1. The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guidelines
2. The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guide 2020
3. The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guide Templates
4. The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guide Template

The holidays are not only known for festivities but also for the increased buying behavior of consumers.

5 E-Commerce Techniques To Know For The 2015 Holiday Season. You’re already deep into planning for the 2015 holiday season. According to Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Guide. Key to ensuring a seamless holiday ecommerce shipping process is an understanding of inventory location and how best to ship products at all times. One of the most effective ways of doing this is warehouse/inventory management with in-store analytics and intelligent shipping. ADOBE DIGITAL INDEX ADOBE DIGITAL INDEX 2015 Holiday Shopping Prediction Sweden Holiday Season (Nov and Dec) Forecast: Total ecommerce: $4 billion YoY growth: +5% Share of annual ecommerce: 19.8% Spend per internet user: $430.87 eCommerce: Phone = 12%, Tablet = 10% Browsing: Phone = 33%, Tablet = 13% Biggest Day Forecast: Biggest day during. Comscore (NASDAQ: SCOR), a global media measurement and analytics company, today reported holiday season U.S. Retail e-commerce spending from desktop computers for the entire November-December 2015 holiday season. For the holiday season, $56.4 billion was spent online on desktop computers, marking a. Source document contributed to DocumentCloud by Davey Alba (Wired.com).

Sales are off the charts around the holidays and stores are pulling off deals and gimmicks so that more and more customers would buy from them.

Ecommerce also rake up sales during the holiday season, with numbers going over those of retail sales.

Holidays is the Best Time for Ecommerce

Sales go through the roof over the holiday seasons. Reports from the National Retail Federation, Adobe Digital Index, and IBM Watson, gave out crazy numbers for the 2015 holidays.

Billions of dollars are spent by Americans starting Black Friday, the day right after Thanksgiving. In total? Shoppers online spent $4.45 billion online on Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day.

E-commerce is so popular that more shoppers bought online than in stores. An estimated 102 million Americans have shopped in stores while 103 million shopped online.

Among these online shoppers, 57% were on mobile devices, with smartphones making 36.8% of the traffic for Cyber Monday and 44.7% on Black Friday. Black Friday sales were the highest for tablet users who averaged at $136.

Cyber Monday sales, however, were highest again for desktop users who averaged at $128. Indeed, e-commerce is a hit during the holidays, making the season the best time for the industry.

And with more and more online shops popping out like mushrooms, and more and more people seeing how convenient shopping online is, there is high expectation for this year’s holidays.

READ:12 Thoughts That Could Prove Devastating To Your Ecommerce Sales This Holiday

Ecommerce Holiday Dates to Remember this 2016

Sales numbers truly go up during the holidays. Here is a list of US holidays that online stores should keep in mind so they can ready their supplies and promotional materials:

• October 31 – Halloween
• November 8 – Election Day
• November 11 – Veteran’s Day
• November 24 – Thanksgiving
• November 25 – Black Friday
• November 26 – Small Business Saturday
• November 28 – Cyber Monday
• November 29 – Giving Tuesday
• December 12 – Green Monday
• December 14 – Stamp and Ship Day
• December 18 – Free Shipping Day
• December 21 – First Day of Winter
• December 23 – Festivus; Gift Card Day
• December 24 – Christmas Eve; Beginning of Hanukkah
• December 25 – Boxing Day; Coupon Code Day
• January 1 – New Year’s Day

Get Ready for the Holidays!

You now know that the holidays offer great opportunity for businesses in the ecommerce industry.

You also already know which dates you should look out for. Now, you should know what to do in order to make the most out of the holidays for your online shop.

Here are a few tips from us on how you can get ready for the 2016 holidays:

1. Shoppers Are Doing Research Now so Prepare Early

Halloween is just a few days away and the terms “Halloween” and “Halloween costumes” are getting high volume of searches. Black Friday is also getting a lot of searches and it’s still a month away.

With this information, you should take an extra step to prepare.

Get your supplies ready to meet the upcoming demand. Strategically carry out your marketing campaigns. Prepare early, the holidays are coming.

2. Test your site’s ability to handle a surge of traffic

Your ecommerce site is your store. Make sure that your website is able to handle the expected traffic.

What use would having so much supply in stock if you won’t be able to sell them because your site is down? Ensure that your site would be able to function optimally.

3. Guarantee your inventory has the items as listed

Make sure that you have a decent amount of merchandise for your online shop.

If you are selling products that you get from a supplier, discuss your plans with your supplier and ensure that you agree on how you will deal with the expected demand.

You should also consider ordering high-demand products ahead of time.

If you are making your own products, start preparing now. It is best to have your products ready before things get tougher. Your last year’s sale is a good estimate for this year’s potential sales.

4. Run through your shipping service plan

Shipping is one of the biggest concerns for online shops. Evaluate your shipping performance last year and come up with a better plan this year.

Don’t make promises you cannot keep so add a day or two to the expected delivery date – it is better to be able to deliver earlier than expected than to disappoint your customers when you deliver later than promised.

Free shipping is also one of the best way to convince visitors to buy. It can also justify that delivery will be later than charged delivery.

Did you know that comScore and UPS found out 83% of the consumers are willing to wait an extra day or two for free shipping.

5. Product Packaging reflects your company

As the cliché goes, “don’t judge a book by its cover”.

This line should not be adhered to by businesses as packaging should be given much attention. Packaging is important, and serves as an easy yet effective marketing tool.

6. Your website must be accessible using mobile

Smartphones and tablets should be able to access your ecommerce site easily and comfortably.

Again, smartphones gave the most traffic last year, while tablets got the biggest ecommerce sales for Black Friday. The Lander Blog has some tips on providing a better experience for mobile customers.

7. Check out the competition

Knowing your competitors is the first step in knowing how to beat them.

The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guidelines

Check out what their deals are and make similar or better deals. Counter what they offer but make sure that you are still making profit.

Check their reviews and see where they are doing well and where they are doing poorly. Try to simulate and improve their strengths and then correct their weaknesses.

8. Dress up your page

Just as you would decorate a physical store to match the holidays, make sure that you design your website accordingly.

Try to incorporate the colors related to the holiday, or add images and gifs, but make sure that you are not taking your ecommerce site’s performance over looks.

9. Capitalize on good reviews

Use good reviews on to leverage your reputation.

As nobody’s perfect, you are bound to receive negative ones but still highlight on the positive reviews. Also ensure that you have dealt with the reasons why you got negative reviews.

10. Strategize your pop-ups

Coupon pops and exit pops, when properly placed, will do you good. Make sure to blend them well with your page and that they entice visitors to buy more. Read on Lander Blog’s testing for pop-ups here.

11. Engage in Social Media Marketing and encourage user-generated content

More and more businesses make use of social media marketing as a marketing strategy. As there are lots and lots of people on social networking sites, the chances are high for you to reach customers.

Use social media to show your products, to share reviews, to talk about promotions, and to reach out to potential customers. Studies show that user-generated content encourages sales from the younger shoppers.

User-generated content refers to images, videos, or statements from potential customers that connect to your products or your business.

Using a hashtag is the most common practice in encouraging user-generated content.

12. Come up with a genius abandoned cart email

65% of carts are said to be left abandoned.

While some believe that coming up with an abandoned cart email is irrelevant, we suggest that coming up with a brilliant email that capitalizes on the holiday spirit, or makes use of humor, is an effective strategy to have them coming back!

13. Strategize your Flash Sales

Strategically make use of flash sales so that your customers won’t need to wait for Black Friday before making a purchase.

Give them a sense of urgency to buy. When customers feel that they are letting go of a good deal, they will more likely buy immediately.

14. Offer Live Chat

Making live chat available is almost a must nowadays.

Live chat is a guarantee that you are ready to serve your customers, even just in answering their queries. You don’t need to be online for 24 hours a day.

15. Clearly state your return policy.

Ensure that you have a clearly understandable return policy. Also place it where your customers would be able to find it.

Proudly displaying your return policy is a manifestation that you are confident in your products’ quality.

What Now?

These are the Holidays ecommerce tactics that we have for you. We hope that you learned a lot with our guide.

There is, however, more to do as the holidays come nearer and nearer. Expect more guides from us to help you face the holidays head on.

For the meantime, make sure to practice what you have learned from our guide so that you will be able to prepare for the holidays in the best way.

Always remember, preparation is key – but this is true only if you are preparing right. Prepare your ecommerce business for the holidays now!

In this article, we explore 7 holiday marketing strategies to increase conversion, order value and more during the year’s most crucial sales period.

While ecommerce retailers everywhere prepare their holiday marketing strategy for the busy shopping season ahead, there are a number of innovative tactics to consider that can drive more site traffic and increase order value and conversions. This is especially critical during a tough year for the industry where every sale counts.

As you restructure your game plan for these next critical sales months, consider these 7 personalization strategies to make the most of your efforts:

Before we dive in, here are a few reminders on upcoming holidays that impact ecommerce and main areas of focus for both brand and shopper:

December Holidays: Christmas, Boxing Day, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Eve

Your customer is focused on:
Finding the perfect gift

You should focus on:
Making it easy for them to find what they need

1. Use the wisdom of the crowd by highlighting best sellers and other product recommendations

We’ve all got them – the people on your list who you love dearly, but have no idea what to buy for. Never is the ‘wisdom of crowds’ more useful than for those gift buying decisions. By showing a customer the products that are selling well, or have been identified as particularly suitable for a certain age group or gift recipient, you make the buying decision easy for them.

On mobile, these kinds of thematic browsing options should be highlighted on the front page, as this will inform a customer’s site navigating strategy. But beware of highlighting your ‘Gifts for Dad’ gift guide on an animated carousel – unlike on a desktop, where hovering over a slide will cause the carousel to pause, this isn’t possible on mobile, so customers will often accidentally click on the wrong slide and possibly abandon your site altogether.

By highlighting best sellers, or using recommendations to show items that are frequently bought together, you’re reassuring a buyer that they’re making a good decision (while possibly increasing the average order value). Including reviews with the product details is also an easy way of answering common concerns right there on the product page, and could prevent later returns (which we’ll cover in a later section).

2. Make your site search friendly

Search has been considered the preferred method of product finding on mobile, but it’s also one of the most broken elements of the average mobile shopping site. Most often, Search was the method that led shoppers to wrongly conclude that the site didn’t carry the product they were looking for.

In order to make search work for your mobile shoppers, it’s recommended that you:

• Always offer shoppers the option to search within the category they’re in
• Allow shoppers to filter the search results to category level i.e. when searching for ‘gold’ allow filtering to Jewelry rather than displaying all gold product results.
• Ensure your search function can handle misspellings and synonyms – 70% of ecommerce search implementations are unable to return the correct result unless the customer uses the exact same word as the site (‘mobile case’ versus ‘phone case’ for instance).
• Support thematic searches, such as ‘gifts for him’.
• Always suggest alternatives and suggestions in the event of no result.

3. Leverage user-generated content for stronger social validation

When a consumer has found a product that interests them, there is an expectation for multiple hi-resolution product images. This expectation becomes an absolute necessity during the holiday marketing season when competition is high and shoppers are frantically bouncing from site to site looking for the perfect product.

When adding images to your site for your products, here are a few quick tips to consider:

1. The images should be shot from multiple angles and include close-ups, so that every aspect of the product is visible.
2. Include more than three to five images on a product page to increase cart volume.
3. Adding multiple product images also helps reduce the potential for product returns, as the shopper is able to clearly analyze what they’re buying (which minimizes any unwanted surprises).
4. If you really want to master this tactic, incorporate a product video to help the shopper see the product visualize the product further.

By showing a customer the products that are selling well, or have been identified as particularly suitable for a certain age group or gift recipient, you make the buying decision easy for them.

Pro tip: User-generated photography is just one of many ways you can transform the way your products are shown to shoppers. Check out 6 of our top product recommendation examples that can be implemented across key pages of your ecommerce website.

4. Encourage shoppers to stay on your site with pre-exit holiday marketing content

When it comes to finding the perfect deal at any time of year, many shoppers can be indecisive. During the holidays when brands are competing to offer the best offers and products, the chances of a shopper landing on your site and leaving empty handed are higher than ever.

Some call it bribery, we call it incentive – but reeling your shoppers back onto your site with a compelling offer can mean the difference between converting them into customers and losing them to your competitors.

Enter: the pre-exit pop-up.

A once frowned-upon tactic to increase conversion has become one of the top way to keep consumers engaged with your brand. Through the use of behavioral targeting, you can keep indecisive shoppers onsite with a personalized exit pop-up based on each individual shopper’s interests and browsing history.

For example, a new visitor can be offered a pop-up containing a special discount for first-time shoppers, which helps build a positive experience from the start. You can also take this chance to collect their email address to send that discount and boost your email database in the process.

A returning visitor might see products they’ve previously browsed to encourage a purchase.

A visitor who is about to leave your site can be enticed with the products they’ve either left in their cart (if any) or with products they’ve already viewed.

5. Clearly display your product discounts to increase order value and conversion rate

It goes without saying that every part of your website should display discounted items and that these discounts should be pushed to the forefront – but some retailers struggle with finding an ideal way to display them without impacting other product sales.

One way to beef up your holiday sales – especially in your Black Friday strategy when shoppers tend to search for the best deals – is to make discounts as clearly visible as possible. Amend your styling to include the products original price, crossed-out, or even show the exact percentage that would be saved. A change as subtle as this can hugely impact order value and drive the discount home.

6. Maximize the rise in email marketing during the holiday season

42% of buyers prefer to receive emails with personalized content, and it’s these emails that can boast an impressive average Click Through Rate (CTR) of 24% and a conversion rate of 6%. If a customer has bought or even just visited your store before, you can use Nosto’s Personalized Widgets, which allow you to automate the personalization of each email on a 1:1 basis.

You can see below how handbag retailer, meli melo, highlights both popular gifts and previously browsed products, maximizing the chance of the shopper finding something that appeals to them. During the holiday period you can combine this approach with a discount code or further sale promotion, to really increase conversions.

The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guide 2020

The cart abandonment email

Cart abandonment emails are a great way of counteracting the sky high abandoned cart rates typical at this time of year, and are absolutely GDPR compliant. Using an exit-intent pop-up, as Vulpine does, is the perfect way to capture email addresses and prompt shoppers to go back to items by emailing them directly to them. This solves several problems: it helps shoppers keep track of their items when they browse on different devices (61% of people browse on their mobile then complete their purchase on their desktop), it allows people to email their wishlist to their friends and family, and of course, it simply reminds shoppers of items they’ve left behind.

Tip: You can set up a ‘We miss you’ email campaign using Nosto in just a few clicks!

Your holiday email marketing checklist

• Match your sale type with your customer demographic
• Optimize your email marketing campaign through personalization
• Activate an email collection mechanism on your site
• Ensure your emails render correctly on mobile devices

Extra holiday hints

The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guide Templates

• If you’re hosting a sale, don’t be tempted to greet your customers with your more profitable items first. They know what they’re there for, so clearly signpost your sale from the front page with a big splash.
• Delight longstanding VIP customers (according to high email engagement, lifetime value, frequency of purchase or average order value) by giving them something extra, such as early sales access or an additional discount.
• Automate as much as you can now, for a low-stress holiday
  period!

Finally, and unrelated but still VERY important side note if your business is based in the EU: Check out our blog that covers how to make sure your email marketing is GDPR compliant. This should put your mind at rest that it’s more than possible to be both compliant and effective this holiday season.

7. Managing (and leveraging) product returns after the holidays

Realistically, your business will probably be holding a January sale in the first month of the new year, to clear out old stock and make space for new inventory. To keep the momentum going, it’s importance to create a great customer experience and the opportunity to create long-term fans out of those people who bought from you last year. However, one dreaded reality for ecommerce retailers still lingers: product returns.

The days of faking a grateful smile on the receipt of an unwanted gift appear to be behind us. Delivery company UPS has gone as far as christening the 5th of January National Returns Day, with shoppers returning 1.3 million packages with UPS alone on this day, and more than 5.8 million packages during the first full week of January.

If this sounds like bad news, it doesn’t have to be….

They also found that 45% of people made an additional purchase when making a return online. In some cases, this could even be the first contact they’ve had with your store – so this is a first impression that counts. A bad returns process won’t stop someone making the return, but it will stop them shopping with you again.

How do you make that positive first impression? Online shoppers reported that free returns shipping (60%), a hassle-free policy (51%) and easy to print returns labels (44%) as the three most important factors in a good returns experience.

Increasing Lifetime Value

You might be tempted to think that if someone is buying a gift, they might not be your target market for the rest of the year, since the purchase wasn’t based on their own likes and interests. But don’t be too hasty. An RJMetrics study found that the average ecommerce business acquires 23% of its new customers during the holiday period (the average two month period would normally see 17% of the year’s new customers). While these customers did have a 13% lower lifetime value (CLV), this isn’t too harmful, given the significant increase in overall customer acquisition.

There’s plenty of data around the fact that re-engaging oldprospects is more cost effective than going after new customers(the much quoted ecommerce stat is that it costs 5x more attractinga new customer than keeping an existing one), and yet 44% ofbusinesses10 focus on acquisition rather than retention. Creating apositive customer experience via things like returns is one strategy,but re-engaging those for whom you’ve dropped off their radarrequires something more proactive.

‘We Miss You’ emails

This is where the email portion of your holiday marketing strategy comes back into play. By using strategies such as sending an email showing other gifts within a few days of the initial purchase you may well prompt a second purchase. Another 42% made their second purchase during the following 10 months – reminding the customer about your store is absolutely worth it, whatever the time of year.

The overall lesson? Holiday shoppers are rarely holiday-only shoppers – it’s essential to get back in touch with your first time customers in January (if not before!).

The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guide Template

Kick off your holiday marketing strategy by preparing for the Black Friday rush

With the Black Friday shopping season just around the corner, now is the time to start kicking your holiday marketing strategy into high gear. We’ve kicked off a special mid-year roundup of ecommerce marketing strategies to unveil exclusive tips and tricks for onsite optimization. With these tips, retailers can drive higher traffic, conversion, order value and more to maximize performance in a highly competitive sales period.