If you have an online retail business it's a pretty fair bet that your sales have suffered this year due to Covid-19. With so many out of work and a financial future that is uncertain, not many people have disposable income for online shopping. However, if handled properly the upcoming holiday shopping season can still allow your business to show a profit for 2020.
Considering that many more people will be doing their holiday shopping online vs visiting retail stores in order to keep themselves and their families safe from the virus, this could actually be your time to shine. This article from Big Commerce agrees with this prediction, stating that during the 2020 holiday shopping season, e-commerce will soar. The article also offers several very good pieces of advice on how to enhance your retail business during this busy shopping season.
For a step-by-step guide to preparing your online retail business for the upcoming holiday season, we'd like to direct you to an article by Beeketing.com. This holiday marketing guide is comprised of a 20-point checklist to prepare your online store for the holiday season. The Rules of Thumb blog from MoneyThumb has listed each of the 20 points below: (Although the article from Beeketing.com goes into great detail with each of the 20 points, so make sure to read it in its entirety.)
- The color palette of your website or e-commerce store
- Product images set a mood for holiday shopping
- A holiday pop up that matches your store’s design
- Sell in bundles, upsell & cross-sell to the max!
- Create daily deals and time-sensitive offers
- Make free shipping profitable
- Display banners on the homepage to advertise holiday sales
- Create a seasonal content marketing strategy
- Launch PPC holiday ads (Google Adwords)
- Make personal holiday greetings
- Run Facebook ads that actually convert
- Add QR codes to your physical items (for those shopping on mobile phones)
- Create urgency in your copywriting
- Send out cart abandonment emails
- Extend your holiday promotions for last-minute shoppers
- Integrate live chat support
- Offer free returns
- Gather feedback from customers
- Collect insights for next year’s ads
- Mark your next year calendar with major holiday milestone dates
Another interesting forecast for the 2020 holiday shopping season comes from one of our favorite marketing companies, Click Z who offer the following predictions:
30-second summary:
- Shoppers aren’t planning to significantly change how much they spend this holiday season compared with 2019.
- Many more people are planning to make their holiday purchases online versus in stores, where the fear of catching COVID-19 is still keeping shoppers away.
- While saving money remains a top priority for consumers, the contraction in consumer spending that occurred in April rebounded in May and June.
- Black Friday is moving online, converging with Cyber Monday to make the overall holiday shopping season for 2020 a very virtual one.
- Retailers can prepare for holiday shoppers by looking at behavior from the recent back-to-school shopping season. Sprout Social found that consumers and brands interacted much more on social media than pre-pandemic, dominated by social conversations focused on COVID-19.
- Retailers can prepare for the upcoming influx of virtual shoppers by focusing on personalization, polishing their messaging, understanding what platforms consumers use to communicate with brands and understanding current consumer expectations regarding shipping times.
By implementing the above 20 actions Beeketing.com offers as a part of your holiday marketing plan and taking into consideration what Click Z has predicted, if you play your cards right you can pretty much rest assured your website or e-commerce store will experience great sales during the 2020 holiday season in spite of the difficult year we have all had.
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