The holidays are coming, and they are opportunities for e-commerce small businesses to deliver more value to their customers. Also, it is an opportunity to draw as much traffic as possible to your e-commerce websites. In addition, you can convert this traffic to customers while they are on your website. In this article, we will share some tips on how to optimize your e-commerce business for the holidays.
Leverage Email Automation
Even in 2021, email remains one of the most effective marketing tools available to businesses. In today’s crowded marketing space, the email statistics are staggering.
Clearly, email is a powerful tool for businesses of all types and sizes — including e-commerce small businesses.
Email marketing comes in a variety of forms. You can use email marketing to nurture new customer and also remind shoppers about abandoned cart. In addition, emails can be used to let customers know about promotions and limited-time offers, like those you might have around the holidays.
The downside of email is that it can take a lot of work. Preparing the emails, maintaining your contact list, and determining which customers are in which stage of your sales funnel can be a tremendous amount of work. Email marketing tools can take a lot of that pressure off. These tools offer a range of features to help businesses utilize email more effectively and to automate as much of the process as possible.
Use AI-powered Personalization to Optimize the Customer Experience
The customer experience (CX) on your website can be the difference between a satisfied customer and a tick on your bounce rate. As you prepare for the holiday surge, take some time to consider the customer experience on your website and any other storefronts you have.
For an e-commerce store, CX starts and ends with your online shopping experience. Physical, brick-and-mortar stores give owners the opportunity to help their customers find items and experience the element of human interaction. These interactions and experiences can be missing with an e-commerce store. This might leave the shopping experience feeling cold.
Shop owners that can provide a higher level of customer experience can give themselves a powerful advantage over their competitors.
Fortunately, there are tools available that can help you create a better experience for your customers. The interesting thing is that you don’t need any coding knowledge.
Dialogue is one such tool. It uses AI and natural language processing to track and analyze customer behavior in real time. It then takes that data and uses it to automatically provide personalized recommendations to your customers. This enables you to not only provide your shoppers with an improved experience but also offers upsell opportunities that you might not otherwise get.
Dialogue helps e-commerce store owners remove friction and give customers a truly personalized shopping experience. Additionally, it works with all the major e-commerce platforms — including WooCommerce, Magento, and BigCommerce — and offers plug-and-play integration with a Shopify extension.
Optimize Sales Pages for Conversion Rates
Getting the right emails to the right customers at the right time is important. This also applies to providing an excellent customer experience. However, if the shoppers come to your e-commerce store and leave empty-handed, you may need to work on your conversion optimization.
Any time a visitor takes an action on your website: whether that’s making a purchase, subscribing to emails, or anything else that moves them along your sales funnel, that is a conversion. The conversation rate, then, is the percentage of overall site visitors that convert. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of adjusting your site to maximize the conversion rate.
CRO can be tough. That is where a tool like Unbounce can help. Unbounce originally started as a landing page builder that helped small businesses build landing and sales pages designed to convert. Unbounce has features specifically for e-commerce stores, like email capture forms, customizable Buy Now buttons, and more.
Finally
Whether your e-commerce brand is in the early stages, or you have been around for years, the holiday season is an exciting and challenging time. Competition is fiercer than ever, but there are also more opportunities for you to try new things.
By adding automated email marketing, focusing on the customer experience, and optimizing for conversion rate, you can give your store major advantages over the competition. Any one of these would be huge, but all three together can help ensure you have your best holiday season yet.
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