If you run an e-commerce store, the fourth quarter is probably your busiest time of year. While this can be great for business, it can also be quite overwhelming if you’re not adequately prepared for the holiday rush. As the holiday season approaches, here are some expert tips and best practices to help gear up your e-commerce business in preparation.
Define Your Goals for the Holiday Season
Before the holiday season begins, take some time to identify your goals, which will help ensure you have the proper strategy in place to achieve them. You may start by assessing last year’s performance during the holiday season and determining what went well and what you could have improved upon.
Do you want to increase sales revenue? Offer faster load times? Turn holiday shoppers into repeat customers? Avoid stockouts? Hit a certain average order value?
If you don’t set tangible goals, you could head into the season with lofty expectations or set the bar too low and miss out on valuable sales opportunities.
Make a Holiday Sales Plan
Consider any special promotions or offers you’d like to offer customers to encourage higher sales volumes during the holiday season. Competition is ripe this time of year, and offering discounts, buy-one-get-one offers, free shipping, and other promotions can help you beat out the competition.
Be advised that you’ll need to price any discounts and promotions carefully. You want the offer to be appealing enough to garner more business but not so much that you end up losing money on the sale.
Prepare a Holiday Email Marketing Campaign
Your email list is one of the most important resources for an e-commerce brand. Sending out targeted emails to your past customers and those who have signed up for your emails means you’re connecting with a warm audience of people who have previously expressed interest in your store.
You don’t have to prepare an elaborate campaign. However, you should have something prepared to stay top of mind with prospective customers as they’re completing their holiday shopping. Plus, this gives you a direct way to inform them of any promotions or special offers they can take advantage of during the holiday season.
Add a Gift Guide to Your Blog
Create a holiday gift guide and post it to your website’s blog to gain traffic from those looking for holiday gift ideas. The guide should highlight some of your products and explain why they’d each make good gifts for someone special.
Ensure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly
A surefire way to lose sales during the holiday season is having a site that is not optimized for mobile. A growing number of adults only use their smartphones to browse and shop online. Thus, the website should be easy to navigate and optimized for mobile devices, ensuring anyone who wants to purchase from your store can do so—no matter how they access the site.
–
Written by Bailey Schramm