According to data from Shopify, online shops generate nearly 40% of their yearly revenue during the holiday season between October and December. So, how can you handle e-commerce seasonality and turn holiday buyers into long-term customers? It’s important to understand seasonal retail trends and use them to your advantage. Read on for nine ways to combat the seasonality of e-commerce and drive sales throughout the year.
Plan for E-commerce Seasonality
If you can’t beat them, join them! E-commerce seasonality doesn’t have to spell trouble for your business throughout the rest of the year. In fact, with the right planning, you can use the seasonality in sales to your advantage.
1. Make a plan for important holidays
When most shopping throughout the year falls in the final quarter, it’s important to prepare your online shop for the holiday season well ahead of time. Holidays like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and even Valentine’s Day are big for businesses selling goods and services. Depending on the localization of your customer base, you may also want to focus on holidays like Boxing Day and Chinese New Year, too. Make a list of the most important holidays for your customer base (don’t forget about potential customers, too!) at the beginning of each year and plan out an e-commerce marketing strategy for your most important global holidays.
2. Make a plan for business-specific holidays
Once you have the main holidays covered, you may want to consider quirky, oddball holidays as well. Are you an online pet store or a creator making customer pet portraits? Consider a campaign during National Pet Day or World Animal Day. Perhaps your online shop is touting children’s toys, clothing, and accessories. Get creative with a campaign during lesser-known holidays like Son’s Day or International Daughter’s Day.
Prioritize customer communication
With the rise of social commerce and mobile shopping, the way brands speak to customers is more important than ever. Your customers want to feel important to you, receive superior customer support, and get questions answered quickly. Great customer communication aids in long-term customer retention and off-season sales.
3. Collate customer communication across channels
Social media managers know that utilizing social media trends and creating viral videos is one of the best ways to bring attention to your brand without upfront ad costs. However, interacting with customers via these channels can be cumbersome. Not to mention, managing customer questions from an array of inboxes is tedious work and requires daily focused attention. What if there was an easier way?
Zimply is a tool that helps shop owners and customer support teams respond to questions from various channels in one easy-to-navigate place. Having the right tool to manage requests during peak season helps build customer retention. Good customer communication makes for a superior customer experience which helps significantly in the off-season.
With Zimply, you’ll find Instagram direct messages, Facebook Messenger queries, and email reviews all in one place for easier navigation and quicker response times. Join the Zimply waitlist today to get started. Great customer communication drives customer retention during the slow season. You’ll want to make sure your store is prepared.
4. Make use of live chat
Live chat is a great way to let customers know you’re there should they need assistance at any point during the sale process. If a customer has a question about an item in your store, they may hesitate to buy without having that question answered. If your site offers live support, customers have a resource for answering those pre-purchase questions quickly. Live support is also a great way to capture user email addresses and acquire customer information in hopes of building a customer profile.
5. Respond quickly
If you’re a smaller shop without the capacity for live chat, don’t fret, but don’t take too long to respond, either. In today’s fast-paced world, answering customer queries quickly can make all the difference for customers looking to purchase from your shop. In every season, make sure customer queries are promptly handled with help from Zimply.
Utilize customer profiles
How much first-party cookie data do you have on your customer base? Likely, there are some helpful nuggets of wisdom hiding within that data. Why not use it to your advantage?
6. Pay attention to geography and season
Use geographic segmentation to your advantage, not your detriment. Geographic segmentation is the targeting of customers based on their location. Its principles argue that customers in similar locations tend to have similar needs and marketers can help customers satisfy those needs based on location and season.
Perhaps you have an online shop with outdoor clothing for all seasons. You’ll want to cater your on and off-season marketing messages to intuit your customers’ needs. Customers residing in sunny Southern Spain or Southern California may not need encouragement to purchase that faux fur-lined winter coat. Similarly, customers gearing up for a Canadian winter may not appreciate ads for the latest line of swimwear in the middle of January.
7. Use UTM tagging
UTM tagging is a goldmine for marketers looking to gain insight into customer behaviors and habits and gain valuable data for future campaigns. In its simplest form, UTM tagging allows marketers to see which marketing tactics work for specific customers. For example, a clothing brand may send out different messaging and product recommendations for men versus women on Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day.
Offer Incentives
8. Consider a customer loyalty program
A program designed specifically for your most loyal customers is a great way to make shoppers feel like they’re a part of a family. Not only will a customer loyalty program make customers feel special, but it will also encourage them to shop during slower seasons, too. Send marketing messages to your most loyal base of customers during the off-season to drive slow-season sales.
9. Offer discounts for returning customers
Customers who have purchased before have a 60 to 70% chance of making a repeat purchase. Not only that, those who have visited your site before without making a purchase, have a 54% chance of purchasing on their repeat visit. Entice off-season shopping by offering discounts to customers who have purchased or interacted with your site in the past.
E-commerce seasonality doesn’t have to be a pain. In fact, marketers can use the seasonality in sales to their advantage by planning for holidays well in advance and prioritizing customer communication throughout the year. During the off-season, make a plan to offer incentives like discounts or a customer loyalty program and use customer profiles to your advantage.
Customer communication is arguably one of the most important drivers of customer retention and loyalty. With Zimply you’ll be able to see all of your customer communication across platforms in one place and have the chance to respond promptly. Having the right tool to manage customer communication during peak season greatly increases customer retention and encourages customers to make return purchases during the off-season, too. Join the waitlist today and you’ll be communicating with your customers like a pro in no time!