The holiday season is quickly approaching—is your business adequately prepared? Chances are, your buyers are already revving up for the season, sharing wish lists with friends and families while adding items to virtual shopping carts months in advance. As inarguably one of the busiest times of the year for retailers and eCommerce businesses, it’s crucial that you have the right strategies in place to maximize your sales and provide a seamless shopping experience for repeat and new customers alike.
Prepping for the massive sales that come with Black Friday and Christmas shopping means more than ensuring you have enough inventory and the correct number of discounts to entice buyers. Not sure what else is necessary for maximum success? Regardless of what products you’re selling, here’s a guide your company will want to incorporate into your holiday readiness strategy for 2022 today.
Why preparing your data & business strategy for Black Friday matters
Everyone loves a good deal—which should come as no surprise in a day and age where budgeting and getting the most value out of every dollar counts. This holiday season, the uncertainty of the economy means even more people are waiting out their shopping in the hopes of scoring price cuts and discounts on their favorite goods. Since you can anticipate nearly 1 in every 3 Americans – a total of approximately 108 million people—to engage in some sort of Black Friday shopping,1 now’s the time to make sure your business is prepared.
Get ahead of the sore in online traffic by prepping your data with improved software and strategies today. Why start now? Data lays the foundation for your decision-making as a business, whether this means segmenting your audience, forecasting consumer behavior, or identifying the right way to approach enhancing the customer experience. So don’t miss out on being underprepared for the busiest time of year for eCommerce and retail businesses—begin by signing up for data validation software that will give you the confidence to execute the proper holiday readiness strategies today.
4 quick tips to prepare your business for holiday shoppers
The holidays seem to approach all too quickly, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to map out your retail or eCommerce business plan. Below, we’ll outline four quick tips that will help prepare your business for the influx of online sales.
1. Simplify the checkout process
There’s a reason we put simplifying the checkout process at the top of the list. Even if you sell the world’s best product, a faulty checkout process may lead users to abandon your site prematurely. Don’t let something as simple as simplifying the point-of-sale keep your business back from maximizing sales and curating happy customers. So how do you do it?
Creating a simple checkout experience means ensuring the following:
- Pricing transparency: present users with transparent total costs at checkout
- One-click checkout: reduce the number of clicks and pages users need to go through to submit their transaction
- Offer numerous payment options: often, users may need to have their credit card on hand. Adding additional options, such as PayPal and Apple Pay, allows for a more straightforward shopping experience
Another great tip is to leverage real-time verification solutions, such as real-time address verification, into your forms to reduce the number of keystrokes required from the user. This allows for a simplified checkout process.
Once integrated into your system, address verification will provide the user with a drop-down selection of addresses to select from as they begin to type their address. Not only will this reduce data entry time, but it will ensure proper spelling and formatting of the address, too.
2. Ensure accurate contact data at the point of entry
Nothing ruins the rush of dopamine users get from online shopping quite like a misdelivered package. While lost packages are a cost of doing business, there is one simple way to drastically increase the probability of your shoppers’ goods ending up in the right hands: address validation.
On Black Friday, everyone is in a hurry to quickly complete their virtual checkouts to commence their online shopping quickly. Unfortunately, fast fingers can lead to typos in addresses, streets, states, zip codes, and more. Fortunately, this is where address verification software comes into play.
In today’s age, users anticipate a seamless online shopping experience where hiccups in the checkout process or delivery are nonexistent.
- Optimize your mobile experience
While your website may seem flawless on desktop, have you recently looked inside at how well your pages appear from a mobile standpoint? If not, you’ll want to take a second glance—especially since a whopping 74% of online traffic last Black Friday season came from mobile users alone.2
As a great starting point, a mobile-friendly website will typically include the following:
- Quick page speed: assess whether your page speed is within the ideal limits since even a second delay can lead to a drop in users
- Responsive design: does your website adapt to various devices and, in effect, screen sizes?
- Simplified forms: incorporate data verification into your forms while ensuring the proper use of checkboxes and drop-downs to simplify the mobile experience
Since the mobile experience has become synonymous with the digital experience, it’s crucial to put the proper measures in place to help increase digital traffic and perfect the online shopping experience to prepare your business for success—even once the holidays are done.
4. Perform testing on form pages
Data should be at the heart of every decision your business makes. Once you have all the technical measures in place and know that you can accurately collect the correct consumer information at checkout with data validation, then it’s time to turn your attention to the user experience and identify which elements help drive complete transactions.
Consider using A/B testing on checkout pages ahead of the holiday season to explore potential revisions on your site. For example, do certain color schemes affect the consumer? Can you tweak the language to be more direct? Are there any buttons or links you can insert on pages to simplify checkout? Testing these elements now will help prepare your business effectively for the influx of shoppers in the upcoming months.
Need help getting started on your holiday readiness plan? We’re here to help! Contact our team to learn more about our data validation software and solutions, explore pricing options, or activate a free trial.
Sources:
The Latest Black Friday And Cyber Monday Statistics For 2022. Bloggingwizard. https://bloggingwizard.com/black-friday-cyber-monday-statistics/1
11 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Online Retail Stats. SaleCycle. https://www.salecycle.com/blog/featured-en-us/11-black-friday-and-cyber-monday-online-retail-stats/2
