With the holiday rush just around the corner, we asked several of our resident Ecommerce experts to share some of their top last-minute tips to help drive additional online sales. From offering gift wrapping services to making small tweaks to improve search engine optimization (SEO), these last-minute tips are a must try to boost holiday cheer and your bottom line this season and into the New Year.
1.Offer In-Store Pick up: Customers expect a seamless shopping experience no matter where or how they shop. Make sure you are offering online shoppers, not just a choice of different shipping methods, but if you have a store, allow them the option to also buy online and pick up in store, especially for those last minute orders. Without having to add in time to ship their items, customers will have several more days to place an order.
2.Don’t Run Out! Utilize your inventory management system for demand planning to make sure that you don’t run out of your holiday best sellers. Nobody wants a rain check as their holiday gift, so make sure that you can supply the goods your shoppers are looking for. Take a look at safety stock levels and other assumptions in set-up that might be sufficient off season, but won’t work when demand begins to ramp up.
3.Make it a Wrap! Do you offer gift wrapping and gift message services to your customers? Is it buried on some FAQ page or in the cart? Why not shout it out loud and clear on the home page? A big part of any gift is the presentation. Can you offer your shoppers something more memorable than a generically bagged item in a brown shipping box adorned with a shipping label? In addition to gift boxes and cards, how about seasonal packing slips, emails, or shipping boxes? It’s these little touches and conveniences that will make your customers smile and keep coming back for more.
4.Build Up Organic SEO Juice: Introduce seasonal product pages on the same URL to
build up organic SEO juice. If the products can't yet be sold, have a ‘coming soon’ page and ask the customer to sign up to be notified when the product is available. Linking these pages from blogs and external content will also help drive the organic SEO for when it is available. By the same token, if your products are seasonal and only available from year to year (Christmas trees for example), keep the page URL the same or make sure you 301 it if it changes.
5.Retarget Your Paid Keywords: Consider retargeting paid keyword budgets out of major cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas and Miami. By retargeting you will enable larger exposure to secondary markets which can lead to a broader awareness of your brand and products. Another key advantage of retargeting is higher conversions which can result in more revenue, fewer clicks and higher margins for paid search campaigns.
6.Publish Holiday-Focused Content: You are likely already publishing holiday-related content on your site, but take it a step further by adding content that links directly back to your best sellers. For instance, publish content such as, 'The 10 best table accessory
ideas to spread the holiday cheer' and then feature those products with a link back to each. It’s those simple suggestions that can assist your customers on their shopping journey and increase average order values.
7.Make Return Policies Clear and Transparent: Shoppers want to know up front that if a grandma doesn’t love that comfy sweater she received that she can easily return it, or exchange it for the gift of her dreams. Is your policy clear? Is it shopper friendly? Do you offer gift receipts? These are all important services to clearly state on your site that can turn a browsing customer into a buying one.
Contributors:
- Jason Asher, Sales Solution Consultant
- Rob Hooton, VME Ecommerce APAC
- Steve Lippman, Senior Sales Engineer
- Yukte Oberoi, Senior Product Manager, Ecommerce