By Mike Auger
Many businesses experience a seasonal summer slowdown, including online stores. To combat this, determine what promotional or marketing plans you have in place now that can be fine-tuned, or amped up to help maintain or even increase summertime revenues. Your current ecommerce platform should have ways to address most, if not all of the following items, quickly and without the need to write code. Items to consider include:
- Pay per click campaigns. Do site visitors search for different key words during different seasons?
- Email marketing. Consider including a seasonal promo code or discount to increase site traffic.
- Abandoned orders. Encourage your customers to come back to your site to complete orders.
- Design updates. Update your home page with new graphics and images.
- Content. Create fresh blog posts that are linked to your site.
Abandoned orders
These orders, or non-orders more specifically, occur when a site visitor places an item into their cart, yet doesn’t complete the order for one reason or another. According to the independent web usability firm, Baymard Institute, the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 67.91 percent. You should have a general idea what your site’s abandon/bounce rate is through the use of Google Analytics, so you can measure the success of any campaign you may institute.
With a general baseline established, now it’s time to capture those lost orders. Our eCommerce platform at Pinnacle Cart utilizes a feature called Drift Marketing, to pull in these orders. With Drift Marketing set up, the platform automatically sends out an email at a frequency determined by the cart admin, to all customers that have created an order but did not complete the buying process. This email is customizable, and allows for the addition of a promo code to entice shoppers back to complete their order. Contained in this email is also a link the shopper may click on that returns them to their order page, with all the products they have previously placed in their cart. Handy, right? Reaching out to these customers could be one of the keys to maintaining or increasing sales this summer.
Images
Thinking about design updates to drive additional revenue is another avenue to explore. Switching up a clickable image in your home page slider may help highlight one of your seasonal products, a higher dollar item, or a new product. Even a small design change to the home page can help capture site visitors and propel them into the buying process. You should also think about if now is the time for a complete design overhaul. If your site usually sees a spike in holiday traffic, having a new design and any additional changes to the site already in place and working perfectly beforehand is always the best plan. If you haven’t changed the look and feel of your site at least somewhat in the last 18-24 months, then you are already behind your competitor, because they most likely have.
Blog posts and social media
Posting on your blog and social media for your site shouldn’t go on vacation this summer. Be sure to take steps to continue posting fresh, relevant information for your site visitors. Search engine rankings don’t take vacations, and neither should your website content. Taking proactive steps now to combat this seasonal slowdown will result in a steady order flow during the summer months.