.svg){kind=small}
In the world of e-commerce, it’s the most wonderful time of the year… Q4. Whether you’re a well-established business or a small start-up, the fourth quarter can make or break the sales success of the entire year. And with Black Friday kicking off the spending frenzy on the 29th November, it’s time to re-evaluate your digital strategy to ensure you’re prepared and ready to thrive this holiday season.
In our latest Kelkoo blog post, we’ll be sharing some crucial tips to ensure your e-commerce store smooth sailing through the sales period.
Slow speed slows conversion
If you haven’t started your planning for Black Friday, you should be making it your top priority.
Speed is key when it comes to evaluating the influx of customers your website will be receiving over the holiday season. Ensure your shopping and checkout pages are fully optimised for mobile and running at full speed; Black Friday shoppers are temperamental and slow page speeds could lead to cart abandonment or worse, shopping with a competitor. So, what’s the quickest way to reduce your sites load time in preparation for the busy period? Enabling compression or using an external compression tool is the easiest way to ensure your site is running smoothly, for those operating in CSS and HTML formats this tool eliminates white space and repeated code throughout the sites body, the smaller the files, the faster the load time.
It’s all about the discounts
For Black Friday and Cyber Monday customers, it’s all about the offers and the majority of retailers over this season will be offering promotions and discounts so you need to stand out from your competition. During this weekend, the bigger the discount, the better and if you’re in a position to offer added incentives such as a free gift with every purchase this will really help you stand out from your competition. Get creative and think about extra ways to entice an extra purchase such as creating Black Friday bundle offers or recommending personalised products at the checkout and on product pages.
Be sure to display your discounts clearly on your homepage, an effective technique to put into play over Cyber Weekend is to add a countdown banner to your site to ignite your consumers fear of missing out, building urgency and excitement amongst your shoppers.
The fight for attention
With the increase in shoppers, follows an increase in traffic so, it’s crucial to put a focus on SEO before Cyber Weekend. Ensuring your products are search engine optimized and easily discoverable on your website will play a big part in your sales this season. We recommend keyword testing campaigns to determine which search terms are most effective for your search rankings. It’s also beneficial to take a look at any promotional campaigns you were running this time last year to analyse the data and find out which areas you had success in last year and where you could alter your campaigns this year.
Over this holidays shopping season be prepared for an increase in competition across auction based paid channels with more bidders pushing up the cost of ad space and CPC’s. Over this period, it’s important to be cautious and re-evaluate your search terms, as PPC becomes more vulnerable, the challenge of fighting for visibility and attention increases. Kelkoo Group has 20 years’ experience in ecommerce, digital advertising and consumer analytics. We can support your entire campaign, from set up through to tracking sales and conversion data to help you get the results your online store needs to succeed. Feel free to get in touch to find out more about how our product portfolio can drive quality traffic to your online store and improve your online presence.
It’s easy to see Black Friday as a bandwagon upon which you need to jump, it’s equally as easy to be a reluctant participant to the commercial pressures that come with the start of Q4. But, as long as you set up your campaigns with a clear and effective strategy and take note of our techniques your business can thrive over this intense trading period.