By Kurt Heinemann, Reflektion
The holiday shopping season can be stressful, both for shoppers — from brick-and-mortar stores, desktops, tablets and smartphones — and for the retailers themselves.
According to the National Retail Federation, from 2014 to 2015 online and e-Commerce sales grew 6.8% to $101.9 billion. Although the market is growing for holiday sales, e-Commerce businesses are still missing the mark on things they can do to improve their site. To help improve their efforts, I’ve compiled a list of the top five tips for optimizing e-Commerce sites for the holidays.
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1. Make an early New Year’s resolution and start respecting your email subscribers as individuals
Most retailers will be recklessly blasting way too many generic emails this season. Stick out of the crowd by communicating like a personal shopper rather than a spam machine. Email technology has finally evolved to a point where retailers can focus on delivering individually dynamic content to each subscriber (not large groups or segments). When content is about the recipient, campaigns become exponentially more efficient and attrition decreases. Oh, and remember that a huge percentage of your emails are being opened on smartphones, so think about that experience and whether they work on a small screen.
2. Go beyond responsive design and make holiday shopping on smartphones intuitive
To foster conversions from smartphone traffic, retailers have to make it easy for visitors to immediately find what they want. Responsive design is only the beginning. Go several steps further by leveraging first party data points — such as the items a shopper has clicked, time spent on product pages, and site searches — to create increasingly accurate profiles of each shopper. Respond to this behavior in real time with product recommendations and site search results that prioritize products matching the shopper’s preferences. It will save shoppers from thumbing through lists of irrelevant items and they’ll see items that immediately interest them.
3. Merchandise intelligently by taking real-time shopper intent into account
The holidays present challenges as digital visitors very quickly shift between shopping for different people and themselves. Your site should dynamically respond to each individual shopper in a way that guides them towards a purchase. Use past engagements to merchandise based on established preferences that guide people whose intent is to buy for themselves, but also pick up on temporary interests so you can merchandise for gift buying. Retailers who smartly account for individual shopper intent are in a position to achieve significantly higher conversions.
4. Know what happened last year
While your numbers of course are going to grow exponentially this holiday season, and it’s true that the experience will be different than last year, that doesn’t diminish the value and insight from last year’s metrics and results. Take a look at last year’s buying cycles, explore what were the most successful email campaigns, and make sure to look at what didn’t perform so you don’t repeat the mistake. Having that data readily accessible when things go sideways can be a huge help.
5. Make sure your checkout experience is optimized
Have you been testing your checkout experience lately? Have you tested it separately on your smartphone? Making your checkout experience work is different than optimizing it. You need to A/B test and find the highest conversion experience. One secret for checkout is to make it simple. The fewer questions you ask, the more likely the user will successfully check out. This is an ongoing process that takes work, but it can have a significant impact on your business.
Kurt Heinemann is Chief Marketing Officer of Reflektion. Prior to joining Reflektion, he was CMO for Marketwired/Sysomos, where he relaunched their brands as well as led the successful turnaround of the lead generation and content strategy efforts for both brands. Previously Kurt was the CMO for Monetate, where he helped double revenues for the cloud-based browser technology company. He has also held senior executive positions at leading consumer marketing firms including Priceline, Time Warner/Synapse Connect, and Walker Digital Companies, where he leveraged his expertise in corporate strategy, product development, customer acquisition and retention, and creative development to increase lead generation, revenue, and market share.
