While it’s only the beginning of October, the 2014 holiday season is less than two months away, beginning on Friday, November 28 and kicking into high gear for you multi-channel commerce retailers on Cyber Monday, December 1.
With that in mind, there’s still time for you and your team of product, marketing, technical, business, and content managers to make like Santa’s elves and prepare for what will be, if history is any indication, the biggest online holiday shopping season to date.
We’ve created this list, and you should check it twice, to make sure your customers’ experiences are better than nice.
Performance testing
For online retailers, it’s important to utilize what’s known as a pre-production or “stage” environment. While most businesses probably only leverage the pre-production environment to regression test new features or defect remediation, we at ICF Interactive highly recommend configuring the pre-production environment to continuously validate that the e-commerce store can handle at least 25 percent more traffic than its busiest day of the year. In recent years, that day for e-commerce merchants is most commonly Black Friday’s online counterpart: Cyber Monday.
To properly test your current platform’s load capacity, you have a few options at your disposal. First, if you don’t have or can’t use internal resources, consider hiring e-commerce system experts. If you’re a day late or dollar short of that option, there are both free and licensed online tools that you can download and run to diagnose potential issues.
Review your returns and exchanges policy
During the gift-giving season, returns and exchanges are imminent. For multi-channel retailers with both brick and mortar stores and an e-commerce site, it’s essential that your instructions on returns and exchanges are clear, easily found within your site’s hierarchy and take all scenarios into account. In doing so, you’ll not only improve the customer experience, but you’ll ensure that accounting and inventory level reports are accurate.
In looking at your current policy, ask a few key questions:
- If a customer purchases an item online, can he or she return it to the store? If so, will he or she be eligible for a full refund or store credit? If not, how does the customer return the item – are the return shipping instructions easy to understand and as hassle-free as possible?
- What if the online purchase was part of a promotion in which a discount was applied, but the in-store exchange item is full price?
- What happens if the customer buys in-store and finds a better price online? Will the store honor the online price by refunding the difference?
- And if grandma purchase in a store in Canada, what is the policy if the recipient lives in the United States?
In determining these processes and outlining clear rules, you’ll provide the best experience possible, while avoiding the pitfalls of ambiguous instructions.
Mind your analytics
Most organizations have an analytics platform or tool (think Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and etc.). E-commerce merchants will want to create a top five list of improvement areas. Look into where the majority of your users are coming from – was it an email campaign, or perhaps a social media channel outreach post, such as a tweet or Facebook update? How are your customers viewing your online content – via desktop or primarily mobile?
And when a purchase takes place, knowing how well customers moved through the conversion funnel will help to replicate success. It’s likely you’re planning to run special campaigns or holiday promotions; make sure these fit well within already established marketing processes – you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, simply throw some tinsel on it! By looking at how well your efforts are working now, you’ll have plenty of time to make improvements for the most wonderful, and busy, time of the year.
Evaluate your disk space
An often overlooked but critical function of site performance is clearing disk space on your hard drives. Much like anything else that stores things: physical filing cabinets, your junk drawer at home, your desk at work or the files on your computer, if they become overloaded, performance will be less than optimal. Be sure to clean the log files and delete old entries; failure to do so may result in a slow site or perhaps a crash; slow sites can cause headaches where there should be hustle and bustle, so make sure your site isn’t turning away customers.
Identify and define holiday promotional tactics
Landing pages, web content, product descriptions and campaigns are sure to be a few of your favorite things when the holidays (speedily) roll around. Use the slower end-of-summer months to ramp up on marketing productions. Make improvements to your product details and descriptions, streamline the user experience for fast and easy navigation and design with the customer in mind.
In conjunction with your analytics research, determine where and how the majority of your efforts should be concentrated; if you have a massive social following, think about a Twitter or Facebook campaign. If you find your customers are straight shooting site visitors, develop targeted landing pages for individual segments.
Ho-Ho-Ho and SEO
If your consumers can’t find you in search engine results now, how will they find you during the extremely competitive holiday season?
Complete a full analysis of your content, keywords, and strategy – what may have worked six months ago could need to be adjusted. In addition to ranking, updating your content will make it more relevant and engaging; consumers will be searching for holiday sales, free shipping, online discounts and the season’s hottest items. Implement an SEO plan now so you’re not scrambling in a few months.
Consider your omnichannel strategy
If you don’t already have an omnichannel marketing and commerce strategy, you’ll need one.
Consumers demand a seamless experience, and they’ll expect it in every channel in which they’re interacting with your brand. Additionally, the content displayed in a particular context and on a specific device, think mobile, or tablet, or desktop or even in-store, needs to be relevant to the customer in that moment.
For the best results and to stay on your customers’ nice lists, get started now.
