With the holidays on the horizon, it’s time to buckle down and get your eCommerce site ready for shoppers. The holiday season is retail’s biggest money-making time of the year, so it’s vital that you prepare early in order to maximize your sales and customer experience. A good holiday shopping experience has a chance of fostering loyalty among customers, so we’ve put together this great list of five things you can do to boost your holiday eCommerce sales.
1. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
A mobile-friendly site is essential to your success during the holiday season. Since a large majority of people actually use their mobile devices to access the internet (which will include your eCommerce site, of course), it’s important that you make your site friendly to mobile devices.
With increased mobile optimization, your site will experience greater traffic and fewer cart abandonments. Cart abandonment is a serious problem for eCommerce sites and is often due to a faulty website or non-mobile-friendly site. You need to customize your site to the preferred buying experience of your customers; if you have a large user base that uses mobile devices to shop, your site should reflect those preferences.
If you’re not already using a web designer/developer for your site, you might want to pay for such a service in order to ensure your site is sufficiently mobile-friendly. Additionally, sending out post-purchase surveys to learn which platforms your customers are making purchases on is a good way to learn where you need to focus some effort on improving the user experience.
2. Start Collecting Emails and Customer Info Early
Don’t forget to ask for at least an email address before the start of the holiday season. You should be collecting information year-round, but it’s important to remember that emails and personal information are a vital part of the checkout process.
By increasing your customer database, you’ll have more people to send promotions to, thus prompting them to visit your site to take advantage of your amazing deals. The more customer information you gather, the greater the reach you’ll have when the holiday rush begins. Don’t be afraid to ask for email and physical addresses, and be sure to let customers know you’ll be sending them promotional materials so they can get better deals.
3.Advocacy Marketing
Advocacy marketing is a good way to spread the word of your brand via your current customers. Offer incentives or deals if customers sign up friends and family for an account on your site. You can offer customers their own referral link, or a special code they can use for discounts when they refer a new customer.
This is perhaps one of the most cost-effective ways to raise your sales numbers. Since your current customers already trust your brand, they’ll be the perfect advocates for your products; and, with incentives such as discounts and special deals, they’ll have a good reason to follow through with the advocacy of your brand.
Your customers are truly your best means of reaching new people. Word of mouth is still an important method of marketing, and current customers who love your brand are the perfect people to help spread the word. A loyalty program can also help increase the faith current customers have in your brand, as well as your brand’s appeal for potential customers.
4. Personalized Product Recommendations
This is where a POS system for growing businesses can seriously benefit your eCommerce store. With a POS system, you’ll be able to track individual customer purchases throughout the year, compiling valuable information on which products are your customers’ favorites.
Armed with this information, you can send more personalized product recommendations that appeal to your customers’ individual tastes. This makes it more likely for the customer to follow through with a purchase since you’re sending them information on things they’re already more likely to want to buy.
5. Respond ASAP to Cart Abandonment
In the unfortunate case of cart abandonment, it is vital to the recovery of the sale that you respond immediately with a follow-up email. There’s a chance that the customer abandoned the cart simply because they lost the connection or had to close their browser window, and you don’t want to lose sales to such trivialities.
Sending a follow-up email will remind your customer that they have items waiting in their cart, and will (hopefully) encourage them to return the site at a later time and follow through with the purchase.
The Bottom Line
Boosting eCommerce sales can help your holiday season become one of the most profitable in your business’s lifetime, and doing so is actually quite simple. With these five simple tips, you’ll be able to maximize the effectiveness of your website and reduce things like cart abandonment.
