29% of consumers are planning to start their holiday shopping in September or earlier.
Think about that for a second – that’s right now! The holidays are coming up fast and, with consumers starting their holiday shopping earlier and earlier, your holiday marketing needs to be ready for the rush.
Before you get too far behind, here are 15 things you need to do before the holidays to get your eCommerce site ready for them:
1. Check your pricing
You want to be price-competitive without slashing your profits. With giant retailers like Amazon and Wal-Mart winning the dynamic pricing battles online, you have to get a bit more creative and include pricing into your marketing strategy. You don’t have to discount all of your products to stay competitive, but it’s worth considering for the products your consumers care about the most. If you’re not able to cut a price to stay competitive, think about what other things you can offer to build the value around your purchasing experience. For example, you could offer an in-store pickup option to cut shipping costs or offer free shipping if in-store pickup is not an option.
2. Plan out your promotions
Consumers will soon be overwhelmed with holiday messaging. You need to figure out how to keep your messages relevant, fresh, and interesting from now and leading up to Christmas, while targeting to the right segments. This means thinking about who the promotion is geared towards, what they find the most valuable, how often they want to be communicated with, and when. Think about adding a free gift with each purchase. Turns out, 54% of consumers love the promotion and 74% of retailers find it an effective holiday promotion.
3. Segment appropriately
It’s important to segment your lists appropriately to ensure you’re sending the right content to the right people. Irrelevant messages, especially during the holidays, can increase your unsubscribes and your customers’ frustration. On the other hand, a timely, relevant coupon, related offer, or reminder can increase your conversions.
4. Review your business objectives
Everything you do during the holidays should be in line with your business objectives. But, if you haven’t reviewed those in a while, you might be missing out on opportunities. Dig into analytics to figure out what worked, and what didn’t work, last year. From that information, you’ll be able to determine relevant business objectives and where to allocate your marketing budget.
5. Lock down your email marketing strategies
Email still remains one of the most effective strategies for communicating and nurturing relationships with your customers. So, make sure you have strategies in place to use it during the holidays, especially for your promotions.
6. Create a plan to address shopping cart abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment is an issue for eCommerce sites at any time of the year, but it definitely jumps up during the holidays. To keep a cap on it, quick follow-up is key. Using email appropriately (and intelligently!) can effectively bring those shoppers back to their cart to complete their order.
7. Keep mobile in mind
Mobile accounted for almost 50% of all holiday traffic last year, and that number is only expected to increase this year. Although purchases on desktop computers still dominate holiday purchases, some people will purchase from their smartphone or tablet. They’ll also be browsing and doing research on mobile, so your site better be mobile-friendly. If you have a retail location in addition to your eCommerce site, you can use location-based SMS messaging to increase conversions and engagement. Imagine your customer is out and about running errands near your store and they receive a text with a coupon code for something they want, chances are, they’re stopping by to at least take a look.
8. Review your Google Product Listing Ads
If you’re using Google PLAs during the holidays, make sure every product you have listed is going to be price-competitive. If you can’t be price-competitive on a product during the holidays, don’t pay for it to be included in a Google PLA – there’s no sense in throwing money at something that will end up driving business to competitors who are price-competitive on those products.
9. Prepare for the unexpected
The holidays are a crazy time and you need to have a backup plan in place for everything that could go wrong for your customers, so you can keep their business amid the frustration. If a link to a promo code is down, have a message prepared apologizing and keeping customers updated on when it might be fixed. If you sell out of a product unexpectedly, having a message prepared and showing comparable products can be the difference between gaining a sale and losing one.
10. Don’t forget about post-holiday strategies
You will undoubtedly gain some new customers during the holidays. So, once the holidays are over, it’s time to switch gears to retention marketing. You have new contacts you need to nurture to ensure they’ll come back to you again. And, you’ll still have your repeat customers to continue building relationships with. Tailoring promotions to your loyal customers and to your new customers is a great way to thank and reward them for doing business with you and strengthen your relationship with them.
11. Check your tech
Your traffic is going to get a boost during the holidays and you want to make sure your site can handle it without slowing down. Speed is your friend, particularly in eCommerce and especially during the holiday shopping rush. Make sure your platform is built to be scalable and you have a plan in place with your host to handle sudden surges in traffic without affecting performance.
12. Security is worth it
Not only does your site need to be designed in a way that assures customers it is secure, it needs to have the right infrastructure in place to truly be secure. SSL certificates are a necessity, but simply stopping there is not enough. In terms of design, make sure your trust seals are placed where customers can easily see them. Start reviewing and testing your site now for vulnerabilities and beef up security wherever possible. You can bet hackers will be looking for weak spots during the holidays – do not give them that opening!
13. Review and crawl your site for errors
Run a crawl test on your site to identify broken links, redirect issues, and more. Fix those and then continue to review all the moving parts of your site to ensure things are working as they should and your customers will have no issues when making a purchase. Go through your site with your customer in mind so you can see what they see and experience it from their perspective. Tensions run high during the holidays and customers won’t stand for missing links or form issues.
14. Optimize your fulfillment process
Once a customer places an order, they want to get it as soon as possible, and definitely before the holidays arrive. Go through your fulfillment process step-by-step, from checkout confirmation to the customer receiving their order, in order to identify lags and potential hold-ups. Consolidate where you can to make the process run as smoothly, quickly, and error-free as possible.
15. Remember social media
Social media is a useful tool with lots of opportunities for eCommerce; so much so, in fact, there’s a term for it (of course there is) – social commerce. If you’re still up in the air on social media, take a look at these stats:
- 64% of shoppers bought a product because of something they saw on Twitter
- 30% of Twitter users tweet about holiday shopping before October
- 64.8% of consumers will turn to social media sites to find the perfect gift
- 67% of consumers said they would be likely to share their digital coupon via their Facebook profiles this holiday season
- 62% of shoppers will be tweeting about purchases they make in preparation for the holidays
- 96% of Millennials will be engaged on at least one social network this season
- About half of them plan to consult a social media before making purchases
So, what does this mean for you? It means people will share a good deal, they’ll share cool, helpful, interesting products, and social proof matters. If you’re not integrating social media into your holiday marketing strategies, you are missing out.
There you have it. Take care of these 15 things in time for the holidays and your ecommerce site will be ready to handle whatever the hectic holidays may bring.