e-commerce

Summertime is drawing to a close and the holiday season is just around the corner – also known as the busiest quarter of the retailing year.

Starting with Halloween at the end of October, and now incorporating some of the biggest dates in the retail calendar such as singles day and Black Friday, the holiday period is now more important to retail than ever before.

This is a period of great opportunity, but also fierce competition.

Here’s our advice on promoting your e-commerce store to ensure you get the most from this highly profitable time of year:

Sell Everywhere

Marketplaces are the central point of e-commerce. Many people now search eBay or Amazon for products before searching Google. A presence on key marketplaces is essential for retailers who want to sell to these marketplace loyal customers.

For customers who don’t like to shop on marketplaces, you should have your own dedicated e-commerce website. This does not have to be anywhere near as daunting or complex as it sounds. Frooition has partnered with both Shopify and BigCommerce to offer custom designed e-commerce sites that offer a superb shopping experience, along side scalability and simplicity for the merchant.

Be easy to find

The closer you are to the top result when someone searches for an item, the more likely the customer is to look at your item. For your own website, this means submitting your site to search engines like Google so that it shows up in results for related searches. You can improve your position in these results by learning about SEO and making sure that your pages are easy for both humans and search engines to read. Ebay has its own search engine, and we have written a separate post on how to improve your ranking within eBay.

Leverage social media.

Remember when we used to say ‘brb’ when we were going offline? We don’t say it anymore, because now we live online. According to a new survey from the tech analyst company ReportLinker, 46 percent of Americans check their smartphones before they even get out of bed in morning. Most of this compulsive phone usage is checking social media.

If your store isn’t represented on social media, you could be missing a huge opportunity.

Decide on which social media channels make the most sense for you—or experiment with a few and see what works best. Start building your following now and you’ll have a dedicated audience to market to during the holiday season.

Social media costs nothing and can be a great asset to anyone selling online. We have written a seperate post for advice on social media for small businesses.

Email for repeat business.

It is far easier to sell to an existing customer than to sell to a new one.

Klaviyo has been researching the optimum amount of holiday-related marketing emails for e-commerce companies. Taking into account the average revenue generated by emails sent, it found that companies across industries including fashion, beauty, and food saw the most success when sending in the range of 21-30 emails over the holiday period. Brands within this bracket saw an increase in revenue of up to 77 times compared to sending between 1-10 emails.

Create a cart abandonment strategy

Browsing activity increases before and during the holiday season. People are looking at different gift options and also comparison shopping for price. Cart abandonment increases massively at this time of year, and a good cart abandonment strategy could potentially save lots of otherwise lost sales. We have written a separate post on advice for creating a successful cart abandonment strategy. 

Make it relevant

Conversant’s 2017 Holiday Retail Outlook Report has revealed that 65% of consumers say they are sent too many irrelevant messages from brands.

Most consumers want personalized communication, with 87% of those aged 25-34 saying they’d be more likely shop with a retailer if it offered personalized offers, and 60% of younger shoppers wanting these personalized offers on mobile.

Creating a mailing list which you can segment by the kind of previous purchases a customer has made from you is nowhere near as complex as it sounds, and is a great asset to personalizing your marketing campaigns.

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