Are You Ready For The Upcoming Festive season?

We all know this year is totally different from any other year. It is the absolute time to ensure that your business is ready for the upcoming festive season. There are few good ideas that can help you to uplift your traffic and sales on your website and surge all the e-commerce activities. This year is announced as a global pandemic, so the shopping in the 2020 festive season will be a little unpredictable but viewing the statistics, there is definitely a hike in online shopping.

1. To Identify The Key Challenges During The Festive Season

With every day passing, the festive season is coming near, you should be ready with the solutions to every challenge that is possible to appear. Making a good strategy and aligning it to your marketing and promotions has a high rate of rising in conversion and sales. Some of the bitter challenges that are identified to break down the sales and creating a negative customer experience in every festive season are:

• Increased Web Traffic
• Last-minute Promotions
• High Delivery Time
• Increased RTO percentage
• Maintaining Customer Loyalty

The best way to tackle these is to plan your festive promotions well in advance to receive a charming increase in sales. As last-minute promotions are neither ideal nor they give a good response. On-time delivery of the order decreases RTO percentage and will increase the loyalty of the customer towards your brand. Dive-in to the checklists to kick out the key challenges coming your way, this festive season.

2. Ensure Customers Will Have The Best User Experience 

(i) Evaluate your 3rd party Integrations:

All your 3rd party integrations should be up-to-date. Test them and ensure that they are able to handle all the jam. Ensure that there are no last minute changes or add-ons on the application that can possibly take away the flow and slow down your site.

(ii) Check Your Site Speed:

If your website page takes a longer time to load, the chances of bounce rate becomes high. The average page load time is 3 seconds, so you should keep a regular check on your website page load time. You can keep a regular check on the factors that can decrease the site speed such as image size, redirects, plug-ins, etc. 

(iii) Personalized Shopping Experience: 

Living in a world full of technology, customer desire for personalized experience for online shopping. You can use your website design to leave a lasting impact on your customers. You can utilize your customer data to specify and customize the user experience for your customers based on their most recent searches, items in the shopping cart, shopping history. The personalized shopping experience can boost your sales in the festive season and help to raise the conversion rate.

(iv) Enable Guest Check-out/Optimize Check-out Page:

According to experts check-out optimization can increase the conversions by 35.26% and reduce the chances of cart abandonment. Customers should always experience a seamless check-out by only one check-out page which offers all the possible payment options. The customers should trust the merchant from whom they are purchasing the products. New customers are as important as the regular ones, most of them don’t feel comfortable to save their details on their first visit and moreover, want the check-out process to be easy.

(v) Enable Cart Abandonment Notifications:

It is one of the possibilities that customers can leave your website with their shopping cart full of items, due for any reason. In these cases, you can send your customers a push notification as a reminder for the products they have left in their shopping cart. The push notifications are done with the motive to convince the customer to make a purchase and have a successful conversion rate.

3. Automate Your E-Commerce Back Office

Automating the E-Commerce back office workflow with the vastly developed technology is a great assistance for all the e-commerce merchants. It will share your load of burden in an easy and efficient way. It will help you streamline all the back office operations without any delay or error.

Does your brand take care of these automation processes to streamline the complex task?

(i) Centralized Fulfillment Automation:

Order fulfillment automation will assist you to ship the orders faster with reduced manual errors. All your sales channels and carrier partners can be integrated on one platform to manage your orders just with a few clicks. You can hand-over the order to the desired carrier partner and also look for which of the orders are in-progress, picked-up for delivery, packed, or shipped. Through a good fulfillment automated software in place, you can assign your bulk orders to the carrier partner automatically.

(ii) Fraud Detection:

The system will assist you to detect the potential fraud customers based on their incomplete details (wrong phone number or ZIP code), their previous behavior of not receiving the order, their purchase history, etc. to decrease your possible fake orders.

(iii) Non Delivery Order Follow-ups:

NDR automated process reduces your time and effort for processing undelivered orders. You can handle your undelivered orders on a multi-functional dashboard which will assist you to make follow-ups with your customers for their availability to receive their order and their delivery re-attempts.

(iv) Reverse Pick-up Automation:

The reverse pick-up automation system will help you to create return and exchange requests on a single panel where you can automatically generate the reverse pick-ups and ease down the process of return management.

4. Create Strategic Festive Marketing and Promotions

It is good to create a marketing strategy according to the holiday or festive season that will help you to raise your customers and the rate of sales. Also, through specific marketing, you can create a zest and eagerness for festivals among your customers. You can consider gift cards, special offers, and discounts, free shipping, and wrapping, etc.

(i) Plan For The Festive Contest and Giveaways:

You can create and organize a different festive contest and giveaways to increase your customer engagement. You can plan for these contests on your website and your social media handles. It can help you to promote your products for their festive sales and gain good customer engagement as well.

(ii) Consider Free Shipping and Wrapping:

Many of the online sellers are offering free shipping so it has become a tight competition to increase your sales and conversions. Free shipping and gift-wrapping for the festive season would help you a lot to turn the table around and escalate your sales.  

(iii) Have Rewards and Loyalty Program in Place:

Planning for some brand customized rewards and loyalty programs for your customers would help for a great conversion rate in the festive season. You can encourage a lot of customers to join your program that will definitely add great value to your brand.

(iv) Integrate With Web Push Notification Services:

You can integrate your website with web push notification services that will be sent to your regular and loyal customers as a reminder or update. These push notifications can keep your customers up-to-date with your newly launched products, current offers, sale relevant to the coming holiday season, etc. The engagement will boost up the conversion rate and sales for the festive season.

(v) Reach Your Customer Through Festive e-Mails:

You can reach your customers with festive emails as well, describing the specified holiday, discounts, particular offers so that the customers can purchase the products before the festive campaign ends. Also, a reminder for their abandoned cart can be given through mail to uplift your sales.

5. Optimize The Post-Purchase Experience

It takes a great effort to keep the existing customers satisfied and happy, a lot more than to obtain a new customer. Post-purchase activities and attention towards customers helps to bind them loyal and trustworthy.  

(i) Use Of Branded Tracking Page That Cross-Sells:

The order tracking page is the one that the customer regularly visits to check where his/her order is. It creates a great impact on the customers if they see lots of logos and links on that tracking page (carrier’s order tracking page) along with the brand logo of the seller. The customers will acknowledge and appreciate if they notice the features of your brand first (logo & promotional links), it will create a lasting impact on them.

(ii) Have a Return Management System in Place:

A good return management system is a healthy way to hold your customers. The customers will feel secure and comfortable with the genuine return and exchange management system in place for the product’s return and refund. The automated solution should direct them to simply return their order by mentioning the required details such as Order ID, reason for return, etc. without any calling or direct communication. This has the least chances of customers getting irritated and hence increase their loyalty towards your brand.  

(iii) Have Rewards and Loyalty Program in Place:

Planning for some brand customized rewards and loyalty programs for your customers would help for a great conversion rate in the festive season. You can encourage a lot of customers to join your program that will definitely add great value to your brand.

(iv) Incorporate Post-Purchase Notifications (SMS, e-mail, WhatsApp):

Post-purchase notifications are necessary for you to build the trust of your customers. Through notifications, they will feel connected with their order at every stage of the shipment. These notifications can be sent either via SMS, E-mail, or WhatsApp.

6. Take Care of Your Orders Before It Is RTO

The non-delivery of the orders is a huge problem faced during the festive season. This can be either because the customer doesn’t want the order now (purpose already fulfilled, maybe because of late delivery), or details of the customer was not correct (fraud customer), or any other reason. But you will have to bear the loss of RTO. So, you should be careful enough to detect the possible scenarios and measures to prevent them.  

(i) Reach Customers in Case of Any Delivery Problems:

To reduce the RTO percentage in the case of customers’ unavailability, you can check in advance for their availability to receive the order by calling them. This will not only reduce the RTO but the chances of damage to the parcel on repeated shipping.

(ii) Confirm COD or Fraud Order:

You can opt for IVR calling as the first step after the COD order is received to verify if the order is genuine or not. In case of fraud confirmed through calling or the customers’ details (incomplete details such as different digit phone numbers or ZIP code), you can cancel the order then and there. It will reduce the maximum of the RTOs.  

(iii) Use Analytics To Check Courier Performance:

In case the shipment was an RTO because it was delivered late (or after the occasion) and customers’ purpose was already fulfilled. You can use the analytics to check the performance of your carriers and take the decision accordingly for the upcoming festive season, especially.

7. Measure Customer Satisfaction 

It is always difficult to evaluate the happiness of your customer. But the solution for measuring customer satisfaction with precision is the NPS (Net Promoter Score) Tool. You can ask for your customers’ feedback on a scale of 1 to 10, on likely they would recommend your product or service to their friends. More the score will indicate your positive performance.  

All Set To Welcome The Festive Season

Make sure all the things are set in advance, no last hour hustle this time. Set up email campaigns, be ready with promotions, a good customer loyalty program, sorted website content to handle the traffic, and much more. We have tried to cover the important factors required from the checklist for an e-commerce business to be festive ready. Hope this helps you to increase your sales and maintain the zest of the festive season