Prepare for eCommerce Success in Holiday Season [Checklist]

Prepare for eCommerce Success in Holiday Season [Checklist]

Reading Time: 8 minutes

For any eCommerce business, the success is most likely to happen in the Holiday season.

And, that is when almost all the eCommerce brands, irrespective of their segment, plans months before to become successful.

Every eCommerce website talks about how to be prepared with the marketing or sales perspectives. But, we have covered the bite-sized and point-based strategy to make your eCommerce successful this festive season.

We are almost near to Black Friday and Christmas holiday season and here is what all the eCommerce brands need to do.

Don’t forget to make this as your checklist to become a successful eCommerce brand.

Let’s start.

1. Prepare your Marketing Mission

Like many other eCommerce brands, even you need to develop the mission for your marketing plans this festive season.

What do you want your eCommerce brand to achieve this holiday season?

• The launch of new products
• Sell more products
• Get more repeat buyers
• Bring new customers
• Get higher market share

Based on what you decide, you need to plan other activities accordingly.

Amazon, in its recent Great Indian Festival Sale 2018, targeted to get its new 100 million customers. Yes, they wanted to bring 100 million new buyers on-board other than their existing 100 million buyers.

Hence, you need to be clear what is the mission behind your marketing plans to make sure, all your marketing activities are aligned with the same.

This surely becomes your very first step to making your eCommerce store successful during the holiday season.

2. Make Your Site Ready

During the holiday season, it is expected that there will be offers, discounts, and so much more to fulfill your marketing mission.

And hence, it is obvious to prepare your online store ready for your customers, irrespective of your marketing missions.

So, how to keep your eCommerce store ready?

a. Configuring products

Whether you are going to bring new products or a varied range of attributes supporting your products, whatever it is- you need to keep your store up-to-date.

The products on which you are going to declare sale or the offers, those products need to configured well enough to be broken due to any technical faults.

In short, you have to configure and update all your products with new details, graphics, and everything that could help your customers easily find them, and even buy them.

b. Speed

Speed is the major concern to be taken care of by all of the eCommerce businesses looking to become successful this festive season.

Well, not just this festive season, but 365 days.

But, more caution needs to be made in order to avoid any issues that might affect the website during the festive season. When you have higher traffic, your site may crash down… That happened to even giants like Flipkart, so make sure you are ready with estimated traffic.

Here are the couple of things that you need to ensure-

• Ask your development team to load test your website and mobile app to see nothing breaks even during thousands to millions of people visiting your eCommerce store constantly and continuously
• Talk to your development team to work upon the performance and speed issues suggested by Lighthouse tool by Google and even by the Page Speed Insights
• Make sure the entire web and mobile eCommerce store is tested rigorously using the manual as well as automated tools to see nothing is broken in the stores
• Check for all the configurations and integrations to the APIs whether they are working seamlessly

If you’ve noticed, none of these popular eCommerce brands have received any complaints regarding their store experience from the buyers, even during the festive season.

Whether you’re such a huge enough online store or not, you should plan and work in a way that your marketing activities can bring millions of traffic to your store and boosts the conversions.

c. Consumer experience

Your eCommerce store must be having all the essential functionalities to fulfill your eCommerce store and their customers’ needs.

But, there are much more functionalities that can create an amazing experience for your customers on your online store.

These amazing experiences allow your customers to get attracted towards your products, brings them back again and again, make them buy your products, and even make them your loyal customers.

d. Promotions/banners on site

Once, you’ve decided on your marketing mission, you can work upon creating highly attractive copies of various marketing techniques.

Here is a step-by-step process to prepare your site for promotions/banners-

1. Strategize and prepare a list of offers that you want to highlight to attract the customers this festive season. Make sure it is aligned to achieve your marketing mission.
2. Ask your creative designers to work on all the promotional materials and banners required for each of your offers.
3. Make your creative writers work on creating compelling content for banners and other marketing materials that converts.
4. Place all the banners and other promotional materials on your site.
   Check and re-check them for being appropriate, attractive, and responsive.

It is important to make sure your web and mobile site and even your mobile app are all set to educate, attract, convert, and delight your customers.

e. Pricing

One of the most important things is to prepare your eCommerce store with the updated pricing.

The festive season is full of discounts and offers. Any slip over here can cost you a huge amount of loss.

Once, you have planned your discounts and offers, you need to-

• Plan your pricing strategy
• Update the pricing for all the products that are categorized for offers and discounts
• Test them rigorously for being up-to-date
• Dynamically change price based on market and competition trends

This helps you make your eCommerce store ready for the holiday season.

3. Schedule Campaigns

Yes, you need to make yourself well prepared with all the marketing plans. You have to-

• Decide your marketing channels to target this festive season
• Plan your marketing activities as per the channel audience
• Ensure your marketing activities are aligned with the marketing mission
• Keep everything well-prepared before you come up with any of the festive season sale

So, for the eCommerce industry, what are the marketing campaigns, you need to plan? Here are they-

a. Social Media

Based on what you’ve planned for your promotions and banners on the website, you need to prepare the whole social media campaigns.

Here is a complete social media marketing strategy for this holiday season-

• Create a plan and the expected outcomes
• Start drafting social media posts and even the paid advertisements
• Based on social media campaigns planned, prepare the creatives for the same

So, you need to be prepared with the social media campaigns for your eCommerce store well in advance this holiday season.

b. Influencer Marketing

One of the most trending marketing techniques is Influencer Marketing. Even the leading eCommerce brands are utilizing it.

And, you should not ignore the same this holiday season.

How to be prepared with influencer marketing for your eCommerce store?

• Based on your earlier experience, you can choose the influencers who had helped your eCommerce store with great success.
• If this is your first time, carefully work on finding the right influencer for your brand.
• You can either pay them, offer them the samples for free or any deal that works the best for both of you- influencers and your brand
• Be prepared with their reviews, creatives to promote on social media and even on the website
• Schedule the campaigns on how you are going to promote the reviews and creatives of the influencers with your products

Also, here is a guide to understanding how you can take the benefit of influencer marketing for your eCommerce brand.

c. Newsletters

One of the highly trustworthy and fruitful methods to drive conversions is email marketing. So, if you want to take the complete benefit of this holiday season, get yourself prepared with email marketing.

So, what you can do to be prepared with newsletters or emailers to drive conversions this festive season?

1. Plan your entire email marketing campaign along with their expected outcomes
2. Prepare the newsletters for various campaigns based on offers, products, categories, etc.
3. Get unique creatives and banners for each of your newsletters but ensure they are aligned with the marketing mission

Being prepared all such campaigns halves your burden on marketing agendas. Now, the only thing remains is the execution of the same during the festive season sale.

d. Frequency & Time

Scheduling the campaigns means you have to plan each and every marketing campaign with their exact time to make them live.

Also, the number of times, you would promote on social media, send newsletters, and even the influencer marketing promotions.

Everything from what to promote, how to promote to how many times to promote needs to be well-planned and prepared before you launch the festive season sale.

After all, planning ensures the ratio of being successful.

4. Stock & Shipping Management

Just planning and scheduling the campaigns are not enough. The real hard work is to get your products ready to ship across all the locations where you sell your products.

a. To sell more – stock more

Yes, this is so important that if you are looking to sell more, you need to stock more or your products.

Whether you have simple or configured products, you need to stock more. Also, if you have specific locations where you’re planning to target and sell your products, you need to gather a list of locations where you can stock up your products physically.

b. Warehouse & distribution location

To stock more at varied locations, you need to have a physical warehouse which helps in shipping and delivering the products much faster and easier. This improves the customer experience and there are increased chances of making your customers loyal to your brand. And, this works amazingly during the festive season as the customers want the products much faster than any other day.

c. Better deals with logistics company

During the festive season, you come up with great discounts and offers. And, that boosts the conversions and sales.

So, to achieve this, you need to manage your expenses and one of the major expenses is the charges of the logistics company which helps you ship and deliver your products.

You need to have a plan and deal with your eCommerce shipping company for the fastest delivery of your products. Also, the deal should allow you to cut in the expenses and see some profits even in the discounts and offers on your eCommerce store.

5. People Management

People Management – this is a challenge for most of the eCommerce brands while planning the success in the holiday season.

Yes, you need a team of people who stay alert, agile, attentive and prepared to make this holiday season sale successful for your eCommerce brand.

After all, the success lies in the team effort. So, what are the teams you need extra-prepared this holiday season?

a. Team ready for an extra workload

Apart from what the teams you have worked aggressively on your eCommerce brand, you need to have a specialized team that can handle the extra workload.

The workload could be anything from managing the incoming orders, looking at the server efficiencies to tracking the deliveries of the products.

So, keep segregated teams prepared to handle the workload.

b. Captains ready for leading the teams

During the workload, there are times when even your segregated teams need guidance and appropriate process to help them handle their workload effectively.

So, get your best people or even hire them (if you need) to make sure they lead all the teams appropriately in order to achieve the outcomes as per the expectations.

c. Team ready to track the outcomes

Also, during the festive season sale, the marketing and all sort of promotions of your eCommerce brand are going on full-fledged.

So, that is the time when you have increased store traffic, wishlists, conversions, sales, and revenues.

This invokes the need to have a team ready who would just work onto measuring the traction received on your web & mobile store and even on the mobile app.

Having a specialized tracking and analyzing team helps you in understanding whether you are generating an increased ROI or not. In fact, this tracking and analysis help in making changes to the existing plans immediately if the outcomes are not as per the expectations or marketing mission.

All these just to ensure your eCommerce success during the festival season.

Final Words

During the festive season, you have a tough time getting your eCommerce brand noticed and even get conversions due to increased competition from the leading as well as the startups. In such a competitive time, it is not just better but even the best thing is to have a point-perfect plan to become successful in the holiday season.

How did you find this rock-solid eCommerce success plan? Share your feedback at [email protected]. We are all eyes to read them!