As the traditional 12 Days of Christmas carol illustrates, no one can prepare for the holiday rush in a single day. But what good are French hens and calling birds to your eCommerce site? Read on because the answer just may surprise you.
The first step towards a successful holiday season is bringing customers to your site. An effective way to attract your potential customer is to use creative content and inbound marketing.
Using social media and blogging promotes brand awareness and establishes your company as a thought leader instead of just an eCommerce source. This strategy is a great way to drive traffic to your site.
So, your customers have come to your site and entered their email information. Now it’s time to make some noise! The best way to stay on your customer’s mind, especially during the busy holiday season, is through email campaigns.
Email campaigns keep your customers informed on promotions and special offers, and messages with incentives to purchase or suggested items specific to your customer are easy and successful ways to make a sale.
With so many people leaping to your site during the holidays, it is crucial that your site is capable of handling an increase in traffic. No matter how elegantly designed or user-friendly your site is, if performance is down your customers will leave.
Be sure to check your hosting capabilities and run the appropriate tests to make sure that your customers have a smooth shopping experience on both desktop and mobile sites.
You want your customers to dance with joy when their order goes though, and the surest way to prevent that from happening is if your site is moving slowly. Just like you need to test your hosting capabilities, you need to be sure that your site will be able to load properly when put to the ultimate eCommerce test.
If your site is moving more like a car stuck in a snow drift than a frenzied Black Friday shopper, check out these ten tips to improve site speed.
Now that you have your customer’s attention and business, you need to milk it for all that it’s worth. Up selling and cross selling are great ways to get the customers you already have to get what they want while increasing your revenue.
Up selling and cross selling work best when the products are tailored to your customer or to their current experience. Utilizing a tool that has rule-based product relations makes this technique easier than, say, milking a cow.
When buying online, it can be tough for customers to know whether the products are a gem or a dud, a swan or a goose, if you will. Descriptive and relevant product descriptions and imagery make a difference in helping your customer find their “swan.”
Product descriptions and detailed pictures are the next best thing to seeing the product in person, so be sure that your customers have the resources they need to make an informed decision.
Even better than receiving five golden rings this Christmas would be to see five-star reviews for products on your site. Giving your customers the chance to rate your products can be hugely beneficial for your business because customer feedback can have a significant part in a customer’s buying decision.
Additionally, customer-generated content is great for your SEO value since reviews often contain long-tail keywords that search engines are looking for.
If your customers are abandoning their carts, send out a few calling birds in the form of a cart abandonment email campaign. Cart abandonment emails are a great way to boost revenue both during the holidays and year-round.
We’re going to be honest with you here: we have no idea what purpose French hens serve. Are they livestock? Are they for exhibition? Why would you want three of them? Even more confusing than French hens is sales tax.
With all of the various tax specifications required by companies, selling and shipping to customers across the country or around the world can be incredibly complicated, and failing to comply with requirements can lead to legal issues. Do yourself a favor and ensure that all potential tax complications are sorted prior to the holiday season.
A pair of turtledoves is an ultimate example of true love. The bond between them is not unlike the relationship between a devoted shopper and their failsafe eCommerce site.
To create an ideal relationship between your customer and your company, employ interactive marketing techniques that will boost Customer Lifetime Values.
What does it truly mean to be the partridge in the pear tree? For eCommerce sites, that partridge is the ultimate gift: one happy customer who likes to visit your site and experience the fruits of your labor.
Although we are already in the thick of the holiday shopping season, it’s never too early to plan for next year. Optimize what you can now, and make sure to take these tips into consideration when preparing your site for next year’s holiday rush. Check out the full 12 Days of eCommerce Christmas series for more information.
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