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Christmas trading tips – what your priorities should be.
29 Aug 2014 Dominic Comments Off on Christmas trading tips – what your priorities should be.
Christmas is nearly upon us and as a small business selling online, you need to be looking at maximizing your reach online in these crucial weeks. Retailers will start planning their Christmas campaigns well in advance and, whilst you may not have the biggest budgets with which to drive traffic to your site, what you CAN do fairly easily and affordably, is make sure you are addressing in advance what I think are the top 10 issues facing small retailers in the Christmas run up.
AB testing
It is not enough simply to have a shopfront and hope for the best when your website traffic arrives on your site. You should always be looking to improve the shopping experience for your customers by addressing any of the failings of your site – perhaps in the customer journey?
You do not need to spend a lot on this – in fact this should be quite easy with Google Content Experiments. I introduced a test and learn strategy with one retailer and this saw significant increases in conversion rate.
Keep it simple!
The primary aim of your site should be to get that sale! Keeping the site simple and avoiding any confusing information or distracting content which interferes with this needs to be kept to a minimum.
Keep language simple, don’t confuse with multiple shipping options where possible and do everything you can to explain clearly to your customers. Keep the colours simple and the design easy on the eye and most of all – make sure you provide as much relevant information as possible for your customers
Provide security
Make sure you let your customers know you are a safe place to shop. Add any certificates to your site as a badge of re-assurance however do not overdo it – if you add every security feature under the sun you could run the risk of this backfiring and alarming your customers. Simply make sure your customers know you are a site which is safe to shop on.,
Mobile and Tablet
It is still surprising to see the number of retailers who do not have a mobile optimized website and as a result suffer a serious drop in conversion across mobile and tablet. Whereas a few years ago customers were primarily using their mobiles to browse and not purchase on tablet and mobile, this is no longer the case – I have seen significant increases in conversion on mobile as checkout optimization has improved as has the browsing experience.
On Mobile and Tablet the growth has become even more pronounced; last year £5bn was spent on mobile with further growth expected this year.
The RetailMeNot survey states that the likely device split for Christmas 2014 will be:
- Laptop/Desktop = 82%vs. 87% in 2013
- Mobile = 11%vs. 9% in 2013
- Tablet = 7%vs. 4% in 2013
New customer acquisition
You may have a small marketing budget and trade your site at an agreed CPA however you should have a marketing plan agreed cross departmentally 2 months in advance of Christmas with relevant offers, campaigns, discounts etc booked in. Not only that but you need to review your budgets accordingly to cater for those campaign. The cost of your Product Listing Ads on Google may go up in the Christmas run up but this may also increase your new customer recruitment numbers.
I have seen PPC campaigns set up before which had very little management over the Christmas period meaning a significant chunk of new customer business was missed out. Possibly consider increasing your bid strategy or revising your ad copy with seasonal copy? You need to keep on top of all your marketing campaigns during this time but also make sure you are working with as many partners as possible online – eg across your affiliate network.
Cross sell
Do not miss out on the opportunity to refine your cross sell strategy. You may be working with company like Locayta or have your own cross sell engine on your site. Make sure that the cross sell options are optimized as much as possible and that they actually make sense – too many times I have seen product which just does not make sense to be cross sold but was chosen due to poor algorithm logic (Little Red Riding hood book with a Red Kettle anyone!?)
In addition make sure yo consider all up sell opportunity – are you making sure that key parts of the user journey are optimized for up sell? One test I introduced a few years back was a basket message giving a discount off a £50 min order level if the customer added another product to take their bag over £50. This resulted in a 3% increase in sales in an A/B test.
Christmas and the New Year are times in every retailers calendar where simple planning in advance can make the difference between an average trading performance and having one of your best trading seasons – simply with a little planning.
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