The holiday season is the most profitable time for any ecommerce
marketplace. From Black Friday 2017 to the New Year, the holiday
sales are pegged to go way beyond $1 trillion this year. Big
retailers have already begun to prepare for the season. What are you
doing?
Here’s a checklist to prepare your ecommerce store for the holiday
season.
1 Free Shipping
Holiday seasons are the time to improve sales. Offering free shipping
has been statistically proven to increase sales. In 2015, Target
offered free shipping and removed the minimum order value criteria,
and experienced a 3% increase in average order size. With free
shipping, offer a liberal return time and exchange policy.
2 Payment Channels
Online shoppers usually have a credit card as the option to purchase.
Include other payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and Cash On
Delivery (COD) to give buyers multiple choices to make a payment. You
can also offer EMI options by partnering with fintech companies like
ZestMoney and Simpl.
3 Upgrade Ecommerce Hosting
The holiday season is the right time to upgrade to a better hosting
plan, ideally to a VPS or a dedicated server. Based on the holiday
season marketing plans, the ecommerce marketplace is bound to receive
tons of traffic and shared hosting servers won’t be able to handle
the traffic inflow. Poor web hosting can cost you business. Upgrade
hosting and install a CDN plan to improve the customer user
experience.
4 Google Analytics Performance
Setup the Google Analytics to track ecommerce performance. You can
track it through Conversions > Ecommerce > Product Performance.
The data will give detailed insights on which products are in high
demand and their sales volume. Retrieve data on most visited pages
and optimize them with better sales offers and CTR. The high traffic
pages data is accessible through Content > Site Content >
Content Drilldown.
5 Pre-Holiday Campaign
You need an email list for this activity. Announce to your ecommerce
site subscribers that special offers are in the pipeline for the
holiday season and share a link to confirm their pre-booking or their
permission to send relevant notifications as the products go live.
You can share a special discounted coupon code to apply during
checkout. With few months to go, this is the right time to prepare
for the Christmas sale 2017.
6 Responsive Website
The Criteo State of Mobile Commerce report for 2015 says there is a
20% higher chance of buyers completing a purchase if the ecommerce
marketplace is accessible on multiple devices. Start working on a
mobile outreach strategy and test the online store performance on
multiple devices. Also, ensure that the checkout options are working
smoothly on all the devices.
7 Promote Sellers
Use the homepage space judiciously to promote the top products or top
sellers in the ecommerce marketplace. If it’s a standalone online
store selling your own products, analyse sales data to ascertain the
top selling products and promote them on the homepage.
8 Specific Landing Pages
An online store can get messy quickly. It is tough to track all the
product placements, listicles, and their sales possibilities unless
you’re using designated ecommerce CMS like Magento. Anyway,
irrespective of the current CMS, it’s a good idea to create
specific landing pages to attract buyers to specific product line.
Design the landing pages well with minimum diversion. Keep it product
focused and run paid marketing campaigns to pull buyers to the
specific product pages.
9 Influencer Marketing
The holiday season is the right time to invest in influencer
marketing initiatives. Find and contact influential marketers who are
active on Instagram and Snapchat. Your ideal influential marketers
should have at least 10,000 followers, impressive reach and good CTR
on their shared links. Ask for their previous campaign reports to
judge whether they are a good fit for your holiday sales campaign. If
they are, offer a financial benefit and free products for testing,
and a promotional schedule. Ensure that the tracking links are
perfectly set up to analyse the marketing performance.
10 Giveaways
Giveaways and contests are recommended to increase buyer engagement.
Put up a product that’s in demand as a prize and send newsletter
updates to the email list requesting them to participate. Share the
content on social media channels, and run paid social media campaign
on Facebook to increase the reach of the Facebook Page. Giveaways and
contests are good for increasing social page reach, improve
engagement, initiate communication, promote the ecommerce
marketplace, improve traffic, and increase sales.
11 SSL Certificate and HTTPS Connection
Buyers are more aware than ever. Sales will be dismal if the
ecommerce store doesn’t have an SSL and HTTPS connection to secure
buyer data. The HTTPS protocol implies secure communication over any
computer network and prevents hacking attempts. The SSL certificate
is a cryptographic protocol to encrypt communication between the
server and the client. Search engines like Google have already begun
to give preference to SSL and HTTPS encrypted websites in SERP as
they are now unanimous with data integrity, authentication and
encryption. Buyers want their data to be safe and protected. Buy a
HTTPS connection and SSL certificate from any leading registrar like
GoDaddy, and migrate the online store. A small tweaking will
drastically improve the product sales.
12 Customer Support
If required, hire additional staff to help with managing the holiday
season sales. The holiday season shouldn’t become an excuse for
delay in business operations. Hire extra staff on an hourly basis to
help with order management, product packaging, inventory management,
product deliveries and so on.
13 Email Marketing
Email marketing is the oldest and proven online marketing strategy.
Billions of emails are exchanged every day and the holiday season is
the right time to utilise the ecommerce site email list through
automated email newsletters. You can also buy ecommerce data from
trusted data sellers and run a transactional email marketing
campaign. Get a clearer understanding of email laws and regulations
here. On a specific note, email laws are relaxed for transactional
emails.
Endnote
The holiday season is nearing. Be proactive and prepare the online
store in advance to avoid last minute delays and mess ups. If you
have the ecommerce marketplace ready in advance
for the holiday
season, you won’t get distracted and would be able to focus on
the
sales completely. Furthermore, if you are looking for an Ecommerce
Design & development company, you can consider The Brihaspati
Infotech to take care of all the design development and hosting
migration for your Ecommerce Store.