E-commerce holiday readiness: Ensure sales success this season

Highlights

You’ll learn about why ecommerce holiday readiness is important

• Increased traffic and sales: The busy holiday season drives more customers to your site and proper preparation ensures you capitalize on this influx.
• Competitive edge: Competitors are vying for the same customers and effective strategies help you stand out.
• Enhanced customer experience: Fast websites and seamless checkout processes improve customer satisfaction.
• Improved revenue: Optimized performance and targeted campaigns increase conversions and sales.

Prepare your ecommerce store or platform for the holiday rush and increase your seasonal revenue.

Keep reading to learn more!

Every year around the holiday season, marketers are busy shaping their customer engagement strategies to achieve or exceed their annual revenues and sales targets. But during the year's busiest season, marketers might mess up quite a lot, so there’s a need for ecommerce holiday readiness. 

Why?

More customers, more purchases and more revenue—those are your holiday goals. But with competitors trying their best to sway your customers, achieving success during the holiday seems a distant dream. 

You have little room for error, especially when creating your holiday plan. With customers spending $211.7 billion online during the holiday season 2022, you lose out on potential sales when you’re not ready for the holiday rush. As your customers prepare to open up their wallets, preparing a dramatic influx of orders and traffic on your ecommerce website helps you deliver highly satisfying experiences while delivering business growth. 

If you want to break your revenue records during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, here are some best practices to understand what to do and what not to do. 

What is ecommerce holiday readiness?

Ecommerce holiday readiness means preparing to advertise your company and its products before the holiday. Being prepared means handling a huge influx of traffic and customer expectations during the festive. Before Cyber Monday or Black Friday hits the calendar, optimize your website performance, manage inventory, craft effective marketing campaigns and enhance customer service. 

When preparing yourself for the holiday rush, focus on:

• Creating a seamless shopping experience
• Ensuring high conversion rates
• Maximizing sales

What happens when you don’t prepare for the holiday season?

Everyone loves a great deal, which is no surprise, especially when getting the most value for every dollar counts. Not preparing for the holiday season is suicidal—51% of customer started their holiday gift shopping before December in 2023. Even then, many e-commerce stores fail to prepare for the holiday seasons and they reap the following repercussions:

Slow website speed

Ignoring website optimization right before the holidays can cause your website to suffer from slow page load times and crashes due to increased traffic. When this happens, you push your customers to your competitors. 

Inefficient inventory management

During the holiday rush, when customers are on a shopping spree, the last thing they want is to see stockout. Lack of inventory management results in either overselling or stockouts. In either case, your brand’s reputation suffers, leading to lost sales. 

Failure to meet customer’s expectations

Many companies prepare a few months before the start of the holiday season to capture customers' interest and meet their expectations. When you don’t run marketing campaigns about the Cyber Monday or Black Friday offers, customers knock on your competitor's store, resulting in a loss of revenue. 

Poor customer service

The increased holiday demand results in poor customer service, negative reviews and reduced brand loyalty. In festive seasons, your customers anticipate efficient customer service delivery and feel disappointed and frustrated when they don't receive it. Maintaining bad relations with customers harms your company since it lowers customer satisfaction, forcing them to look for other products to buy.

Marketing strategies for ecommerce holiday readiness

Focus on quality promotions over quantity

Many companies will have tight budgets and fewer staff entering the holiday season. As a result, doing everything economically is a must. But does a smaller marketing budget translate to a smaller marketing impact? 

Focus on quality over quantity. What’s the point of running numerous ad campaigns when only one campaign is sufficient? Do you know brands spent over $600 million in ads during the 2022 holiday period? But, most ads were not digitally suitable for the period—a complete waste of money. 

Focus on personalization when and wherever possible. Personalization makes your messages more resonant and relevant to customers, improving the likelihood of converting a customer. 

In addition, create targeted ad campaigns across different social media channels, print media and radio to spread awareness during the bus shopping season. You can use the results of the previous year's ad campaign to determine which platform to focus your marketing budget on.

Rely on social media

While content is king, promotion is queen and running a successful kingdom without anyone is impossible. Start by informing your customers about the stock availability of in-demand products. Before the holiday rush, inform your customers about your services, product catalogs, coupons and deals through social media. 

Create quirky, eye-catching and engaging content to promote on your social media. Use memes, short videos, banners and infographics to spread information about your products. Use relevant hashtags that your customers are likely to use. Hashtags like #blackfriday, #Cybermonday or # holidayseason help you reach the right audience. 

Use personalized marketing

Like you, your competitors prepare and do everything possible to steal your customers. As a result, your customers get bombarded with numerous messages and communications from various brands. However, only the most relevant ones stand out from the crowd and remain at the top of their minds—personalized ones. 

Personalization is often the most important aspect of your successful holiday season customer engagement strategy. However, you cannot send personalized messages in a single day. Your work starts long before the festive season commences. Analyze data gathered from all your sales channels to send personalized emails, messages and recommendations.

Case study: How Contentstack helped Miami Heat increase efficiency and offer advanced personalization.

The Miami Heat transitioned from SDL Tridion to Contentstack’s headless CMS due to high costs, poor scalability and integration issues with Tridion. Contentstack provided a customizable, efficient solution, increasing internal adoption by 30%, reducing developer costs and time by half and enhancing fan engagement with advanced personalization. The move resulted in a 100% increase in app open rates and sales growth for the Retail Group. The sports company improved decision-making through better data visibility.

After using Contentstack, Edson Crevecoeur, Vice President of business Intelligence and Strategy at Miami Heat, said:

“Being able to customize a message to just certain segments of the population is key. It is not just the fans engaging with content, but it is everyone in our organization tracking and further improving that engagement. This allows us to derive concrete value from the data we have about our fans.”

Read the complete case study here. 

Prepare your email campaigns

Remember the traditional ways of communicating with your customers. Send timely and targeted messages to inform customers about product launches, holiday deals and exclusive discounts. Include festive visuals and compelling subject lines to capture attention. In addition, ensure your emails are optimized for mobile for seamless viewing on any device. 

Prepare your email marketing campaigns using these high-level tips:

• Optimize your emails for mobile
• Add a buying option like “Purchase now” or “Buy now”
• Test your subject line
• Include social proofs
• Focus on your call to action

Focus on marketing technology

You are likely to witness a huge rush, especially in peak-season sales. One of the key advancements in the retail industry is using a headless content management system (CMS) and a composable digital experience platform (DXP)to personalize your customers' online shopping experiences. Marketing technology equips you to handle the peak season rush. 

How to ensure a great holiday shopping season

Start early

Don’t be a lazy bone e-commerce website that wakes up during the last week of November and scrambles to create a holiday plan. You will not achieve anything from it. With more customers shopping online during the holiday season, start your promotions early—ideally in the last week of October or the first week of November. 

To start early, prepare these materials:

• Banners for various social media platforms and other digital channels
• All design and marketing collaterals
• Promotion details
• Coupon codes
• Ads for Google and Facebook

Upgrade your website’s speed

When starting your e-commerce holiday readiness, ensure your website’s uptime is more than 99.9%. If your website speed is low, your mobile and web customers will bounce, and you will witness a reduced conversion rate. An e-commerce site that loads in 1 second enjoys a conversion rate 2.5x higher than a website that loads in 5 seconds. To increase your website’s site speed further, focus on:

• Removing unused plugins and codes
• Compressing all your GIFs and images

Ensure you have enough inventory

The worst thing that can happen during an ongoing sale is running out of products. Whether shipping the product yourself or relying on third-party vendors, place orders early to receive them on time. Facing an inventory shortage can be detrimental to your business. 

To avoid long wait times, check in with your suppliers to ensure your products are properly stocked. 

Make the checkout process smooth

Let’s face the truth: checkout is the most important place on your website. That’s where customers decide to make a purchase or abandon your products forever. While bottlenecks during the checkout process decrease sales, they cause more harm during the holiday shopping season. Ensure your checkout process is seamless and offers a superior customer experience. Remove any unwanted fields from the checkout’s main navigation form and menu. 

Optimizing your checkout process means:

• One-click checkout
• Price transparency
• Numerous payment options

Simplify the return process and make it free

Nothing increases customer experience more than simple, easy and free returns. Apart from offering a free return, the entire process is simple. When customers have to undergo 2-3 calls to the customer service team only to find out they need to send an email requesting a return, it degrades their shopping experience. Negative experiences with the return process no longer encourage customers to purchase from the same brand again. Your return process should be a hassle-free replica of Amazon’s return process. 

Offer customer support

Offer customer support throughout their shopping experience. Give them choices like live chat, email or phone to reach you. Have a friendly and knowledgeable support team to address all customer questions, from simple product questions to more complex technical problems. Ensure you have specific sections dedicated to articles that answer most of the questions customers ask and how-to guidelines. 

Essential metrics to measure during the busy holiday season

Conversion rates

Conversion rate determines the rate customers purchase your products after visiting your e-commerce site. A higher conversion rate means your marketing and customer experience strategies deliver the desired results. Conversely, a poor conversion rate means wasted clicks and money on ads.

Average order value (AOV)

AOV measures the average amount spent per purchase per customer on each order made through your website or mobile application. Use AOV to evaluate your pricing strategy and online sales and marketing promotions. Cross-selling, upselling, free shipping, and package discounts can increase your average order value.

Cart abandonment rates

The cart abandonment rate is the number of shoppers who add products to the cart but abandon them before making a purchase. This rate makes it easier to determine where potential customers are abandoning your site and not moving toward the purchase.

Traffic and engagement metrics

Monitor page views and the unique visitors, including their origin (organic, paid, social), session duration and bounce rates. This key performance indicator (KPI) will show the impact of your marketing efforts on the traffic and whether your website is intriguing to visitors.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Customer acquisition cost is the amount of money spent to acquire a single customer when using marketing and advertising media. It monitors the effectiveness of campaigns and helps you adjust your marketing strategy and budget.

Customer retention rate

Customer retention measures how often e-commerce stores attract repeat purchases. The lower your retention rate, the more loyal your customer base is. A higher retention rate translates to faster business growth as you retain more customers.

FAQs

What is the seasonality of e-commerce?

Seasonality of ecommerce deals with the frequency of buying and use of ecommerce sites within a particular period. It occurs because of holidays, special events and shopping habits.

What are the best months for e-commerce?

November and December are the most successful months for the e-commerce business because of the holiday season. 

What is the busiest day for e-commerce?

Cyber Monday is the busiest day for many e-commerce businesses because companies offer increased discounts and promotions.

What is the slowest month for e-commerce?

January is the slowest month because customers have gone overboard during the holiday e-commerce sales. In January, they try to overcome their holiday expenses.

Learn more

Preparing your business for the holiday season contributes to business growth and higher customer engagement. Before the holiday season begins, ensure your online store has the necessary tools and techniques.

To get ready for the holiday season, talk to us today.