If you are an online store owner looking to be on the top of your e-commerce game during this holiday season 2021, this post is specifically for you. This blog outlines top e-commerce strategies that maximize sales and help you succeed during this holiday season.
The holiday season is just around the corner, and e-commerce strategy planning has never been more important. The holiday season is a time for giving and receiving, but it can also be a time of stress. If you are not on top of your e-commerce game, this could lead to missed opportunities or even worse – lost revenue.
Therefore, online store owners need to have a well-thought-out plan in place so that they can take advantage of the holiday shopping frenzy and boost your revenue for this year.
In short, you need to create an e-commerce strategy that will work when the holiday shopping period is at its busiest time of year and make you stand out in a crowded marketplace. And for that, you must consider hiring a e-commerce consultant or web development agency who can help to prepare a foolproof e-commerce strategy for the holiday season (2021).
During the holiday season, the demand rises unprecedentedly for everything, especially for online shopping.
Having said that, as per eMarketer, during the 2020 holidays:
- Total retail spending increased by 6.5% to $1.064 trillion.
- E-commerce sales increased by 32.5%, while brick-and-mortar sales increased by just 2.2%. Cyber Monday 2020 was the biggest online shopping day in history — sales rose by 15.6%.
- Black Friday sales went up by 22%, while Thanksgiving sales increased by 21.4%.
These stats prove why you must create an infallible e-commerce strategy during the holiday season. All said and done, let’s move forward and see how to prepare a successful e-commerce strategy for this 2021 holiday season.
Ready? Get. Set. Go!
7 Ways to Prepare E-Commerce Strategy for the 2022 Holiday Season
Provide Personalized Shopping Experience
Online shopping has evolved. Today, customers are more likely to buy personalized items. As a result, they’re increasingly seeking out personalized products for friends, family members, or even themselves.
This is why retailers need to create a unique and personalized shopping experience during the holiday season that allows them to stand apart from other e-commerce sites — and one way of doing so is by personalizing their marketing efforts through dynamic product recommendations on every site page.
How can they offer personalized product recommendations?
- By collecting information about your customers’ past purchases
- Using machine learning algorithms based on purchase history data
- By asking users if they’d like help choosing something new using text messages/emails
Create a Hassle-Free Customer Experience
When the holiday season is in full swing, e-commerce store owners must look for ways to create a smooth customer experience during the holiday season so that customers will remember it all year.
How to do that?
- Improve communication and transparency with social media.
- Reduce cart abandonment rate by increasing trustworthiness and site security.
- Ensure smooth running of systems through meticulous QA testing and live monitoring tools.
- Provide customers with free shipping.
- And more
The key to creating a hassle-free and enjoyable customer experience during the 2021 holiday season is to ensure your customers have everything they need before, during, and after their purchase. Emphasize that, and you’re good to go
Form Strategic Holiday Marketing and Promotions
As the holiday season is one of the best times to create a buzz around your brand. You can get shoppers excited about what you have on offer with some strategic planning for marketing and promotions during the holiday season.
Make sure your online store is fully optimized and ready with all the campaigns and promotional strategies. Email promotions can do wonders for your e-commerce store during the holiday season. So don’t neglect that.
All you need to do is start early and plan ahead, adopt some promotional strategies to engage customers, and integrate all your marketing efforts. If you want you can also leverage some paid advertising tactics just for the holiday season. And that’s all. You will surely get amazing results after that!
Leverage Peak Promotions
Let’s admit that the holiday season is the best time for any e-commerce store owner to leverage peak promotions. Why? Because during this period, many customers look for great deals and discounts on products they want. However, the competition gets tougher during this time because everyone wants their share of profits from the bigger market pool.
That being said, how will you be able to figure out how to leverage peak promotions during the holiday season, especially during Black Friday and Cyber Monday because these two are the busiest days of all the holiday seasons.
It’s simple — learn about the kind of promotions that work better when it comes to leveraging peak promotional period. Also, identify which products/services categories do well while utilizing peak promotion benefits.
Create Holiday E-Commerce Email Campaigns
Are you wondering how to get your e-commerce customers into the holiday shopping mood? Your shop has probably been getting a lot of visitors since the holiday season kicks off. It is time for some email marketing action!
Emphasize creating holiday e-commerce email campaigns that are personalized and resonate well with the customers. This will surely encourage online shoppers to buy more items during the festive period.
E-commerce email campaigns for the holiday season are a great way to reach more and more customers during the period. Personalize subject lines, highlight limited availability of products/services, and more for better holiday e-commerce email campaigns.
Ensure Site Speed Is Way Faster
If you own an e-commerce store, faster site speed is essential to improve customer experience and eventually your ROI. Not only do online shoppers hate slow websites, but Google also ranks faster sites higher in search results!
Having said that, a faster e-commerce site becomes even more imperative during the holiday season. Because a slow website may kill your holiday sales. And if you don’t want that, you must focus on increasing your e-commerce website speed. Reduce resource usage without sacrificing user experience via tools like Pingdom or GTmetrix.
Offer Great Customer Service and Support
No customer wants to miss heavy discounts during the holiday season. And as an e-commerce store owner, it’s your responsibility to offer great customer service and support during that period.
You can respond immediately to every email, call or even chat session that your customers initiate with your business. The faster they receive an answer, the more satisfied your customers will be.
Also, customers expect quick replies to inquiries about orders, shipping statuses, and returns/exchanges. Therefore, make sure that all of the processes run smoothly by keeping up on communication throughout this time of the year.
In Conclusion
With all of these strategies in mind, you have a great opportunity to create an unforgettable shopping experience for your customers this holiday season. So which of these strategies do you think is the most important for holiday e-commerce success in 2021? And which strategy would be your favorite if you were a customer looking to buy from an online store this year?
