Featured Content: Top 3 strategies to optimize revenue this holiday season
As the holiday season creeps up and Black Friday is just around the corner, successful companies are finalizing plans to maximize their seasonal revenues. A holiday retail sales forecast from eMarketer estimates a year-over-year increase of 5.7%, hitting an all-time high of $886 billion. To help retailers capture a larger slice of the expanding holiday pie, digital marketing services company eClerx Digital has identified three top strategies focused on optimization.
To accelerate your company’s ROI, the name of the game is optimization. Optimization should be viewed as a discipline, not a project, particularly when preparing for the holidays. The goal is serving your customers the products and offers meaningful to them – in a method more personal and favorable so they’ll buy your products.
The following are three areas retailers can scale up to maximize their ROI in advance of the holidays. These apply to the online and offline worlds alike.
Learn from lessons past. Look at the key areas and categories your customers shopped last holiday season. Even if some of your team moved into other departments since then, pull together last year’s crew to discuss “wins” and improvement opportunities. What were the top 50 keywords or phrases? What was your top performing email and why? How were your top 20 items merchandised?
Make it easy, and quickly, for customers to find the key items they’re looking for now. This applies to how stores are merchandised and signed on the sales floor, but is equally important on your website. Customer journeys and site search results should deliver what you’d expect as a shopper. This can be difficult to scale, but worth the time to increase conversion rates. For example, we at eClerx Digital help many retailers double site search conversion rates by up to 100 percent in key categories to improve incremental revenue.
Stay nimble and establish holiday-specific tests across your web and mobile experiences. Your analytics and site output will often vary from your customers’ behavior during the other 10 months of the year. If you haven’t done this previously, log and measure what you test this year to better inform your planning next year.
I often hear, “Now is not the time to optimize and test, but to execute.” In truth, the time to optimize and test is ongoing. Companies that continue last year’s trends will only marginally improve results, while successful companies will find the integral balance between optimization, testing and campaign execution. Be ready and willing to try new things, all the time, especially when you can drive incremental sales at scale.
Your company should be prepared for the seasonal incremental traffic, which is often tied to incremental acquisition spend. Many brands fall into the major pitfall of poor on-site search functionality. This common frustration dampens user experience and lowers on-site conversions. “But I clicked on the link – why do I have to search again or work so hard to buy something?”
This isn’t to address the key challenges of “keeping the lights on,” as seasonal load balancing and stress testing are table stakes. You can dig into trending keywords both on your site and Google and confirm you’re optimizing for the hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords and phrases visitors are entering into your site search.
Some say, “It’s not the tools or the technologies, it’s the data.” While the holiday season is certainly not time to replace the engine while in flight, data should receive dedicated attention. Peak performance season is the time flaws in your data structure or quality may be white-washed by all the tactical activities to execute your holiday strategy. eClerx Digital helps retailers scale operations and manage complex multi-channel data through additional human touch and process automations.
Finally, assign someone to keep a log of data-related issues beyond the typical quick fixes (like creating a landing page) so once the dust settles, your data needs, opportunities and improvements will drive your efforts for the next year – whether that be an entire re-platform, marketplace expansion or just an overhaul of your content and data structures and platforms.
High-quality and actionable data will ensure you’re on your way to advanced analytics, put you on a smart path to true personalization, and deliver the ROI on your efforts in improved customer experiences and conversions regardless of where your customers are engaging with your brand.
Before you know it, the 2016 holidays will be here! Don’t forget to learn from lessons past, make it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for, and stay nimble to establish tests across your web and mobile experiences.
Don Nelson is associate principal at eClerx Digital, specializing in managing and improving complex data-driven processes to drive ROI on digital investments for many Fortune 500 companies.