Grow Your Business Over the Holiday Season

An evident shift from physical stores to the Internet is determined by demanding expectations regarding stock deversity, delivery options, returns, and customer service. Cover all the aspects above and when the world is eager to celebrate, you will be the one to dominate.

Active sales during a short holiday season can make the whole year festive to you. So keep your e-commerce business up and running to plant the seed for the next year and get as much as 50% more customers.

Boost promo activity

There’s hardly a successful marketplace disregarding holidays promotions, as that’s what people expect when postponing a purchase till Christmas. 

Make them know. Call forth to remember.

• Being the best way to deliver information on promotions, targeted mailing campaigns combined with ads, coupons and gifts, help you find new and reactivate the existing customers. As soon as your targeting is behavioral, the result is flawless.

• Provoke the “last-chance” feeling with limited time price and free shipping, countdowns or catchy labels and use pop-ups featuring the deals.
• Create smart catalogs to save time on routine management and make mass parameter customization swift. Track the stock, plan pre-sales and automate discounts based on stock analysis.
• Make all the value propositions, like free shipping, money back guarantee, best-selling, etc., evident, bring reviews at hand and let them speak for description and drive conversion.

Enhance customer communication

Although customer communication is bilateral it all comes to you as a source of valuable information.

• Be an advisor. Whether your customers use social networks, blogs or forums to look for gifts and inspirations, help them find both and forth guide them to your e-shop. Ensure they are not the only ones interested with likes and shares allowing to attract more targeted audience and make your e-store viral.
• Be an assistant. To handle peak orders and returns flow you’ll need optimized customer communications system. “Holy days” are not always what even proper staffing is prepared for. With adequate FAQs and live customer support you help customers overcome most of the barriers to purchase.  

Improve usability

When it comes to holidays every audience segment becomes targeted. Gift-targeted, joy-targeted and shopping-targeted. The only thing left to do is to encourage conversion.

• Let your e-shop guide your customers throughout the process with intuitive navigation. Hasten the search with focus on prominent hot deals and holiday items.
• Help them instantly get the desired product with add-to-cart option or get additional information in reviews right from the drop-down list not to waste time on page reloading.
• Record traffic doesn’t have to affect speed, so your site may need some clean-up to get get rid of inactive, outdated and irrelevant pages and improve performance during peak periods - all the way to desired 3-seconds page loading.
• Raise confidence stipulated by comprehensive contact information, additional guarantees, transparent return policy and store pick-up opportunities by making the cart-to-door way and back seamless. 
• Smartphones and tablets are rapidly replacing laptops when it comes to couch commerce. If you still don’t have specialized app, be sure to optimize mobile versions of you e-store.

Increase order value

When a customer grows excited you can have more from every purchase. Leave a “breadcrumb trail” of additional services, including gift wrapping, expedited delivery and advanced insurance.

Make sure they won’t miss related products and additional services with up-selling and cross-selling products being displayed throughout the process, and finally on checkout and shopping cart pages to make their necessity evident. 

Simplify checkout

Goods in shopping carts don’t bring you money, but holidays is the time to return customers to abandoned carts and offer them a better service.

• Consider quick registration and login, wish-/compare-list management, simplified check-out to drive sales by simplifying 6-step process to 1-step checkout to achieve every cart being completed. 
• Diversify logistics options. Add to confidence of your store with multiple trusted couriers and advanced shipping options available. Provide the freedom of choice to assure the client that the whole network of shipping forwarders is with him.
• Bring your secure multi-currency payment gateway to notice and ensure the customers that payment data are kept safe whatever it takes. 

The sooner you start the better results you achieve, so start now, as you have the whole festive year ahead.