Start winning holiday shoppers to boost your bottom line

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Whether it’s Black Friday, Singles Day, or any other holiday, festive shopping seasons are undoubtedly one of the biggest opportunities for business growth. In 2021, online holiday sales across November and December rose 5% year over year worldwide to $1.14 trillion.¹

How do you ensure your business becomes the go-to shopping destination for customers? Here are several tips that can help you achieve this by focusing on three core areas: marketing your online business, optimising your shopping experience, and protecting your business from holiday scammers.

1. Drive traffic with seasonal content and promotions
Content is king and that rings particularly true during the holiday shopping season. A curation of relevant content and an effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy can help set your business apart from your competition.

• Why is this important?
  Knowing what your customers search for in terms of keywords and product choices can help optimise your content and promotional strategy to be more engaging, which can ultimately drive more sales.
• What can I do?
  Optimise your on-site content with holiday-specific keywords and launch festive-themed Search Engine Marketing (SEM) ads. You can further build loyalty by offering seasonal services. Get more tips on formulating a robust online marketing strategy here.

2. Attract holiday shoppers with personalised experiences
With nearly half of holiday shoppers choosing businesses that offer better prices and promotions², it’s evident that shoppers expect good deals especially during the holiday season.

• Why is this important?
  Personalisation can drive brand loyalty: 76% of customers stated that uniquely tailored communications is a key factor for brand consideration and 78% are more inclined to repurchase after receiving personalised content.³
• What can I do?
  Personalise your site experience with relevant product recommendations based on customers’ browsing history. You can also incentivise shoppers to complete their purchase with personalised discounts.

3. Amplify your customer support
The bustling holiday season is a great time to increase sales and start your business on a good track for the following year. However, converting and retaining customers requires exceptional customer service.

• Why is this important?
  Customer service inquiries increase by 75% during the holidays⁴ and nearly half of shoppers want fast replies to their questions.⁴ As such, timely and thorough support is crucial.
• What can I do?
  Ramp up customer service, respond to inquiries within 24 to 48 hours to drive more sales⁵, and be upfront with all costs, fees, and delivery times. It’s also worth upgrading your workplace before the holiday rush with these tips.

4. Make checkout as frictionless as possible
As much as shoppers plan ahead, last-minute shopping is still inevitable. And the last thing they want is to go through a checkout process that’s slow or interrupted.

• Why is this important?
  A seamless checkout process ensures your customers don’t leave your site. After all, 50% of customers get frustrated by having to create an account or key in a password to pay for their purchases.⁶
• What can I do?
  Remove unnecessary barriers by offering guest checkout, reducing the number of clicks required to checkout with a Buy Now button on product pages, and providing multiple ways to pay.

5. Build strong cybersecurity for holiday success
Some customers are starting their holiday shopping much earlier this year⁷, and while this increase in traffic is good, it unfortunately opens a wider window for fraudsters to scam shoppers too.

• Why is this important?
  It’s a simple fact: beyond financial loss, fraud attacks also negatively impact your business growth and reputation, thus causing your customers to lose confidence in your brand.
• What can I do?
  Closely monitor your site for any suspicious activity such as excessive order amounts, auto-generated email addresses, or mismatched billing and shipping addresses. Besides that, enable multi-factor authentication to keep your customers’ data safe.

With online sales booming and the holidays getting closer, ‘tis the time to set your business up for holiday success. Capitalising on the opportunities that the holiday season brings is a great way to improve your bottom line and ensure your business grows according to your vision. Follow these tips and more from our eBook to make this upcoming holiday season your best one yet.

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