2022 Ecommerce Holiday
Readiness Checklist
With rising prices, continued supply chain tension, and rapid changes in consumer buying patterns, this year’s holiday shopping trends are difficult to predict. The best defense? A flexible, customer-centric readiness strategy. Save these must-do tips to prepare for a holiday shopping season where anything is possible.
High-Level Strategy and Planning
Align your tactics around a central holiday sales strategy informed by customer research and market trends.
- Project your sales by studying previous holiday buying patterns and analyzing current customer demand. Perform customer research with on-site surveys and by analyzing trends in search queries.
- Outline your holiday sales targets and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
- Design promotions to optimize for holiday KPIs (buy more/save more, flash sales, BOGO, free shipping, price matching, etc.).
- Factor tighter budgets this holiday season into assortment planning, adding items at a variety of price points.
- Bring your entire team on board with the holiday vision and action plan, communicating goals and needs clearly and transparently.
Customer Experience
Give your customers special shopping experiences that surpass expectations and help them find what they’re looking for faster than anyone else.
- Optimize your product catalog and PDPs, ensuring that all attributes and metadata are accurate and optimized for search.
- Create personalized, automated opportunities for upsells through recommendations to increase revenue per visitor.
- Consider implementing a product discovery platform like Constructor to automatically personalize search and browse results, reducing shopping time, surfacing merchandising insights, and increasing conversion rate and revenue.
- Offer a variety of fulfillment options like BOPIS (buy online, pickup in store), ROBIS (reserve online, buy in store), and free delivery to serve customers in the way they prefer to receive their merchandise.
- Hire additional customer support team members during the holiday season to answer questions, process returns, and handle problems that may arise.
Your customers are already making their lists and checking them twice. Are you prepared to offer them the best shopping experience?
Marketing
Stand out from the competition by resonating personally with your customers across channels.
- Develop and execute on an integrated holiday marketing strategy, including content, email marketing, paid ads, social campaigns, and other channels as appropriate.
- Use the holidays as an opportunity to create value-driven campaigns. During the 2021 holiday season, 35% of US online shoppers bought from brands supporting causes that were important to them.
- Automate marketing campaigns as much as possible based on buyer behavior like add-to-carts, product page views, and purchases. For example, you could update your abandoned cart and abandoned browse campaigns to offer additional incentives to known customers during the holiday season.
- Tap into loyalty programs to personalize offers and provide exclusive discounts to your most devoted customers.
Supply Chain Mitigation
Don’t let shipping delays ruin the holiday season. Being proactive and creative can turn external forces into opportunities for creativity and conversion.
- Overestimate demand and stock up on inventory as much as possible. If possible, have alternate suppliers on standby.
- Consider category-based promotions rather than item-specific promotions, as specific items might not be in stock.
- Offer free expedited shipping once an out-of-stock item becomes available.
- Keep customers updated with creative status updates over email, and thank them with a free gift or discount to use on a future purchase.
Learnings for 2023
Make the most of the post-holiday season’s learnings and use them to plan for an even better 2023.
- Capture relevant shopping data from this holiday season to revisit and use to set goals for Holiday 2023.
- Identify trends in returns and exchange requests, then use this data to update product descriptions and/or metadata.
- Identify items that did not perform as well as anticipated, then use this data to balance inventory through your product discovery platform.
- Ask new and existing customers for feedback or reviews.
HAPPIER HOLIDAYS WITH CONSTRUCTOR
Constructor empowers ecommerce companies to help their customers easily find products they love across your entire site—from search and browse to recommendations, product collections, and quizzes. Analyzing onsite behavior in real time, Constructor is able to refine and curate personalized shopping experiences for individual customers. And the proof is in the Christmas pudding.
See how we drive consistent lifts in revenue, conversion rate, and profit for our partner brands.
