The culture of online gift giving due to eCommerce shopping has exploded. Online merchants should make sure they take full advantage of the annual increase in Christmas spending. Holiday spending is expected to exceed $789 billion in 2020. The figures have continued to evolve since the National Retail Foundation began reporting them, and 2021 is expected to be no different.
E-commerce sales from new and current customers are expected to rise at a pace of 169 percent this year, according to a survey performed by Accenture. Because consumers are unlikely to change their purchasing patterns in 2019, strengthening and smoothing out the wrinkles in your digital retail experience is essential.
Deloitte also forecasts that e-commerce sales will grow by 11-15%, year-over-year, during the 2021-2022 holiday season. This will likely result in e-commerce holiday sales reaching between $210 billion and $218 billion this season.
#1 Optimize On-Page Speeds For Your eCommerce Website
Customers want to conduct business with a company that makes buying easy and convenient.
They expect an eCommerce website to meet their requirements when they engage with it. When it doesn’t, they move to other e-stores, which leads to a greater bounce rate and increased cart abandonment. According to studies, if your business takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 57% of your clients will abandon it.
As a result, ensure that your site loads quickly while dealing with high traffic and frequent transactions, particularly during the holidays when traffic is at its height for your eCommerce platform.
Here are a few tried-and-true ways to speed up your eCommerce site:
- It’s worth noting that Google prioritizes loading times on mobile devices.
- Reduce the time it takes for a website to load by using a CDN.
- To prevent needless database access, use caching and in-memory technologies.
- Compression software can be used to reduce the amount of data transmitted to a browser.
- To enhance performance, optimize the available settings in the eCommerce platform.
#2 To Avoid Making Mistakes, Review Your Previous Data
When you don’t make the same mistakes as before, you improve.
Fixing the preceding obstacles will prevent people from abandoning your site. This will make it easier for them to progress through the funnel and improve holiday sales and conversions by looking at your previous eCommerce data.
Here’s how to avoid making the same mistakes you did before:
- Analyze your statistics from the previous year using Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
- Look at heatmaps and scroll maps to see what’s pushing your visitors away.
- Learn about user activity on your pages by watching the recordings of page views.
- Fix what went wrong in your business the previous year, such as product marketing, advertising, and so on.
#3 Have A Customer-First Approach
During the Christmas season, people purchase the most. The more people shop, the more problems arise. You must give customers prompt customer care that resolves their problems.
If you succeed in doing so, 93 percent of your clients will want to purchase with you again. Keep in mind that you won’t be able to please every user, but if most of them are, you’re doing well.
Here are some suggestions for improving your customer service:
- Reduce the time it takes you to respond on average
- Customer service should be multichannel.
- Your website should provide a self-service option.
- Use chatbots to solve frequent and recurring issues.
#4 Retargeting Customers
It is far more beneficial to target existing consumers than it is to seek new ones. Existing consumers are interested in your brand and have already interacted with you. As a result, when you approach them, they are more inclined to listen to you and your proposals.
Existing consumers also purchase more items than new customers. If you want to increase Christmas sales, it’s always a good idea to target existing consumers.
- Improve your targeting by segmenting your existing consumers.
- Remarketing allows you to show them tailored adverts.
- Cross-sell and upsell goods that are related to their current and prior purchases.
Retargeting based on pixels on your eCommerce. Your adverts are shown to anonymous website users depending on their prior activity on your site. When someone views particular pages on your website, the visitor’s information is saved in browser cookies. ReTargeter is a pixel-based retargeting tool that works well.
- Retargeting on social media. You show advertisements to those who have visited your website and/or who have interacted with your social media posts. Likes, comments, and shares are all possibilities.
- Retargeting based on a list. Using platforms like MailChimp, you may deliver your advertising to the email addresses of visitors or customers on your existing mailing list for your eCommerce platform.
#5 A Holiday Makeover For Your Website
Have you ever noticed how festival-themed businesses are decorated? They adorn their stores by the event for visitors to understand.
Your website is your store in the eCommerce world. You should give it a festive appearance and feel so that customers know you’re ready for the holidays and may take advantage of some great discounts.
Here’s how to make your website seem festive:
- On your website’s main page and other pages, you can add festive pictures.
- Use images and themes that are associated with the event or the current season.
- To give your website a festive vibe, change the typefaces.
#6 Enhance the Checkout Process
All of your efforts to attract customers to your site and encourage them to make purchases should not go for naught due to a bad checkout experience.
- Describe what to expect throughout the checkout process. To minimize visitor confusion and surprises, mention each checkout criteria on the page before they arrive on your eCommerce.
- Activate the progress bar. Prospects would be able to see where they are in the checkout process and how close they are to the final step by using the bar.
- Do not need customers to register before making a purchase. It’s a kind of tussle. For a more seamless experience, provide a guest checkout option and then ask them to register once they’ve completed the process.
- Make no compromises when it comes to security. To avoid client data risk, use HTTPS, connect with a trustworthy payment gateway and follow best practices to protect your eCommerce platform.
- Add a back button that is completely functioning. Customers frequently reverse their internet purchasing decisions. It may cause further friction if they are unable to return to the previous page, particularly throughout the checkout process.
- Avoid unpleasant surprises when it comes to shipping costs. Whether delivery is free or not, make it explicit on the product page. If the cost is changeable, you can give a zip code/shipping calculator.
- Provide a variety of payment methods.
#7 FOMO: A Sense Of Urgency
It’s tough to attract customers’ attention to your firm during the Christmas season when everyone else in the market is giving tempting discounts and deals.
Making customers feel like they’re going to lose out on a fantastic opportunity by instilling a feeling of urgency is a strong method to boost sales. It’s a technique for instilling the dread of losing out on your eCommerce platform.
Here’s how to make this technique work for you:
Come up with a deal on popular items. People are more likely to express interest in items that they are already seeking. The offer is only valid for a short period. To generate time pressure, use a countdown timer on your website.
Demonstrate product scarcity.
#8 Improve Product Recommendations
Improve your clients’ shopping experiences by suggesting better goods, making forecasts, and making smart suggestions based on their budget, taste, and shopping habits. To-do:
- Use the “Best Sellers” or “Most Popular” categories to highlight your best-selling items.
- Show suggestions based on ratings and reviews from customers.
- Geo-targeting allows you to sell items based on the visitor’s location.
- Analyze customer activity with HubSpot forms and visitor tracking scripts and cookies.
- Under the first scroll, pin the most popular and new arrivals.
- Check out these clever upselling ideas for holiday sales in 2021.
#9 Improve Your Refund & Exchange Process On Your E-Commerce Platform
If the returns procedure was simple, 92 percent of shoppers said they would buy again.
This item on the eCommerce site checklist will assist you in maintaining control over your return and exchange policies. Make sure your refund and exchange gateway is ready to manage all of the bulk requests and provides a simple refund and exchange process, regardless of whether it’s a return, refund, or exchange.
To-do:
- Make sure your product descriptions are clear.
- With RMA Authorization, choose an automated tool to assure seamless refunds and swaps.
- Get a refund and exchange system that is automated.
- Each stage of the refund process should be communicated to your consumers through email.
#10 Choose the Best Technology Partner Another critical step is to find a good technological partner. Your technology partner should be able to give your eCommerce business the greatest solutions and support. As a result, devote sufficient time to discussing your eCommerce store’s requirements and learning about its assistance throughout the process. At DCKAP Integrator we connect your ERP, eCommerce, and CRM applications instantaneously and efficiently, eliminating the hassle of back-and-forth manual efforts – so your operations team will have access to critical data to enrich customer experience.We believe that things between you and your technology partner should be transparent, so you know exactly what’s going on. That’s what we do here at DCKAP Integrator. We have a dense corpus of information on everything related to NetSuite which you can find here. I hope you found this helpful, ask us in the comments below if we missed something and we’ll get back to you. Here you’ll find all the information you need to manage your internet distribution company. You can also save this page to your favorites for quick access to the most recent information. Tell us something you’d want to learn more about on LinkedIn. Thank you for reading this far.
