The e-commerce agency Soledis, with its experience of 350 active customers in all sectors of activity, shares its top tips for making the most of the last quarter of the year: a key period for e-commerce.
From September to December, boost your online sales!
The last quarter of the year is crucial for e-tailers, offering many opportunities to maximize revenues. In September, consumers resume their shopping habits after the summer vacations. October and November follow with major commercial events such as French Days, a period of promotions comparable to Black Friday, which encourages consumers to spend more. Visit Black Friday itself, as well as the Cyber Monday, are key times for e-tailers to clear their stocks and attract new customers with attractive offers. Finally, December, with Christmas holidaysis the highlight of the season. Christmas gift buying is a big boost for e-commerce sites.
E-tailers therefore need to prepare their inventories, optimize their sites for fast, secure browsing, and launch multi-channel marketing campaigns to attract and retain customers. By taking advantage of these different strategic periods, e-tailers can not only increase sales, but also strengthen their brand image and customer relations, laying a solid foundation for the following year. We take a closer look at all this with advice from the experts at e-commerce agency Soledis.
1 - Plan your campaigns and marketing automation strategy in advance
Start planning your back-to-school marketing strategy this summer. Develop well thought-out promotional campaigns and inform your customers of your offers in advance. Early communication is essential to capture the attention and interest of your customers.
On the same subject, properly orchestrating these email marketing campaigns is central to promoting your back-to-school offers. Segment your subscriber lists to send the right message, at the right time, on the right channel. Send teasers before the start of the school year, personalize your emails as much as possible and track the performance of your campaigns. These actions reinforce engagement and increase sales. At Soledis, we are used to working with Klaviyo or even ShopiMind which also use AI to enrich your product sheets or shopping cart pages.
2 - Guarantee SEO optimization of your event campaigns
SEO is generally the first lever of traffic generation on a website! Highlight your back-to-school offers on your home page and create dedicated landing pages. Keep the same URL year after year to maximize your SEO. Our SEO experts can help you define your semantic cocoons, generate content and monitor your SEO performance on Looker Studio.
A little tip: for French Days, don't forget to register on the website joinfrenchdays.com to be able to mention this event on your site and thus move up on this keyword!
3 - Get a head start on your Ads campaigns
Launch your Google Ads campaigns as early as July if September is a business opportunity for you. Launching your campaigns two months in advance allows you to segment your audiences and use remarketing to remind visitors of your offers. Remember to target keywords with high purchase intent and create specific campaigns for your flagship products. Did you know that the ecommerce agency Soledis has a team of 6 experts in remarketing? webmarketing with certification Google partner first ? This certification is awarded to only 3% of agencies to underline their mastery of Google services. Don't hesitate to Contact us !
4 - Choose the countdown timer: an essential widget to encourage purchases!
To play the event card for Black Friday or French Days, add a countdown timer to your site to create a sense of urgency and scarcity. Display it on product pages, categories, dedicated pop-ups, the home page, banners, emails and social networks. Soledis e-commerce agency can help you integrate this type of module effectively.
5 - Improve the customer experience with a helpdesk
Today, the automation of low value-added tasks is an indispensable expectation for merchants. Whether it's standardizing internal processes for assigning incoming requests, or automatically replying to incoming messages from all your communication channels. The unified commerce experience, in-store or online, counts too. Connect your communication channels to your help desk and automate responses to all incoming messages, regardless of the channel chosen. The result: substantial gains in customer satisfaction and internal productivity. In a period of peak activity such as the end of the year, it's essential to be well equipped to respond to your customers' numerous requests while streamlining internal processes. This not only avoids damaging your brand image, but actually enhances it! What's more, the right use of AI can enable you to go even further and enrich that customer experience. On this subject, we recommend Crisp or Gorgias.
6 - Boost conversion and trust with customer reviews
Having customer reviews of your store and/or products is a powerful lever for boosting conversion, confidence and customer satisfaction. TrustedShop or Skeepers' verified reviews are reliable solutions for meeting these objectives.
Beyond the impact on conversion, collecting reviews is an important pillar for improving certain criteria that Google uses to assess the reliability of your site and content, in order to improve rankings.
7 - Boost up-selling and cross-selling with relevant product recommendations
That's right, ShopiMindIn addition to managing your e-mail marketing, this new product allows you to enrich your site by highlighting products selected by AI based on the user's purchase or visit history. Take a look at our webinar with ShopiMind on Marketing Automation ! Similarly, offering relevant search suggestions is crucial to boosting conversion on your products. To enrich your internal search engine, we recommend Doofinderan intelligent search engine with which we also made a webinar !
8 - Play up proximity and complicity on social networks
Social networks are obviously a must for directly engaging your customers and creating enthusiasm around your products and end-of-year promotions. The back-to-school period and Christmas are rich worlds in which to create creative campaigns to boost your brand's goodwill and drive direct traffic to your online store! But be careful not to overdo the promotions, to maintain a positive brand image.
BONUS: as a 360 agency, our vision of e-commerce isn't limited to webmarketing! Here are our latest 4 tips on technical aspects to take optimization even further
Don't work for nothing: all these actions are pointless if your site is too slow!
Consumers are impatient and quickly abandon a slow site. Make sure your site is fast and fluid: check page loading speed, optimize images and simplify the checkout process. A positive user experience is crucial to converting visitors into buyers. It's a good idea to start working on this early, so you'll have time to call in the right e-commerce agency with technical skills (like Soledis) if you can't improve your performance on your own.
Prepare your servers for peak activity
If you already know that back-to-school, black Friday or Christmas are very busy times for you, prepare your infrastructure for a traffic spike. Make sure your servers can handle an influx of visitors, and make sure you have enough bandwidth. By working with a technical e-commerce agency and a dedicated hosting like Soledis, you can benefit from scalability adapted to these load peaks.
Prepare your inventory and logistics processes
Likewise, make sure your stocks are sufficient to meet the increase in orders. To this end, Soledis offers you connect your e-commerce site to your ERP or POS software. As a result, your inventories are updated in real time on all your management tools, or on the one you designate as the data master. In addition, to optimize your logistics processes and avoid putting yourself at risk during peaks in activity, don't hesitate to choose one of our partners ShippingBo or BoostMyShop.
Offer your customers a fluid, responsive shopping experience (UX design)
A responsive site is essential, especially with the increase in mobile purchases. And even on the desktop, the buying tunnel needs to be optimized and navigation fluid at every stage of the purchase. One of the key stages is the order summary, for example: reduce cart abandonment rates by pointing out the back-to-school discounts on offer. Clearly display the discounts next to the payment form to reinforce customer confidence and encourage them to finalize their purchases. The end of the year is a key period for impulse buying, so make sure your customers' purchasing decisions don't take too long!
Conclusion
Back-to-school in September, French Days, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas are strategic periods for all e-tailers. By planning ahead and implementing the strategies described above, you can maximize your sales and build customer loyalty. The Soledis ecommerce agency, with its technical and webmarketing expertise, can help you optimize your site and marketing campaigns, guaranteeing a successful back-to-school season.
