Traditionally, Black Friday has marked the start of the holiday shopping season. Enticed with sales, holiday shoppers hit the stores, websites, and apps looking for great deals. On Black Friday alone, shoppers spend billions in-store and online. Recently, more and more shoppers are choosing to shop online, especially on their smartphones, avoiding the drama of holiday shopping crowds, check out lines, and traffic.
In order to make the most of the holiday shopping season, we compiled three steps retailers should take to better prepare themselves for the upcoming season.
The 3 Steps
Plan
The first step is create a roadmap or plan to map out what sales you will offer. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are very important, but they do not make up the entire holiday shopping season. Therefore, it is important to plan your sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday as well as the remaining weeks in the shopping season.
Additionally, it is important to take the proper measures to ensure you have the inventory needed to meet demand as well as create a contingency plan should you run into any issues with suppliers or couriers that prevent you from filling orders for customers.
Communicate
Another important step is to create a communication or marketing plan to connect with both current and new customers and make them aware of your current and upcoming sales. Print ads as well as an online ads can help you connect with a wide audience. Using your current contact list, email campaigns can used to connect with current customers in a variety of ways. Here, the possibilities are broad but planning a strategy ahead will be beneficial.
Test
Last but not least, QA testing is an essential step to take to prepare your business for the holiday shopping season. During the holiday shopping season, many shoppers will flock to your site or app in search of great deals.
To guide them, you will most likely incorporate new banners, color schemes, and other elements to capture the attention of customers. You may even add new pages to your site or app with new promo codes or special promotions. All of these aspects need to be tested to ensure that your app or site is capable of handing the increase in traffic, especially from mobile devices. Furthermore, it is very important to assure any site or app updates function and appear as intended, but also do not result in bugs in other parts of the site.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure - Benjamin Franklin
An early QA campaign can alert you to problems that your site or app has including crashes or slower speeds due to increased traffic, unresponsive promo codes, or a poor or confusing customers journey. By alleviating any bugs, you protect yourself from poor site or app performance that can dissuade customers from placing an order now and even in the future.
To learn more about testing, click here for additional articles or download our white paper below, "E-Commerce Sites : The Challenges of Testing."
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