holiday-ecommerce-chapter-3

holiday ecommerce guide

 

Chapter 3: Create a Holiday-Themed Gift Guide

These days, people are busier than ever and don’t have time to spend hours scrolling down price lists and navigating busy, overflowing menus.  They need help, and a holiday-themed gift guide could be the perfect way to motivate them to get something for everyone on their list – right from your site.

In this chapter, you’ll learn simple ways to make your site more user friendly, so people stay on your site rather than jumping to your competitions’.

It’s a New Year for Holiday Marketing

Ideally, you should have been planning your holiday email campaign back in July, according to David Workman, operations manager for Delta Apparel. He claims that many retailers simply resort to last year’s email campaign because the results worked so well – but a lot can change in a year.

Case in point: the pervasive use of mobile phones and tablets has only increased in a year’s time – with much of the focus going toward designing a responsive site that understands and adapts dynamically to mobile users’ needs.

Email is the same way – with as much as 47% of all emails being opened on mobile devices – and the number is only growing.

email_marketing_opens_mobile_aug_2013

A study by Litmus learned that as much as
47% of all emails are opened on a mobile device

With this in mind, why not develop a campaign that can be opened and interacted with in a way that’s responsive across all devices?

One such idea: a themed gift guide. By analyzing your email and customer behavior data, you can glean a great deal of information about your shoppers in the span of a year.

Delta Apparel did this, and learned enough tidbits about its customers to segment them into tighter groups that focused more on relevancy than shopper’s interests. A large portion of their marketing was also more geared toward personalization. As a result, in their words, “conversions went through the roof.”

What are some ways that you can segment customers that go beyond the typical demographics? Can you offer up personalized items or a mobile-optimized tailored gift guide to take some of the stress out of shoppers’ holiday headaches?

User-Friendly Site Suggestions

Beyond responsive design, email marketing and festive pixels, there are several other elements of your site design that warrant a closer focus this holiday season.

1. Site search. Your site search is likely going to get some heavy usage as hurried customers search frantically down to the wire for the perfect last-minute gift.  Does it give them the results they want?

2. Personalized gift suggestions. Many stores segment by demographic (gender, age-range), but what if you segmented suggestions by interest or price?  If you have a large selection of products, it may well be worth investing in a product suggestion filtering system that allows customers to check specific boxes regarding their recipient, and then dynamically load the results in the same window.

One such tool, which can help you automate and personalize many of these customer channels, is ExactTarget, a cloud-based marketing software owned by Salesforce.com – so if you currently use Salesforce CRM, you’ll find ExactTarget integrates perfectly.

exacttarget

ExactTarget integrates across key platforms
including web, social, mobile and more

Tap into your social spheres

Beyond your website itself, there’s also the burgeoning social media sphere that you can tap into. The holidays were made for sharing – so now’s the time to dust off that Twitter account, connect with Facebook friends and fans, and start getting active on Pinterest.

If you’d like to add a little festive flair to your social media links, there are plenty of free holiday-themed social media icons out there, including a frosty Facebook (among others), and some Santa-capped snowglobes.

Even though there’s less emphasis on social media this year, there are still a variety of ways to keep customers engaged through the appropriate social channels. The next chapter will give you some great ideas on how to do just that – in a way that’s easy, and most importantly, fun!

chapter 2 chapter 4

Download the PDF

Hard-Boiled_Guide_to_Holiday_eCommerce_img

Make your website better. Instantly.

Over 300,000 websites use Crazy Egg to improve what's working, fix what isn't and test new ideas.

Free 30-day Trial