With 2015’s Black Friday potentially bringing the UK’s first £1 billion shopping day, spending power is soaring back up. It is time to prepare for the festive period, especially given that last year 7 out of 10 eshoppers bought their Christmas presents online. Get ahead this year with these festive ecommerce tips to help optimise visibility, maximise basket success rate and retain clients throughout the lead-up to Christmas, the sales period and beyond…
Optimise Your Visibility
1) Catchy Adverts: During the festive season, everyone is on the lookout for the best presents and is therefore unlikely to stop at the first item they find. For this reason, the best advertising campaign to invest in this season is retargeting to remind browsers that you’re there and to get them back to your site.
2) Global Marketplaces and Search Engine Optimisation: As the festive season can attribute 20%-40% of a retailer’s annual revenue; it is worth being the first site that shoppers visit. But you need to get going now as this process can take time. Have a read of our Google Keyword Planner to put you at the top of search engine results pages and steer your business to festive success. It is also worth placing your products on marketplaces in order to benefit from their traffic. With 3 out of 10 eshoppers buying their Christmas gifts from abroad last year, this is the way to get global reach with minimal effort.
3) Be Phone Friendly: With over a third of UK sales being made via mobile devices, adapting your site should be a top priority. Your site should be fun, festive and facilitate the buying process. This means that from product to purchase there should be a minimum number of clicks required for fumbling thumbs.
Maximise Your Basket Success Rate
4) Enticing Prices: Great deals ensure regular web traffic, but offering limited time vouchers is a good way to get customer and prospect information for future email marketing campaigns. If they don’t buy anything, you don’t lose anything. Use social media to host games, competitions and advent calendar giveaways to attract potential customers and get them to “Like” and “Follow” you.
5) Pain Free Checkout Process: Two words: speed and convenience. Forget hassling people for as much information as possible, which can be frustrating and can make customers forget why they even came on your site in the first place. So skip five page fill out forms. Resist the urge to ask the name of their next-door neighbour’s cat. Why not follow Amazon and offer to securely store card details, so that your clients are literally one click away from their next purchase.
6) Free Delivery: Increase sales with a 12% improvement on basket abandonment rates and up to 8% more items added in the first place. Offer free delivery for a limited time at the beginning of December in order to create a sense of urgency. Or, if you’re feeling especially generous, why not just have free delivery full stop – an effective and powerful promise that you can proudly shout from the rooftops. Alternatively, offer free delivery to clients who have reached a specific spend amount. You won’t get as many people through the door as those who offer unconditional free deliveries but, if you get your pricing right, you will sell more per visit.
Retain Your Clients
7) Delivery Until Christmas Eve: Go on, become every panic buyer’s hero – even Royal Mail is offering a normal delivery service on Christmas Eve.
8) Express Delivery Option: Another one for panic buyers, but also for those whose excitement for Christmas starts tentatively in October and ramps up at lightning speed as the day approaches. Shoppers are impatient to receive their carefully chosen gifts and pick the perfect wrapping paper to get them under the tree as early as possible. And, with 63% of eshoppers expecting next-day delivery, this is a good way to stay competitive.
9) Multiple Collection Point Options: Unfortunately for most, offices don’t usually close until Christmas Eve, leaving little or no time to be in for inconvenient deliveries. By offering delivery solutions, such as Click and Collect or Doodle, and the ability to track orders, you are making it easy for your customers to shop with you. On the other hand, why not take a leaf out of certain florists’ bouquets, and design your packaging to be letter box friendly, where possible.
10) Stress-Free Returns: Festive eshoppers are savvy individuals. They know that buying online means beating the parking nightmares, glacial temperatures and mammoth queues, giving them the ability to shop from the comfort of their sofa. However, the compromise they often have to accept is not being able to try items on or see them in the flesh before making the decision to buy. Therefore, why not offer them the best of both worlds this Christmas. Nothing will boost sales like the promise of free returns. It gives customers the confidence to buy more than they would otherwise have done, and 60% of shoppers are less likely to return online goods than their high-street counterparts.
Above all, remember to set up your promotional feeds in advance, to automate sales periods and product management, and ensure you have an effective cross-border ecommerce feed management solution to make all of this possible.
By Mickael Froger, Co-founder and CEO of Lengow.
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