Eager Christmas shoppers start to buy gifts online as early as October, according to Google. That doesn't mean its too late to get your online business ready for the holiday season and it's certainly not too soon.
1. If there's still time to Ship, there's time to Remarket!
If you still have time to ship orders before Christmas, you still have time to convert additional sales.
Remarketing is on-hand to recover potentially lost sales. The choice facing customers online is immense. It's easy to be lost in a sea of competition. Here's two approaches to keep your brand at the forefront of your customers minds.
Paid Remarketing
Remarketing, or retargeting, is quite a simple concept. When a customer visits your online store, your advertising platform will make a note of that customers behavior on your store. At a later date, a paid advert will be shown to that customer when they are browsing another website or service.
Many of the top paid advertising platforms, such as those provided by Adroll and Google have a remarketing solution available.
Recover Abandoned Shopping Carts
According to the Baymard Institute, shopping cart abandonment is as high as 75%.
It may be easier than you think to turn an abandoned cart into a successful sale. The first step is reaching out. Make contact with customers who have abandoned their carts, find out why. Offering token discounts or even just friendly reminders will complete more orders than you may have thought.
From a technology standpoint, you may need to do a little work to your current website up to scratch here. Search the online app stores for the eCommerce platform you are using. Be it Magento, Shopify or something else, there should be a solution out there waiting for you.
2. Get Mobile Friendly
In 2015, eCommerce traffic from tablets and smart phones has accounted for up to 45% of all eCommerce traffic in the U.K.
If your store is not mobile friendly, you may be being penalised by Google. As a result, you may be missing out on customers.
You can check if your store is mobile friendly here.
Tip Have you ever tried to purchase something from your own store on your phone? Was it as easy as it should have been? Increase how your website responds on mobile devices and increase your sales.
3. Gift Guides are simpler than you think
Shopping for family and friends is hard. You can make it easier for your customers with gift guides, they will thank you for it.
Gift guides are essentially collections of products that appeal to a specific group. Gift guides don't need to be complicated occur development costs. Here are two ways to create simple gift guides that help your customers shop and steer customers towards your products.
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Product Categories: Gift guides can be a simple as grouping products into a category of their own. Lets create a category called Boys 8-12 and fill it with catapults and slime. Pair that with a little social media marketing and you have yourself a gift guide that helps customers buy your products for boys between 8 and 12.
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Gift Guide Blog Posts: If creating product categories doesn't fit your business, why not create a blog post listing your most popular products for an age group? Blog posts can be an effective way to present products using great product imagery and product reviews.
4. Get Smarter with your Shipping
The holiday season is going to keep you busy. You don't have time to manually create shipping labels for every one of your orders. And there is absolutely no reason you should.
Automating shipping is a must for any successfully online business. Create smart shipping rules that drive the production of shipping labels. If you are still typing shipping labels manually, you are missing a serious trick.
If you would like to more about how Shiptheory can help you automate your shipping this holiday season, please get in touch or open an account for free and try it out for yourself.
5. A Customer is not just for Christmas
You provide a great service to your customers during the holidays, why not all year round? The seasonal increase in new customers is a great opportunity to build a base of loyal customers that will buy from you again and again.
Implementing a loyalty program gives your customers a reason to come back. Rewarding your customers with return discounts and free gifts keeps you at the top of your customers list of favorite stores.
The holiday rush is also a great chance to build a mailing list. Mailing lists allow you to engage with customers all year round and can provide a great source of return orders.
6. Holiday eCommerce traffic can take its toll. Is your website ready?
Promotions, customer retention, smarter shipping and great content are important factors to help you sail through the holiday season with ease. But without the infrastructure, you may spring a leak.
It's important to ask yourself how your website handles it's current traffic.
- Do you find yourself waiting longer than you should for pages to load?
- Does your website fails to respond from time to time?
- Do you get complaints about slowness from your customers?
If any of the above apply to you, get in touch with your web hosting provided and start a discussion around improving the performance of your website. You may need to invest a little capital in increasing your servers available resources.
Even if the non of the above questions apply to you and you are happy with the speed and stability of your website, it won't hurt speaking to your web host anyway. Find out how your current server(s) will handle additional traffic and if they scale.
