Christmas Shopping Online
It goes without saying, the holiday season is the most important event of the retail calendar. This is the time when retailers will do a majority of their sales, even more so for an eCommerce retailer with heavy promotions during this time such as Black Friday and Cyber Week sales. The busy promotional period means a lot of opportunity for sales but also heightened pressure and competition. Below we cover how you can prepare and capitalise on the Christmas shopping season.
Firstly, make sure your site can handle increased traffic, particularly if you are expecting a peak over a short period of time. If you expect a significant increase in traffic, consider scalable hosting solutions that can handle sudden spikes in visitors. You should also conduct load testing to identify potential bottlenecks and optimise server configurations accordingly.
Conversion optimisation is a key area to look at during this time. A thorough review of your website prior to the busy Christmas shopping season may help with conversion, it can also be a good excuse to do some housekeeping. For example, reviewing the user flow on the site and checking your products shown in the best light with high quality images and comprehensive descriptions.
To drive conversion a strong promotional calendar should also be in place. A majority of customers will shop for their Christmas gifts over the busy Cyber weekend sales period. To maintain a competitive edge, explore ways to entice customers to convert, whether it be through a gift with purchase, upsell with stocking stuffers or push gift cards as a last minute Christmas gift.
Having strong promotional offers will help gain cut-through with your marketing efforts. You can build anticipation with teaser campaigns across email and social. You can reward your existing loyal customers with VIP previews to sales or new launches. This is also a key time where you can acquire new customers. Have a strong CRM strategy going into the season to ensure you can build a long-lasting relationship with new customers beyond the Christmas shopping season.
During this time it will be important to allocate a slightly higher budget to paid advertising given the increased competition (you will likely see CPAs increase over this time). For paid media during the Christmas shopping season timing is everything. A more hands on approach to ad management may be needed to work with peaks and lulls.
The Christmas shopping season can be stressful but equally very rewarding. There is a lot to prepare but an eCommerce consultant can help you develop and execute a strong strategy pre and post the holiday season. Contact us today for a chat about your Christmas season plans!
