Preparing Your Online Store For The Holiday Season

With so many online retailers keeping their eye on this holiday season, the competition is likely to be fiercer than ever. Online spending growth is expected to outpace brick-and-mortar expenditures, but many online retailers are still struggling. Whilst eCommerce sales, revenue, and audiences are poised to grow, success isn’t guaranteed and the companies who have done their due diligence to prepare will see their hard work pay off.

To help you prepare for the festive season, we spoke with Trustpilot, the most powerful review platform, for the top strategies they recommend to ready your eCommerce store for the holidays.

Read on for part one, and come check back next week for part two!

Collecting Consumer Insights To Give Customers What They Want

It’s a simple question, but one that a lot of companies can’t answer: what do your customers want?

The easiest way to really understand your customer is to listen to what they have to say and incorporate that into your offer. Listening is essential in order to get to know your customers better, understand their needs, and get to the core of their problems. It also helps businesses offer better services by working on what can be improved until they reach a point where the company exceeds customer expectations every time.

Collecting customer feedback will give you all sorts of insights into what your customers want and expect from you: faster delivery, better communication, and a good customer experience.

Treatwell allows customers to leave a review after each treatment they receive

Matching customer feedback with your business’ data will provide a clearer picture of the situation, improve your customer experience, and go after the right opportunities. Observing a dip in numbers and receiving negative feedback from your customers could help you understand where your business needs to invest more efforts and what can be improved for future customers. So if you’re not collecting consumer insights just yet, don’t panic!

Here are three easy ways to start: 

1. Give consumer surveys a try
Typeform and SurveyMonkey are great tools you can use to easily conduct a survey.

2. Check your customer reviews
If you don’t have a review management strategy in place already, use trusted third-party sites applicable (for example: Trustpilot for online businesses, Tripadvisor for travel, and Yelp for local businesses).

3. Social listening is essential
Leverage social listening to get a snapshot of what your customers are saying about you online.

Personalizing The Customer Experience

If you’re not personalizing your eCommerce website or marketing experiences, then you’re already behind. In fact, 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that recognizes them by name and recommends options based on their past purchases.

Shoppers go through a considerable amount of research before deciding with which company they’ll engage. In such a competitive market, it’s important to employ strategies that will help you stand out - and one of the best ways of doing that is to personalize your customer experience with insightful and relevant content like offers, podcasts, blogs, videos, products or even events.

Personalizing the customer experience with relevant pieces of information creates better brand awareness and loyalty, encourages customer relationships, and elevates your brand as a thought leader.

ASOS’s personalized mobile experience

Gartner says smart personalization could also enable digital businesses to increase their profits up to 15% by 2020.

If you want to start seeing results this season, try one of these five ways to implement personalized marketing into your business strategy:

1. Pop-ups
Try an add-on website app, like Sumo, for a free solution that’s easy to set up

2. Emails
Cart abandonment emails are a great place to start

3. Limited-time offers
The holiday season offers plenty of opportunities to offer an extra incentive

4. Recommendations
Use buyer history to suggest purchases that turn one-time buyers into repeat customers

5. Content
Share the images, videos, blog posts, or other content that educates visitors and keeps them coming back

Implementing these strategies will help you retain the extra traffic you’ll get during the holiday season, improve your customers’ shopping experience, and increase your conversion rate.

In our next blog post, we’ll cover three more strategies to help you anticipate consumers’ needs, reduce shopping friction, and ensure your user experience is as good as it can be in time for the festive season. Stay tuned!