We’ve said it once, and we’ll say it again, leaving your holiday campaign planning until Q3 is a very seat-of-your-pants approach to ecommerce marketing. That said, if for whatever reason you’re putting together your strategies just now we have the perfect post for you that is going to maximize conversions and increase sales over the holidays when it comes to your Magento store.
Make Inventory Management Easier for Yourself
Get it right, and the holiday season is the going to be the most profitable time of the year for your ecommerce site. The average retailer sells 52% more merchandise between Black Friday and Christmas Eve than any other day of the year. That means a whole lot of orders, and a whole lot of work fulfilling those orders. The key to success when it comes to those busy periods is finding a way to work faster without slip-ups, and this means automation.
There are several integrations that allow you to automate and oversee inventory management. Many of these also offer drop shipping (important, in a world where AmazonNow exists), stock control, inventory optimization and multiple warehouse tracking. Using these integrations, you can better mobilize your teams and ensure your processes can keep up with the demands of this busy period.
Remember, 47% of shoppers will abandon their cart and buy from a competitor when they can’t find a delivery service that suits them, so it’s also essential you review your delivery options if you’re providing physical products.
Know Your Shopper
Holiday buyers are an interesting subset of your customers — they’re often not typical shoppers on your site because they’re buying for people other than themselves. Basically, they’re shopping outside of their wheelhouse. Keeping in mind most of your holiday shoppers are not shopping for themselves, content pieces offering advice and reviews of products will be particularly effective.
But it’s not just enough to write a few content pieces. Truly knowing your buyers is your key to holiday success. Create buyer personas for your shoppers and make use of Magento’s features to truly understand where your focus should lie.
In particular, Business Intelligence for Magento is going to help you better understand the potential profits for your business, as well as growth opportunities. Using features available in the essentials package you should be able to identify emerging trends for product revenue, which will give you a good idea of seasonality and which products you need to increase stock on.
From https://magento.com/products/business-intelligence
You might assume a holiday shopper is great in the short term, but worth less than the bulk of your customers over a lifetime. The difference is marginal, less than 13%, and it is more than made up for by the increase in revenue. In certain categories, holiday customers can make up 23.6% of annual revenue.
Prepare Your Site
Your inventory management systems aren’t the only things about to be tested and pushed to maximum capacity. More purchases mean more traffic on your site, and your site is going to need to be super robust and user-friendly to handle this influx in traffic.
Magento is a great platform for managing and improving your site health as well as usability, and there are a number of extensions designed to help you optimize your site.
We’ve written about quickly optimizing your Magento store for SEO before, but as a recap when performing a site audit look out for:
- Title tags
- Duplicate product descriptions
- Xml sitemaps
- Dead pages
- 404 errors
- Sold out items
- Old or outdated discount codes or sale pages
When it comes to making your site easy to use, consider user the following features and processes to maximize user experience:
- Auto suggesting products in search fields
- Allowing guest check-ins (in the past, ASOS increased store conversions by 50% by using this feature)
- Be mobile friendly — or better yet, go one further and have a mobile-first site made for mobile use
- Don’t ask too much. When it comes to checkout, potential buyers get fatigued very quickly. Increase your conversions by asking less.
What are you doing to prepare for the holidays? Tell us in the comments!
