christmas-decorations

 

The top priority for your team during the holiday season is instant and effective customer support. From live chat, chat automation flows, and AI-powered chatbots to email, phone, and messenger integrations, a brand must offer real-time assistance to reduce bounce and abandonment rates.

 

Ahead of the holidays, perform a tune up and testing of your technology. Validate hosting services, optimize web speed and performance, establish advanced security measures & firewalls, revisit compliance, governance, and privacy protocols, perform load testing, confirm scheduled back ups, and monitor data in real-time.

 

Here is a checklist to advance holiday performance and bring about good cheer!

  • Pre-build holiday templates and campaign themes.
  • Feature festive accents and spirited graphics across your digital channels.
  • Boost messaging that is inspirational and enticing.
  • Present daily deals through the holiday season.
  • Allow for wish list creation and management, along with multiple wish list capability.
  • Highlight the ability to share product pages and wish lists.
  • Emphasize social media sharing.
  • Enhance product pages with bundles, complementary items, gift wrapping etc.
  • Showcase gift cards.
  • Prominently display customer reviews.
  • Promote a ‘free gift’ in the shopping cart to solidify the purchase and reduce abandonment.
  • Recognize the shifts in searching behaviors with time sensitive holiday priorities and a focus on gifts.
  • Redefine your product recommendations to spotlight popular gifts and draw attention to best sellers.
  • Revamp paid & display advertising keywords for common and trending holiday shopping search terms.
  • Take advantage of Google Trends to spotlight seasonal queries, compare keywords and detect related terms.
  • Optimize Google business listing with accurate company details, holiday hours and closures, special promotions, seasonal events, and festive photos.
  • Enhance listings with categories, distinctive features, primary products or services, reviews, and clickable links.
  • Capitalize on retargeting and paid advertising in the social media channels that your target audience use the most.
  • Establish an effective holiday-themed email & SMS strategy.
  • Prepare your audience segmentation game plan and a testing regimen.
  • Send consistent holiday messaging across channels and touch points.
  • Consider integrations with Google and Facebook, and single-click login through social accounts.
  • To attract new visitors, incentivize customers to refer friends with an instant and automatic reward.
  • Using BI tools, execute your personalization plan to improve the brand experience.
  • Offer flexible payment solutions.
  • Create a seamless shopping experience across devices and channels.
  • Employ local SEO and geo-targeting to drive retail and omnichannel traffic.
  • Provide an ‘estimated delivery date’ and clear order delivery tracking
  • Send automatic shipping notifications (offer both email & SMS).

 

Remember, the post-purchase customer experience is equally as imperative as the pre-order brand journey. Pay attention to their needs and potential interests. Make them feel fully appreciated. Give them reasons to smile. Stir their motivations and curiosities. Present exclusive, personalized offers. Show genuine care.

 

Two final points

Take bold steps, test, and learn.

Brand building is a movement, not a moment.

 

Contact me at anna@artofdigitalcommerce.com to help put your holiday plan into action.

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