Here at adMixt, we love the holidays as much as our retailer clients. We know this is the time that our clients will want to maximize their sales. On our end, we can use a variety of promotions and methods to not only drive interest but also sales through Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest ads. It’s an eCommerce retailer and marketers’ paradise of a time, really. To get you prepared on your end, we have included some tips on how to prepare your eCommerce store for the holidays. Enjoy~ and Happy Selling this holiday season.
Included are some best practices as our gift to you during this holiday season!
- Get your Site Ready!
• Make sure your eCommerce store is mobile-friendly — This should be pretty much standard these days as we all know that more and more shopping is taking place on mobile devices. Because of this, you will want to make it easy for users to lead themselves down the path to purchase. And the best way to do that is to optimize your site for each device. Easy!
• Prepare for heavier traffic — Get your site optimized for the heavy traffic times ahead. If you are on a hosted solution like Shopify, they will luckily handle the bandwidth for you, so make sure your site loads in record speeds and all that fun stuff that you can do to control the experience once they land on your store. If you are hosting your store on your own, you will want to ensure that your site is robust enough for the added bus loads of traffic that will inevitably be dropped off at your store during this time.
• Stock up on product inventory — The worst thing that can happen is unfulfilled sales and more customer service headaches. We all know that the sales will come so plan ahead now and make sure you have plenty of inventory to go out the door. Cha-ching!
2. Run Promos the Right Way!
• State deadlines to promote a sense or urgency to buy — This will enable users to recommend your store to new buyers through social sharing and give you a sense of the demand of certain products on your store based on the urgency of the promotions. It will also enable you to leverage certain promotions in A/B testing further down the funnel and as it nears closer to the holidays. The last thing you want is poor customer service experiences so make it clear when the buying/shipping cut off dates are for products to arrive just in time for the holidays.
• Sell ‘Holiday Bundles’ to make gifting easy — This is always a win in increasing your average order value; pairing products that the user might not have tried otherwise for repeat purchasing later and makes buying from your store a lot easier for their gifting needs.
• Run seasonal items early — Giving those early-to-market buyers the opportunity to choose your store over elsewhere. This will also give you the ability to stock up again on those seasonal items that sold well on the first round if you can get/make more in time for round 2 and perhaps even 3.
3. Make things Easy on your Customers
• Make top-sellers visible — This is fairly obvious but not always accomplished on stores’ home pages or landing pages. Figure out your best items and make them front and center for easy and quick purchasing. Holiday shopping can be quite time consuming. The easier you make it for your customers, the more you will sell. Product recommendations are also a bonus.
• Offer in-store pickup — Give your shoppers options especially as it nears closer to the holidays to pick up their items in your brick-and-mortar store. If they missed the shipping cut off deadline, you still can capture those much wanted sales by offering this. It also helps with shoppers that aren’t even going to take advantage of this option by giving them another layer of trust to your store for first time buyers that have never heard of you.
• Update clear return policies — This will cut down on extra customer service nightmares or questions during the buying process. These areas cleared up can make or break spur of the moment sales and not act as any kind of blockers.
That’s all we have for you this go around folks. As always, feel free to contact us to find out how we can help drive demand to your store through Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest ads. We’re always up for a quick chat!
