Every year, online retail brands brace themselves for the holiday hype. They stock up on the typical best-sellers, notify their repeat customers to let them know their favorites are in stock, and start advertising for the upcoming deals and discounts. This year is different. While e-commerce sales have increased for certain products, they’ve plummeted for others, as the pandemic has created a whole new wave of shopping trends and preferences.
As we’re rapidly approaching Christmas and New Year’s, it’s time to take charge of your e-commerce store and find the most promising strategies to prepare and boost your sales while you also improve customer satisfaction as well as loyalty. Some of the following tips can help your 2020 holiday sales flourish, and greet the upcoming year with more financial stability, ready to recover from the impact of the pandemic, and hopefully grow even more.
Make sure your website performs well
Since online shopping has become so prevalent, customers have become accustomed to certain standards of online shopping. That includes the loading speed of your site, a short and sweet checkout process, and clean product descriptions and reviews to help them understand how your product fits into their lives.
It’s time to revamp your site before the holiday sales begin. Start by implementing social proof on your site to humanize your brand and make your products more relatable. Analyze and test your site’s performance to make sure everything loads quickly and smoothly on all devices. And of course, make sure your prices and images are updated and relevant for the holiday season.
Make use of various digital tools and platforms
In order to allow your online store to work effortlessly, you need to have an infrastructure powered by various digital tools and solutions to create harmony in all of your core processes. From manufacturing, inventory, vendor invoicing, all the way to managing customer orders, you can use different software solutions, or integrate them within a single platform.
Some of the more advanced software can help your business organize and manage your entire supply chain and automate a wide array of tedious processes. Using such software tools will help you make smarter forecasts for the holiday season, have your inventory ready, and always exceed customer expectations with speedy and safe shipping.
Create buzz on social media
During the holiday season, your brand can benefit from an increased number of targeted ads on social media as well as a stronger social media strategy that emphasizes consistency and engagement. More ads will help place your brand in front of more customers at the right time – when they are ready to make a purchase. Plus, providing assistance on social media will help your brand stand out and create a valuable rapport with customers.
Empower assistance with chatbots
The pandemic has brought on the need for elevated customer service and different precautions that will help your brand elevate its reputation. People have more questions than ever and they prefer immediate help and support rather than waiting for hours for one of your customer support agents to get back to them. That is why more e-commerce businesses will leverage AI-driven chatbots to automate customer support at its earliest stages. These handy tools can take over a large portion of customer queries while your support teams handle more intricate tasks.
This kind of effort will help your business improve customer experience as well as customer support during this pandemic. If you help your customers find what they need and you make the process easy, you will have the chance to make their holiday purchases seamless, thus encouraging them through the sale.
Emphasize secure shopping in your store
Your customers have so many options to choose from, it’s up to you to help them choose you. Your competitors, no matter your industry, will be pouring all of their efforts into defining their own holiday sales strategy to make sure they stay on the map, and preferably in the leading ranks of their e-commerce niche. Your goal should be to elevate customer engagement through a wide array of marketing channels, but also to give your customers valid reasons to trust you – or to remind them of why they’ve trusted you in the first place.
The element of secure shopping prevails in everyone’s decision to buy or not to buy. They’ll find a product similar to yours, if not the same, perhaps even at a lower price with one of your competitors. You should emphasize that your cybersecurity measures make your store perfectly safe for online purchases, so place your cybersecurity seals to make them visible and put your customers at ease.
As we wait for our lives to go back to normal, or at least to some kind of normal, people are still eager to make the most of the holidays, connect with their families, and bring some joy to each other’s lives. Your e-commerce business can be the perfect source of joy for people looking to enjoy the little things in life and to add some bliss to the holidays, even if they cannot spend them together. Make sure to spread the word and keep your brand in the spotlight throughout the holiday sales.
