How E-Commerce Retailers Can Maximize Sales This Holiday Season

With the holidays approaching, how can online businesses adjust their strategies to maximize conversions and boost end-of-year revenue? originally appeared on : the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

by Alexandre Robicquet, CEO of Crossing Minds, Stanford ML Research Scholar, on :

There are several different strategies e-commerce retailers can use to fully maximize major sales opportunities this holiday shopping season.

First, it’s important that businesses surface the right products for the right customers, even if they’ve never shopped with them before or are shopping for a loved one. For years, online retailers have depended on third-party cookies to extract consumers’ personal information, which they used to predict what potential customers want to buy. When shopping for someone else, this tactic makes the shopping experience much more challenging because retailers that employ it are delivering product recommendations based on the gifter’s demographic data rather than factoring in the context of the visit. This actually hurts the retailers’ credibility. There is a solution, though: session-based personalization. By analyzing clicks and time spent on different product pages during a single session, businesses are able to deliver relevant, in-the-moment recommendations, which can immediately set themselves up for more conversions, no matter who ends up receiving these purchases.

Businesses can also increase sales during the holidays by ensuring checkout is a seamless process for customers. The holiday shopping season often brings significant discounts, making shoppers more inclined to impulsively add items to their carts when they see markdowns. But, the bridge between “add to cart” and “thanks for your purchase” is the most critical part. Most of us can relate to frustrating checkout experiences where we ended up abandoning items entirely. To avoid this, retailers should audit their checkout experiences to ensure it runs smoothly, efficiently, and without hiccups, and they should always look for ways to improve. For example, implementing a one-click buying option helps speed up the checkout process, and buy now pay later (BNPL) options encourage shoppers to follow through with purchases by offering a more digestible payment option. Optimizing the checkout experience for the holiday shopping season also sets up seamless experiences year-round, increasing the likelihood that customers will return even on non-sale days.

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Lastly, because frequent customers are likely to spend the most, it’s in a business’s best interest to show loyal customers some love with specialized deals and discounts on top of a standard discount for Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Online retailers should make use of highly targeted email campaigns that also factor in omnichannel personalization, such as sending an email with a special discount code to a list of the business’s most loyal customers. These emails can be further maximized by highlighting recommended items to the customer based on their previous purchases, cart adds, or other onsite behavior. The one-two punch of a bonus discount along with recommending items most relevant to the customer’s interests are likely to drive higher value conversions.

originally appeared on – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

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