Each year, the holiday season provides the boost retailers need to improve their annual revenue. The year 2020 has thrown a curveball to most retailers, who are anxiously looking ahead and wondering how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect seasonal sales.
The good news is that most predictions are forecasting the typical boom associated with the holidays. That’s not to say that the pandemic hasn’t significantly altered the shopping habits of most people over the last few months. Plenty of e-commerce businesses are already setting their holiday season marketing plans in motion. Retailers will need to prepare their online sector to ensure they receive their fair share of traffic to their e-commerce operations.
Here are a few ideas you can use to increase online holiday sales in 2020:
Improve the Customer’s Online Experience
This is the most important of all. Your website is a fantastic tool for introducing your brand to new leads and prospects, but you will need to ensure they receive the best experience while on your site. Use a quality hosting provider to ensure your pages load quickly and don’t keep visitors waiting. Do load testing so you know your infrastructure can handle the extra influx of traffic and transactions.
Photo shot by melpomen.
Stock images that are not optimized can turn your web pages into molasses. Customers won’t wait around for more than a few seconds! Use a competent graphics editor to shrink your image files down while maintaining as much image quality as you can.
Check that all your third-party integrations are up to date. Out of date integrations can break your site in ways that may take hours or days to fix. You must update your integrations well ahead of time and avoid doing them last minute. If something isn’t broken, set a freeze on updates until the holiday rush has passed.
Here’s what the busy holiday season means: carts are easily abandoned. Customers who are distracted by everything they have to do will definitely move away if they find a better option. Enable abandoned cart notifications so you can send a friendly push notification to your visitors for products they may have mistakenly left behind. Notifications for abandoned carts have historically achieved triple the click-through rate of a standard email.
Deliver a Personalized Online Shopping Experience
Ultimately, we still rely on great content to appease search engines. But it’s the personalized experience that will create the best impression when someone is browsing your site.
When you analyze your visitors’ behavior, you can use cookies to enhance their experience by providing a more personalized shopping experience to increase online holiday sales in 2020. For instance, if they are looking at heart-shaped pendants, show them a list of current specials in that range. If they are a returning visitor, they will appreciate seeing new additions to a category they previously showed an interest in.
You can also use search data to tune your on-site search results. When your customer receives accurate results for searches on your site, you will increase online sales for the holidays.
Streamline the Checkout Process
The checkout process should be limited to a single page because it creates a seamless checkout experience. The holiday season is a busy period for sure! Your customers will appreciate any efforts from retailers that help them get things done. Anything that helps them complete a sale, check! Especially sites that are optimized for small screens like a mobile phone, will increase online holiday sales for 2020.
Offer a Visual Search Experience
Visuals are always more effective at catching a customer’s eye than textual search results. Rather than a drop-down menu, you can use visual categories in the sidebar for a more intuitive shopping experience. Stock images are an excellent way to boost your visual design if you have minimal photography or graphic design experience.