5 Ways to Optimize Your Ecommerce Site during the Holiday Season

Anil Kaul, Co-Founder and CEO of Absolutdata, shares some key marketing strategies for eCommerce sites for the holiday season. This season is critically important dates for online merchants, many of whom generate a significant portion of total revenue via holiday sales. Make sure you’ve optimized your eCommerce site to maximize customer engagement and sales.

Holiday season is right around the corner, and will be here before we know it. eCommerce marketing teams are putting the finishing touches on their holiday sales strategies.Thanks to an ever-increasing volume of data, online marketing pros have more tools at their disposal than ever before.

Are you making last-minute tweaks to your sites for the holiday season? If so, take a look at five tech tips that can help you make the most of the upcoming shopping bonanza:

Make sure you’re targeting customers precisely with data: Look at your database. Does it provide a comprehensive view of target customers? Does your marketing tech stack allow you to easily create actionable buying personas? If you’ve got the right technology solutions in place, it should be simple to use unified customer profiles to target customers precisely and deliver the most relevant content. With a modern approach to automation, you can blend art and science, freeing your marketing team for more complex and creative tasks.

• Use data to fuel AI solutions: Customer profiles and data drive on-target holiday themes and messaging for high-performance marketers who use AI, such as Amazon’s “customers who bought this item also bought” feature. Machine learning is behind the suggestions-data pattern recognition uses past customer actions to predict future purchases. If you haven’t already put your data to work in this way, now is a great time to start. AI can also help you address abandoned carts and manage win-back campaigns. Make sure AI is working hard for you this year.
• Conduct outreach on social media: Make sure your holiday-themed marketing messages are prominently featured on your social media pages. Given the premium social media users put on images, consider using videos, GIFs, slide shows and carousel ads to engage people on social media. It’s also a great idea to provide readers with incentives to share your content, e.g., “Share this purchase with a friend on Facebook for 15% off your order.” If you can free up more budget dollars for advertising on Facebook, now’s the time .
• Listen for feedback on social media: Don’t forget that social media is a two-way street — talk to customers, but listen too. There are Voice of the Customer tools that can be very helpful in pinpointing issues, so you can address them before they become major problems. If you don’t already have such a tool, consider adding it for the busy season. But at a minimum, monitor social media feeds for brand mentions on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
• Engage customers with live chat: Customers who are purchasing gifts are typically more sensitive to time than year-round buyers. Expedited shipping can help allay their concerns, but also consider adding a live chat feature to answer customer questions . Many smaller online merchants don’t have the service year-round but do add it for the busy season. That’s a smart move because customers will want to get answers about potential gift products immediately and may move on to another merchant if they must wait for a response.

For many online merchants, holiday season is make-or-break time. Operations will be stressed because of the influx of customers, but with the right customer outreach strategy and effective marketing technology tools, can set the tone for a very green holiday season.