With projected global online holiday retail sales set to reach a staggering $5.5 trillion in 2022, the world’s largest online shopping season of the year is about to take off. E-commerce holiday sales worldwide have grown quite dramatically compared with last year when they reached $4.92 trillion.
The competition level within the sector remains at its high, just as e-commerce still dominates the share of the retail market. A total of only 43% of shoppers still intended to visit the stores while 57% had already set plans to shop online, a figure indicated by Statista. Become their first place to buy gifts if you can make the shopping process easy, flexible, and full of choices that address the needs of your customers. And the best time to do all of this is now.
This article will cover everything you need to do to get your online store ready for the holidays. To make sure you don’t miss anything, we tapped e-commerce experts from across the sector for their best insights and counsel.
Steps to Take to Get Ready for the Holidays in 2022
The holiday season is what retailers rely on for the bulk of their annual sales. Here’s what you need to do to stay ahead of the competition and have your best holiday season ever.
- Prepare for incoming traffic.
- Make the customer experience easy.
- Give your customers a surprise and a sense of satisfaction.
- Organize smart holiday marketing campaigns.
- Boost support and customer service.
1. Prepare for the traffic
Shopping during the holidays will attract more visitors to your online store, especially on busy shopping days.
A website outage at one of these critical moments is the worst scenario.
Ensure your inventory is adequately stocked
Increased sales translate into greater inventory requirements. Check in with your suppliers right away to make sure you’re adequately stocked, especially for likely gift items, to avoid long lines and angry customers who discover their must-have gift is unavailable or back-ordered.
Evaluate your third-party integrations
Examine your third-party integrations. Don’t add any more until you’ve tested them to see if they are up to date and can handle the load. The flow of your site can be disrupted or slowed down by additional or hurried app additions.
2. Make the customer experience simple
The holiday consumer today wants to buy what they need quickly with as little hassle as possible. That means that your website should offer options catered to their specific needs and a seamless checkout.
Let’s consider some fundamental ways you can update your website to deliver holiday magic and meet and exceed customer expectations:
Test your site’s speed
In addition to being reliable, your site should also load fast. According to one study, 70% of online customers said that page speed would impact their decision to shop online.
Have your team run a test of page load times for every part of your site now. Contact your technology provider. These companies can help you with load testing so you can determine visitor numbers and traffic flow.
Make it personal
Give customers a personalized experience. A massive 89% of marketers said that the use of personalization resulted in increased sales.
Present to customers pertinent products that might draw their interest and encourage them to buy based on behavioural and contextual customer data other than business data such as margin and inventory.
A high conversion rate and low cart abandonment are achieved by basing product recommendations on customer information such as geo-location or demographics.
Optimize checkout
When a customer reaches the checkout page, they have already decided to buy something. The more you can make the process simple on your checkout page, the less likely customers will be to abandon their carts before buying.
- Simplify checkout to one page.
- Enable guest checkout.
- Offer several payment options.
- Enable multi-recipient functionality.
- Let shoppers select their preferred shipping option.
- Give shoppers peace of mind with shipping insurance.
3. Give your customers a surprise and a feeling of fulfilment
You’ll need a well-defined strategy for where to sell your goods and how to ship and complete orders to implement a great customer experience strategy.
Increase your sales channels
You can also spread holiday cheer in places other than just your e-commerce store. Consider additional sales channels, such as:
- Online marketplaces: Don’t forget other popular options like Wish and eBay besides connecting to big players like Amazon and Walmart Marketplace.
- Social commerce: To sell items on Facebook and Instagram, update your product catalogue and tag your products.
- Cross-border: Consider selling across borders through other online marketplaces.
- Brick-and-mortar shops: Make sure your efforts are the same both online and offline.
Shipping and fulfillment
In-house shipping and fulfilment entail taking care of all order fulfilment, including inventory management. This approach is practical and effective for many businesses.
With drop shipping or outsourced shipping, products are delivered directly to customers from your wholesaler.
Reduce the amount of time and money spent shipping each item by outsourcing shipping and fulfilment to a drop shipper.
You never have to monitor inventory, shipments, or returns because products always leave the warehouse, which saves money.
4. Execute smart holiday marketing strategies
This year, retailers had to adapt their stores to fit an influx of unanticipated changes to sell their wares as efficiently as possible, whether those changes were about new technology or marketing strategy.
To achieve the largest possible sales around the major holiday shopping days in the country and abroad such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday etc, your shop should be set and optimized during campaigns and strategies.
Here are essential planning ideas on how you make sure that it’s prepared as well as optimized for these frantic holiday shopper times.
Plan and do it early on
It is important to start organizing your affairs well in advance, even before your customers are even considering their holiday shopping because marketing is often a long game.
The most obvious effects of SEO campaigns take longer than six months to appear, and the greatest effects take longer than a year.
Use marketing tactics to draw in customers
Your promotion strategy can be done in a wide variety of ways for the holiday season. To give urgency, offer limited-time offers on items like Vintage Wall Art & Canvas Prints or use gift cards to upsell at checkout. You might also offer seasonal services like free shipping or gift wrapping.
Plan holiday giveaways and contests. This is because you can enhance customer satisfaction and engagement, besides increasing sales, through different contests and giveaways during the holiday seasons. You may use social media tools to send messages directly on your store’s website.
Set up a reward or loyalty program. Ahead of the holidays, it might be necessary for you as an entrepreneur to have a customer reward or loyalty system in place that is tailored to your brand.
Invest in your repeat customers while at the same time encouraging new ones to join through a consumer incentive and value increase for your store.
A good rewards program will be easy to use, offer benefits to members only, give your products more value, and foster member engagement and interaction. This is an effective strategy for converting one-time holiday shoppers into devoted patrons.
Combine your marketing efforts
A critical part of creating a holiday marketing plan is the consistent flow of content.
This can be achieved through social media sites, blogs, videos, and all other web content. Any search traffic on the web will also be directed to your business. When your content is unique, current, and appropriate for the holiday season, there is a good chance that customers will be directed to your store, which will increase your holiday sales.
You can also reach your customers via social media. Use social media for the holiday season in the most creative ways such as posting something on the store’s Instagram story, writing a Facebook ad which is focused on sales and discounts, or you can just simply tweet about the product campaign that has an amazing hashtag.
At this point, your brand needs to be different and creative so that you can capture the attention of customers. Sales can be generated and people spread the word about visiting your store by making sure that social media campaigns and marketing strategies are in place (before holidays like Christmas).
Use paid advertising
Though paid advertising may further fortify your brand in a busy market, organic traffic still matters. As organic content can easily be promoted, it’s good to start with Facebook or Instagram ads. However, search engine marketing and general conversion rate optimization need more effort from your side. In an omnichannel approach, paid advertising can help drive traffic across channels.
Make an email strategy
Promotional email sending is a crucial part of holiday campaigns. Do not wait until the last minute to send out promotional emails if you have special holiday sales, discounts, or offers.
You can create buzz about any holiday promotions that will help you boost conversions when you need them most by grabbing your customers’ attention in advance with the help of automated email features.
5. More support and customer care
The holiday season is near, and the company and the customers must be prepared for success.
Your e-commerce website has to be ALWAYS accessible
Your e-commerce website crashing on the highest week of holiday sales is a nightmare in the book of any e-commerce company.
Your customers have not been pleased, and are unable to buy products through your hard work in designing the website for months. It’s frequently neglected but support is crucial for any business to prosper.
It will give you the confidence to experiment and flip between products as you want while also giving you peace of mind should anything go wrong. With an automatic backup service, you can face any challenge head-on.
Create an all-encompassing customer service strategy
Behind your shop lies a committed support staff. You now need to take care of your customers. There’s no doubt the holidays can get frantic and overwhelming. Make information easily available and prepare for any queries and concerns that might arise.
Provide dedicated support and quick answers to questions. With good customer care, you get a devoted customer for life even when things go wrong. You should have a dedicated team handling calls, emails, and social media inquiries. You should also ensure that all messages are replied to within 24 to 48 hours.
Request customer feedback and work on it
Reviews will be progressively more important when the 2021 holiday season for shopping goes on. Rather, it’s said that including reviews and even social proof plays a significant part in succeeding with your campaign. Brands and merchants are advised that anything that provides education, encourages, and may even increase possibilities for conversion would be great things to give them.
The Final Word
The holiday is a season that has been looked forward to by businesses and customers this year. The hope is that this year is going to see a return to normalcy or as close to normalcy as we can hope for given the challenges the world is still facing.
In their pursuit of the perfect gifts for everyone on their lists, shoppers will shop offline, online, and across all platforms and marketplaces.
Give them a reason to choose your store over the competition by designing a shopping experience that appeals to them and provides a simple path to purchase. Whatever method they choose, make it quick and easy for them to shop with you.
Follow a step-by-step plan for holiday preparation, and before you know it, you’ll be ready to hospitably welcome merry customers.
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