With most of the major shopping holidays behind you, it’s time to shift your focus to your ecommerce business’s final holiday push. Customers will still be buying gifts and other products last-minute between Cyber Monday and Christmas, so it would be to your advantage to both target them and work with them to get more sales before the year ends. But where should your focus lie in doing so? Here are some of the most important actions ecommerce businesses should take during the first two-thirds of December to finish the year strong.
1. Focus on Fixing Issues
In a perfect world, your online business would not run into a single issue during the holiday rush. However, it’s more likely that you’ll run into at least one or two problems over the crazy retail holiday weekend that limit your ability to operate at full capacity.
Your first priority should, of course, be fixing these issues so that last-minute shoppers aren’t affected by them moving forward. Whether images on your site are glitching or you are receiving complaints about delivery, do what you can to remedy the situation. Once you’ve made sure that everything is working as expected, you can move on to boosting your marketing initiatives.
2. Ramp Up Abandoned Cart Strategies
Chances are that in the rush to find the best deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, many customers may have abandoned their carts on your store. This offers you a great marketing opportunity since you already know they have an interest in your products.
To take advantage of this opportunity, market to customers who abandoned their carts by sending them follow-up emails and/or displaying banners on your site when they return to encourage them to complete their purchase. Consider offering a discount to make the idea more enticing, or focus on creating urgency to make sales happen sooner rather than later.
3. Increase Retargeting Efforts
If a shopper has visited your site without having purchased or added items to their cart, you still know that they are likely looking for something at least very similar to what you offer, if not exactly the same. To take advantage of this fact, increase your spend on retargeting efforts so that these customers are reminded about your products even when they’re elsewhere on the web.
The benefits are twofold: if they are still interested in your product offerings but just haven’t hit the “purchase” stage of the sales funnel, you’ll still remain top-of-mind for when they do reach that stage. Alternatively, if they still haven’t found the exact perfect thing they want, they’ll still have your products top-of-mind that they can substitute for their original plans.
4. Use Countdown Widgets and Posts
With the actual (versus sales) holidays around the corner, the majority of people will be focusing on what they need to get done before those dates—and what those dates actually are. Help them keep these dates in mind by publishing countdowns where they are easy to find.
Countdown widgets are great for your website, whereas daily countdown posts work well for social media. This action helps shoppers by letting them know how many days they have until shipping deadlines and holiday dates so they can stay prepared—plus, it creates a sense of urgency as well.
5. Hold an End-of-Year Blowout Sale
After Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’ll have a pretty solid idea of which products sold well—and which you have more of in stock than you expected. Take this opportunity to place inventory you’d like to clean out on a last-minute sale or discount to encourage customers to buy those products specifically.
Not only will this help you make more money—it will also help you start the new year fresh with a more leveled-out inventory count so that you’re not left with too many products you don’t need after the holidays.
Final Thoughts
The end of the holiday season is almost here, but you can’t let up on your ecommerce efforts now. Follow these steps for the final month of the year so that you can rest assured you’ve done everything you can to maximize your holiday sales.