to buy, and your store should welcome them stocked!
With their tastes and preferences more nuanced than ever, you should offer the shopping experience they desire and deserve.
We’ll cover the tactics your small eCommerce businesses can implement to become festive ready and ensure your customers are eager to spend more with you.
1. Strengthen Your Website’s Security
Unlike your customers, hackers never take a holiday. And if they cause your eCommerce store to crash during the holiday season, you’ll lose a huge amount of traffic and sales.
You’ll also upset your customers who
- can’t browse your store and
- may be concerned that their details are at risk.
Cyber attacks include ransomware – when hackers hack your systems and hold them until you pay a fee, as well as phishing.
Here are some tips to safeguard your store as a way to become festive ready:
- Back up your data. This includes your key files, your cloud data, and the whole website. Back up website codes, database information videos, settings, and configurations.
- Use firewalls. There are two types of firewalls you should look to install – application gateways and network security systems. Both are designed to protect your online store from unauthorized individuals and groups getting in.
- Hire IT security. If you currently have no cyber/IT security specialists, it might be a good idea to hire someone for the holiday period.
2. Make It Easy for Your Customers
It’s the festive season, which generally means one thing – your customers are in a hurry. They’re in a buying mood, looking to find the online shopping experience to be as hassle-free as possible.
What does this mean?
It means they want fast-loading websites, an easy-to-navigate online store, a quick-fire checkout, and fast responses to their questions via better customer service.
As a small business, you can take the following steps to keep things ready for the festive season and meet your customer’s needs:
- Run your store through a site speed checker.
- Work with a web designer to make sure your website is easy to navigate (you can also make changes yourself, such as adding relevant dropdown menus, and search bars and testing the site yourself).
- Add guest checkout. Cart abandonment rates can soar during the holiday period. One of the sticking points for customers is a lengthy checkout process requiring account creation before any purchase.
- Add chatbots to your website. Chatbots are available 24/7 to answer your customer’s queries promptly. This is ideal for ensuring their problems get solved and they’re able to continue with their shopping.
3. Personalize the Shopping Experience
Personalization can increase revenue by 15% at the best of times. So while your customers might be in a rush during the holiday season, they still want to associate themselves with brands that build relationships (as opposed to just going for the sale all the time).
Personalization in eCommerce means marketing to your customers in a way that feels personal to them.
In other words, to include effective personalization in your “festive ready” plan, use data, and analytics such as onsite behavior and past purchases to learn more about your customers. You can then proceed to display content that’s relevant to their actions, needs, and wants.
With eCommerce personalization, you can:
- Create an email list and segment your audience. This allows you to target different people with different offers so that you improve your email metrics, and your customer loyalty and boost sales during the holidays.
- Product recommendations. Product recommendations are a form of behavioral targeting. Essentially, you use onsite actions like ‘most frequented category pages,’ as well as past purchases, to display products you already know your customers will be interested in.
- Dynamic content. This personalization strategy lets you target specific segments with specific offers and content. For instance, if you’re selling products worldwide but you’re only offering free shipping in the US during the holidays, you can display the offer of free shipping to all your US site visitors via a site banner.
4. Run Promotions!
Online shopping promotions are the equivalent of a yuletide stocking filler, allowing customers to take advantage of a few little treats that make them feel like they’re getting significant value.
The trick, of course, is to run promotions that attract new customers – but which don’t eat into your profits.
On the flip side, if you ignore promotions altogether, you could miss out on customers who instead do business with your competitors who are offering discounts.
So what’s the answer?
Be strategic with your promotions to ultimately become festive ready. Here are some ideas:
- Offer free shipping when customers spend over $50 – for example.
- Offer discounts. You don’t want to go too deep with your discounts as too many of them can cause consternation among your customers who’ll start to question the quality of your products. But you could – for example – use an exit intent popup that entices new customers with a discount on their first purchase. And if you’ve got seasonal deals? Promote them on your landing page for everyone to see.
- Cross-sell. This is a great way of maximizing sales during the holiday period. For instance, you can offer value-driven bundles that knock a few $$$’s off the total price if a customer buys complementary items.
5. Stay on Top of Ecommerce Fulfillment
eCommerce fulfillment is important at any time of the year because it helps store owners to get their items delivered to their customers on time, thereby reducing returns and customer churn.
Seasonal peaks, however, are one of the biggest challenges you’ll face. And during the holidays is generally when online stores face higher order volumes than at any other time of the year.
And not only that. There’s so much that store owners need to consider such as fulfillment, international shipping, and inventory management. There are also trends like freight rate changes and their subsequent costs.
Here are two important ways to stay on top of eCommerce fulfillment and become festive ready:
- Work with a 3PL. A Third-Party Logistics company can take care of your supply chain for you, which then allows you to focus on other core aspects of your business that matter. Especially during the holiday period when you’re expecting an upswing in sales, 3PLs allow you to take advantage of supply and distribution resources that ensure your items are delivered to your customers on time.
- Set your inventory levels. You can invest in inventory management software to help you understand your optimal inventory levels, which will then ensure you avoid inventory problems. Inventory levels change during the year – and especially during the holidays – which is why it’s key that you maintain optimal levels so that you can meet customer demand, secure their trust – and fulfill their orders.
Conclusion
The holiday season will soon be upon us, which is why there’s no better time to start implementing our eCommerce tactics as quickly as possible. Preparation is key and will ensure you have enough time to make any half-time adjustments where necessary.
Take care of the “small stuff” – such as implementing excellent customer service and thanking each customer for their purchases. This will give you every chance of becoming festive ready and secure loyal customers over the seasonal period that sticks around once the holidays are over.
This is a guest contribution from Jake Rheude
Jake Rheude is the Vice President of Marketing for Red Stag Fulfillment, an eCommerce fulfillment warehouse that was born out of eCommerce. He has years of experience in eCommerce and business development. In his free time, Jake enjoys reading about business and sharing his own experience with others.
