How to gear up your eCommerce site for 2018 holidays
The holiday season is the time when plenty of new customers come into your store which turns out to be an opportunity to transform them into your loyal brand ambassadors. Magento has surveyed 15 leading experts and found the three key insights which are:
- Creating superior shopping experience,
- Fulfilling the shopper journey and
- Leveraging shopper data and business insights.
The research and study have enough examples that quote the various best practices. Here’s few excerpts and key takeaways for prepping up your Magento eCommerce for this 2018 holiday season.
Make your customers’ shopping experience memorable and superior over others.
In the past, competitors differentiated using price, product, and promotion whereas today the critical differentiator is the shopping experience. US Customer Experience Index has reported that elite brands provide 22 emotionally positive experiences over brands which give just 2 of them.
The benefits of providing a superior customer experience are boundless. For starters, there are 1.6x brand awareness, 1.9x average order value, 1.9x return on ad spend and overall revenue growth rates of 36%. To sum up, positive emotion and superior shopping experience mean customers will stay with the brand longer, increasing the customer lifetime value (CLTV).
Ensure true omnichannel experience for fulfilling shopper’s expectations.
As a shopper, the journey doesn’t end with checkout but also extend into post-purchase experiences. Online buyers expect free shipping, fast delivery and package tracking as default services. To scale up to these expectations, merchants have to extend their services such as flexible delivery and return policies.
To fulfill the shoppers’ journey in your eCommerce store especially during the holiday purchasing cycle, maintain a consistent experience, across all channels including physical store, online store, mobile app and social media pages. Implement customer-centric measures such as subscription-based models, flexible return policies, free shipping, buy-online-return-in-store and coupon codes to prevent cart abandonment.
Shopper data is the eCommerce fuel to run your marketing campaign engines successfully.
In-depth understanding of the customer is a must for providing a unique experience that’s exclusive to your store. Metrics such as content response metrics, browsing habits, and purchasing histories can help deliver the best experience throughout the customer’s lifecycle. To identify the customer’s expectations, you need to track the following data points.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), or the sum of purchase totals help identify the high-performing customers. Secondly, customer lifetime number of orders can help determine the customer’s loyalty to your brand. After finding the customer’s lifetime number, calculate the Average Order Value (AOV) and finally, make a note of the recent purchase order of the customer. Personalize your marketing campaigns to the customer based on these data points.
Let’s explore some of the famous brands and their holiday strategies to grow revenue:
Amazon Pay
Amazon Pay focuses on convenient shipping, fast delivery, and shipment tracking to keep the customer aware of their order arrival. They also have a subscription-based model like Amazon Prime and a special focus on customer’s expectations to gain long-term benefits. Amazon also extends the buying experience in social platforms like Instagram. A voice commerce solution can also be implemented for easing customer’s ordering tasks.
PayPal
PayPal had leveraged over Q1 2018 survey results and implemented the following measures.
- Providing smooth checkout experience for mobile users,
- Storing credit card and shipping information so that customers’ don’t have to re-enter them every time and
- Offering different payment methods for customers to choose.
Summary
Research and surveys on eCommerce provided crucial insights to improve sales. As an eCommerce owner or a digital marketing strategist, make your customer’s shopping experience, superior. Ensure a true omnichannel experience to fulfill the shopper’s journey. Deep dive into the shopper’s data and identify metrics to formulate new marketing campaigns. Finally, watch out for eCommerce giants like Amazon and Paypal to learn and adopt some of their strategies that suit your business.
