Top Christmas Ecommerce Tips

Once everyone is back from their summer holiday, Christmas will come around before you know it. Here are our top ecommerce tips for getting ready for Christmas. Mine Your Data - Your most valuable resource for deciding what you should do next Christmas is data you have from last year. Look at who bought from you and when in previous years.  Use this data to build segments for your email campaigns. Review what products you sold most of last year. Can these categories be expanded? Are there any categories that didn't sell well? Additionally, review which promotions worked the best; what times of year and what types of promotion were they?   Embrace PPC - You might not normally use PPC but at Christmas it can be a great way to cut through the competition and boost traffic and sales. Customers are more likely to convert at Christmas which means better margins than the rest of the year. Google Shopping feeds, Remarketing Lists and image ads can take time to get right, especially if you have to go through external developers and designers so give yourself plenty of time to set these up.  Optimise Mobile & Tablet - Sales made with mobile phones last Christmas grew 14% compared to 2015 and are set to keep growing. We would hope that everybody has a responsive mobile template by now, but are you doing everything you can to make it easy to buy from you on mobile? Adding simple payment solutions like Paypal can give your conversion rates a real boost.  Improve Conversion with Plugins - Basket Abandonment functionality and review software, like Feefo or Trustpilot, are proven to improve conversion rates. We've seen great results with both types of software. If you want to get the most out of these improvements before Christmas, you're going to have to get coding and testing soon.  Site Speed, Code Freezes & Hosting - Slow speed or site crashes can cause huge revenue losses in the lead up to Christmas. We recommend a 'code freeze' in Q4 to prevent any unexpected bugs and changes taking down the site during peak business. It’s also worth checking with your hosting providers to see how easy it is to scale up your hosting capability during peak times.  Find out more about us here.

Is it too early to mention Christmas Ecommerce?

While the summer tries to make a stuttering start we thought it was about time to start thinking about how to maximise Christmas performance. As with all things, a successful ecommerce Christmas relies on careful planning and doing simple things well.

So, with apologies for bringing up Christmas in July, here are our top tips for getting prepared for the Christmas rush ahead of time:

1. Mine Your Data - Your most valuable resource for deciding what you should do next Christmas is data you have from last Christmas. Look at who bought from you and when in previous years. Use this build build segments for your email campaigns. Review what products you sold most of last year. Can these categories be expanded? Are there any categories that didn't sell well? Additionally, review which promotions worked the best; what times of year and what types of promotion were they? 
2. Last posting dates - Speak to your couriers now. You may not have checked, but Christmas Day falls on a Sunday, which means that the week before will be critical to your business. Yet with DPD stating in Feb 2016 that they where already at capacity that week, based on contracted volumes, don't just assume that all will be well for you. 
3. Embrace PPC - You might not normally use PPC but at Christmas it can be a great way to cut through the competition and boost traffic and sales. Customers are more likely to convert at Christmas which means better margins than the rest of the year. Google Shopping feeds, Remarketing Lists and image ads can take time to get right, especially if you have to go through external developers and designers so give yourself plenty of time to set these up. 
4. Optimise Mobile & Tablet - 40% of ecommerce transactions last December were on mobile of tablet. We would hope that everybody has a responsive mobile template by now but are you doing everything you can to make it easy to buy from you on mobile? Adding simple payment solutions like Paypal can give your conversion rates a real boost. 
5. Improve Conversion with Plugins - Basket Abandonment functionality and review software, like Feefo or Trustpilot, are proven to improve conversion rates. We've seen great results with both types of software. If you want to get the most out of these improvements before Christmas, you're going to have to get coding and testing soon. (The same goes for mobile and tablet changes!). We recommend a 'code freeze' in Q4 to prevent any unexpected bugs and changes taking down the site during peak business. 

Need to know more? Visit our website here or send us an email to discuss your ecommerce needs.

Summer Is Ending - Is Your Christmas Ecommerce Plan Ready?

Now that September is here, your minds will surely be turning towards your Christmas Ecommerce Plan (if they haven't already!). Many ecommerce companies make more than half their revenue in the last three months of the year so It's important to make sure you have a clear online marketing plan that will deliver sales.

Here are our top five tips to get ecommerce success this Christmas:

1. Email & Social Media Plan - In the final hectic weeks before Christmas it's easy to fall behind on email and social media. This can be a costly oversight, so make sure you have all your emails and key posts planned well in advance, so all you have to do is press send and watch the sales come in.
2. Christmas SEO - It's never to early to launch your Christmas Gifts category and product pages. Give yourself an edge by uploading your categories early, and updating copy on your site to reflect the upcoming season so that Google can index your new products.
3. Google Shopping - Make sure your products have maximum visibility in Google as people are much more likely to convert in one visit during the festive season. Google Shopping ROI will soar over the next few months.
4. Brand PPC - Although you might not run PPC throughout the year, running brand PPC at Christmas allows you to tailor your brand copy, landing pages and sitelinks to Christmas traffic, to improve conversion rates.
5. RLSA - Remarketing Lists For Search Ads allow you to show ads for broad keywords only to previous visitors to your site. Eg. You would never normally bid on 'Christmas Gifts For Men' keywords but with RLSA you can ensure that only users who have visited your site see these adverts in Google. Christmas is the ideal time to experiment with these campaigns.

Get in touch if you would like any help or advice about getting the most out of the festive season.

Best Ecommerce Articles from Around the Web - November Edition

Well, it's official - Amazon is predicting that online Christmas sales will peak at 6pm on 2nd December. Now that has been sorted out, here is a round up of some of the most useful articles and blog posts we've read this month.

So if you need a bit of inspiration to bump up your Christmas site conversion, or improve your content, look no further:

1.             7 Ecommerce Optimization Tips to Help You Achieve Record Breaking Holiday Sales - A good checklist for making the most of Christmas sales. Read here.

2.             What content marketers can learn from the 'Jerusalem' cookbook - An interesting article reiterating the importance of interesting content that looks great; tell a story, add quality images. Read here.

3.             Search: Not Provided: What Remains, Keyword Data Options, the Future - Everything you need to know about (not provided) keywords in Analytics and how to cope. Read here

4.             Future of retail is in ‘bricks and clicks’, says John Lewis - A good mobile site is the link between online and in-store purchase. More stats from John Lewis here.

5.             The 7 High-Converting Places to Add Email Sign-Up Forms to Build Your List - A comprehensive look at where to put your email sign-up forms. Read here.

If you need help with any of the above areas - site optimisation, content creation, Analytics, SEO or email marketing - take a look at our site to see what we do, or drop us an email.

Regards

The MoneySpyder team

Is it too early to mention Christmas ecommerce?

Every year Christmas ecommerce advice gets published earlier and earlier. This year, to get ahead of the curve, we're starting now.

Christmas may seem like months away - and it is - but if you want to be ready for the Christmas peak now is the time to start work.

Here are our top long term projects to start working on now if you want to have a very merry Christmas:

1. Conversion Rate Optimisation

Don't wait until summer is over to start thinking about responsive mobile templates, abandoned basket auto-emails and conversion rate optimisation. Our ecommerce mentoring  programme aims to help businesses make meaningful and long-lasting improvements over a period of 3-6 months.

2. Ecommerce Platform Upgrades

A new website, or new functionality takes time to perfect. You don't want your site build to run over schedule and be testing new features halfway through November. If you think your current platform isn't the right one to take you through next Christmas take a look at our Ecommerce Platform brochure.

3. Christmas SEO

What keywords are you targeting this year? Now might be a good time to set up some category pages for wrapping paper or Christmas decorations. You don't necessarily have to link to them in your main navigation but it would be prudent to get them live and indexed by Google.

If you want to know more take a look at our ecommerce consulting pages or our ecommerce platform offering.