By Erika Jolly Brookes
For small retailers, now is the time to start thinking about strategy for driving sales during the holidays. Why now? Holiday shopping starts earlier each year. According to the Rubicon Project, approximately one third of consumers begin their holiday shopping before Labor Day.
This means delaying holiday marketing planning could potentially cost retailers a significant revenue opportunity. Consider the following tips to get ahead of the game and begin attracting holiday shoppers.
Tip #1: Check Your Data
Before peak season strikes, dig into your data and determine what holiday promotions and campaigns drove the most sales last year. Understand which marketing channels are contributing the most referral traffic to your business and what products are the most popular with your shoppers. Reviewing this information can help you develop a holiday marketing strategy that’s concentrated on high performing items, promotions and channels.
Tip #2: Mind Your Mobile Presence
Don’t ignore mobile. Mobile sales are growing rapidly, accounting for nearly 30 percent of e-commerce revenue, according to Internet Retailer. However, very few marketers run mobile-enabled websites, leading to customer frustration, negative word-of-mouth and lost revenue. To avoid alienating mobile shoppers, consider making your website responsive and simplify the checkout process.
Tip #3: Get Social
Social media is another area where you can maximize your presence and capture more consumer attention. Visual content reigns supreme on social. Instagram has doubled its user base to 700 million monthly actives in two years. Native Facebook videos are reported to have extremely high engagement rates. Consider posting a “how to” video published directly to Instagram and Facebook to organically reach your audience.
Tip #4: Nurture Your Way to New Sales
Yahoo Small Business recently found as many as 83 percent of customers don’t buy items they place in their online shopping carts. You can set and forget a series of automated emails that trigger based on customer behavior — abandoned cart, welcome email, anniversary email to re-engage these shoppers and bring them back to your store to make a purchase. If your ecommerce business makes $10,000 per month in online revenue, winning back just 10 percent of abandoned carts can result in an extra $12,000 per year.
Tip #5 Reel in Shoppers with Retargeting
You also can re-engage store visitors who view but don’t purchase items through retargeted ads on the web, mobile, and social of your brand and products.
You can use dynamic ads to send visitors back to the specific products they viewed on your site. If they viewed a pair of sandals and a skirt on your site, the ad they see will feature those products and lead them back to the product pages.
Consumers often put plenty of thought into their holiday gift purchases, and independent retailers that want to win the holiday rush must as well. Putting these tips in play can provide you with the sales revenue you need to finish out the year on a high note.
For more tips to prepare for the holiday season visit SpringBot.com.