The first days of fall are upon us, and retailers everywhere are taking full advantage of the calm before the storm. As Halloween candy, Thanksgiving desserts, Black Friday coupons, and red and green tinsel begin to flood the local shopping malls, online retailers are also preparing their stores for the holidays.

If you are an online retailer, you are about to enter your busy season. The time you put into preparing for this season will set the tone. In the upcoming weeks, you can either develop a record-breaking e-commerce plan or quickly fall behind your competitors. In our multi-part e-commerce blog series, we will help prepare you for what’s ahead, so you can tackle this holiday season with confidence.

Review Past Outcomes

Avoid making the same mistakes twice, let your past successes and failures inform your future decisions. Start your planning by reviewing your sales and marketing performance from past holiday seasons.

Survey Your Team

Your team has contributed to the planning, executing, and recovering from the holiday season in the past. They have seen your efforts first-hand and undoubtedly have valuable insight. Ask for feedback from your departments, and encourage your team to share their experiences from last year. They may notice trends and recognize areas of opportunity that can help you improve your retail efforts this year.

Start the conversation by asking your team to provide their feedback on the topics below.

What was the number one complaint of customers? If there is a hole in your sales process, your customer service team has likely been told about it many times over. Take note of the top complaints from the year before, and solve these issues before the season starts.

Did the business take on too many holidays? Too few? Ask your staff if they felt overworked or poorly-supported. If you take on too many holidays too soon, you risk spreading yourself and your staff too thin and tanking all your efforts. Be smart, see what holidays performed best the year before, and consider staffing up for the holiday season or cutting back to focus only on the most profitable holidays (if necessary). 

What was done well? What were some roadblocks? Every year is a learning process. Ask your staff to be honest about what went well and what didn’t go so well. Problem-solve and discuss how you can work together to make this year more efficient.

Were you overstaffed? Understaffed? Don’t let your staff get burnt out. Ask them about feeling overworked or underworked last season, and let that inform your staffing decisions for the season ahead.

Is there a demographic that you feel was underserved? Who is your target demographic? Did you offer products last year that targeted each subset? Chart out your target demographics, and ensure that you have products available this holiday season to cater to each of them.

Review Last Year’s Sales

Once you’ve absorbed your team’s thoughts, measure them up against cold, hard data from the year before. You may find that your team misinterpreted some factors, but chances are, you’ll find that there are correlations.

As you research last year’s analytics, identify the following:

How much inventory was sold? This should inform how much inventory you purchase this year.

How many orders were filled? Knowing how many orders were filled last year will help you identify the popular retail items, and help you staff your shipping and customer service departments accordingly.

What products performed best? Popular products fluctuate year by year, but it’s good to have an idea of the products that have previously performed well in your store. Check past holiday sales and recent sales to see what products in your store are trending up.

Are your delivery dates accurate? Could the shipping department keep up with demand? If you find that your customers often received packages outside of their estimated date of delivery, you can decide if you want to staff up for the holiday season or extend your estimated delivery window. Timely deliveries are important during the holidays.

What holidays performed best? Knowing what holidays performed best can help you focus your efforts accordingly, examine what may have gone wrong in the past, and cut back in areas where you’re not converting.

What ad type/messaging performed best? Does your audience respond better to text ads or video ads? Ads that tell a story, or ads with a humorous tagline? Do A/B tests and pull data from previous ad campaigns to get started on the right foot this year.

Design Your Strategy

After you’ve spent ample time looking at last year’s holiday successes, failures, and data points, it’s time to put that insight into action as you design your sales strategy for this holiday season.

Most often, it’s unnecessary to completely reinvent your strategy. Use last year’s strategy as your outline for this year, and iterate as needed.

Brainstorm Events

Set a meeting with your team. Brainstorm ideas for holiday events and promotions to explore your options and lay the framework for your holiday sales strategy.

Discuss the following:

Giveaways

Holiday promotions and giveaways can be a super successful way to reach new customers, draw attention to upcoming holiday specials, and get current customers excited about what’s new in your store.

Promotions and sales

What inventory do you need to move now in order to make room for new inventory? What exciting items can you mark as ‘on sale’ to help increase traffic to your site?

Some examples of holiday promotions include:

• Buy-one-get-one-free
• Order now to receive free shipping
• Get free gift-wrapping on all orders placed before December 5th
• Use code HALLOWEEN to receive 5% off your entire order
• Black Friday/Cyber Monday exclusive sales

Email capture strategy

Start building your email list early. Brainstorm incentives to encourage customers to sign up for your email list.

Consider the following:

• Start a rewards program.
• Create an ‘insider’s club’. Offer exclusive sales and promotions to club members.
• Offer a one-time discount to visitors that provide their email address.

Once you’ve built a healthy list of ideas, you can use this list to promote holiday sales and to remarket to for future company promotions.

Holiday Engagement

How much time do you want to invest in your online engagement? How will you communicate with customers during the holiday season (email, social, etc.)? How will you support customers before, during, and after they’ve ordered? Discuss your responsive marketing plan to support your customer’s needs and nurture positive engagement.

Build A Content Calendar

Create an organized and timely content calendar to ensure that everything that can be scheduled ahead of time is scheduled ahead of time, and everything that can’t be scheduled ahead of time has a clear deadline and plan for action. A content calendar will help you make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

The first step in designing a content calendar is deciding which e-commerce holidays you want to support.

Here is a list of some of the most important e-commerce holidays:

• 10/31 – Halloween
• 11/27 – Thanksgiving
• 11/28 – Black Friday
• 12/01 – Cyber Monday
• 12/09 – Green Monday
• 12/16 – Hanukkah
• 12/22 – Super Saturday
• 12/24 – Christmas Eve
• 12/25 – Christmas
• 12/26 – Boxing Day
• 12/31 – New Year’s Eve
• 01/01 – New Year

Build your content calendar around the most important holidays for your business. Design corresponding graphics, email promotions, social media campaigns, and ad campaigns ahead of time, and include them in your calendar. Content calendars are a great way to ensure that your holiday promotions go out at the right times and on all channels.

Consider all your marketing channels, including:

• Social media – Announce sales and new products on your social media channels. Publish promotional videos, behind-the-scenes looks, and holiday-themed ads and coupons.
• Email – Design and schedule holiday-themed email campaigns with coupons, specials, and links to your store.
• Website/Blog – Publish gift idea blogs or holiday-themed content on your blog. Update your website banners, homepage, and storefront to promote holiday-themed promotions and retail items.
• Paid Advertising – Design and schedule holiday-themed ads with appropriate graphics, text, and promotions.
• Mobile App –Make sure your mobile app reflects the seasonal promotions and features the most desirable items in your store. If you have any mobile-only promotions, design and test them ahead of time to make sure everything works.

Set Your KPIs and Benchmarks

What are your goals? How will you and your team know when you’re taking steps toward those goals? Setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) clarifies what success looks like and unifies your team around a common objective. KPIs give your team clear, quantifiable measures for success and anchors them to what’s most important.

For example, a sales team that aims to promote inventory turnaround will price and promote items differently than a sales team that aims to maximize profit margin. Setting KPIs helps teams prioritize when the busy seasons strikes, so don’t underestimate its influence. Set KPIs and clearly communicate them to your team to ensure that your team is tied to the same goal and taking intentional steps toward achieving it.

Identify your industry benchmarks and reference them frequently to see how you stack up against your competitors and identify where you should be focusing your efforts. Look at industry reports to see what is projected to fly off the (virtual) shelves this season, and make sure your Google Analytics account is set up to track your sales and collect data to help you make informed decisions.

Select Your Promotions

Pull sales data from last year to see what sold and what didn’t. Check your Google Analytics account to identify the best selling items in your store, and check your online store to see what items have received the highest reviews from your customers. Use this information along with holiday projections to select your featured items for promotions. Google Trends is an extremely helpful tool that shows what is trending online in your geographic area. Check your retail items to see if they’re trending up or down and let that inform your inventory decisions.

Consider adding a seasonal line or a series of new items that will get your audience excited, deliver a sense of urgency, and keep your store fresh. Don’t get carried away, but do pay attention to your competitors.

Manage Your Audiences

The holiday season is a great time to organize and optimize your email lists and audiences. Thankfully, you can do a lot of audience management ahead of time to prepare for promotions during the holiday season.

Replicate the most successful emails. What emails performed best during the holidays last year? Look at open rates, click-through-rates, and conversion rates to identify the emails that got the most traction, and recycle them using updated graphics and edited language to promote this season’s products.

Utilize old email addresses and retarget them with new holiday promotions. People who have visited your site or purchased from your site before are more likely to purchase from you again, so make use of the email addresses you collected from past promotions.

Get your email lists in order. Segment your email lists based on content. How did your acquire their email? What products did they view and/or purchase from you previously? Customize your promotional emails to appeal to specific email lists.

Consider your social audiences. What posts are your followers engaging most with? What ads are performing best on social media? What is your audience asking for? Pay attention to your social audiences, and maximize your social reach by using tools like Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences that helps you find new audiences that are similar to your existing customers.

Update Your Site

Sit down with your development and marketing teams to outline your upcoming website design and marketing needs. Make a website design calendar that synchronizes with your content calendar, and plan everything out ahead of time. This way, you’ll ensure that your site is always in line with your holiday promotions and goals.

Website Decoration/Information

Don’t wait until the last minute! Design branded and cohesive graphic elements such as page headers, website banners, form fills, blogs, themed website copy, embedded coupons, etc. Get all your graphics completed ahead of time and organized with your content calendar.

Pay special attention to your homepage. Is all your information up-to-date? Are your shipping estimates and return policy accurate for the holiday season? All of the design elements and text elements of your site should be consistent with one another and promote the right products and goals.

Mobile Accessibility

More and more shoppers are taking their business on-the-go with mobile shopping apps. If you have an app, check it to verify that it’s properly synced up with your website, glitch-free, and easy-to-navigate. Make sure that all design elements align, look cohesive, and work correctly across web and mobile devices.

Sitemap Updates

Rearranging your sitemap is a great way to get customers to see the products you want them to see right away (without having to click through your webpage to look for them). Update your sitemap to prioritize holiday-related blogs, fill forms, or e-commerce pages that feature holiday items or holiday sales.

By surveying past successes and failures, crunching data, putting ample thought into upcoming holiday promotions, and planning your content, store, and website design calendars ahead of time, you’re ready to face the upcoming holiday season with confidence.

This concludes the preparation portion of our e-commerce series. Keep your eyes open for the next segment of e-commerce blogs, Path To A Happy E-Commerce Season: Execution.

At Fujisan Marketing, we’re happy to help you design and execute your own e-commerce holiday strategy. Contact us for more information.