Preparing for the Peak Season: eCommerce Holiday Planning 2021

The holiday season is a make or break period for eCommerce businesses. And same as last year, the eCommerce holiday season 2021 is predicted to be lucrative for retailers. Believe it or not, eCommerce holiday planning is a real thing. It is now or never, the prime time for the brands to start making marketing plans, optimizing their eCommerce websites, and prepping for the upcoming holiday season. It is supposedly the busiest eCommerce shopping season of the year. So, it would make sense for eCommerce business owners to take full advantage of it and bag the opportunity to skyrocket that revenue graph.

The eCommerce holiday season 2020 highlighted the changes in the world, digital or real, due to the Covid 19 pandemic. There was a paradigm shift in the retail industry, with a majority of retailers playing their hand in the eCommerce industry for the first time. Hence, the existing eCommerce industry had to work around massive competition more than ever.

This was an opportunity as much as it was a challenge. The rising demand for online shopping created a chance of growth across many niches. According to eMarketer, the total retail spending in the US market increased by 6.5% to USD 1.064 trillion, with eCommerce sales rising by a whopping 32.5%. Cyber Monday 2020 was recorded as the biggest online shopping day globally, with sales increasing by 15.6%. Simultaneously, the other holidays followed a similar trend, with Black Friday sales rising by 22% and Thanksgiving sales by 21.4%.

Unlike the newbies on the playing field, most of you eCommerce players would know how to play. Unlike past decades, 2021 promises to be a whole new ball game, a little similar to 2020 but a notch above.

Expectations are that the eCommerce sales for the 2021 holiday season will rise by 11.3% to USD 206.88 billion. And during the most significant sales of the season, Cyber Monday and Black Friday 2021, you might witness spendings surpassing USD 10 billion.

While you might be comfortable with the rising eCommerce sales forecast this year, there are takeaways from the holiday season 2020 and its predecessors. You must be prepared for unexpected changes and specific must-dos to prep for the eCommerce holiday 2021.

Here’s how you can be armed and ready to go at war by the perfect marketing strategy and an optimized eCommerce store!

We recommend you start working ahead of time on the most critical calendar dates. If you are working with a technical or marketing partner, this overview will certainly provide you with a handy guide to discuss your eCommerce holiday plans:

• Point #1: Focus on Personalized Content & Marketing Strategies
• Point #2: Leverage Peak Holidays
• Point #3: Focus on Holidays Specific eCommerce Email Campaigns
• Point #4: Cash on Video and Animated Advertising
• Point #5: Pay Attention to Eco-Consumers
• Point #6: Focus on Social Media on Mobile
• Point #7: Create an eCommerce Holiday Gift Guide
• Point #8: Keep a Check on the Review Section
• Point #9: Leverage Page Tracking Journey
• Point #10: Enhance the Customer Service
• Point #11: Use Traffic and Order Volume Predictions
• Point #12: Test Run your Resources
• Point #13: Optimize your eCommerce Store
• Point #14: Monitor your Performance
• Point #15: Stay Connected to your Technical and Digital Marketing Partner

Let’s dive in and understand each of them in detail…

1. Focus on Personalized Content & Marketing Strategies 

There will be many eCommerce brands putting their content out. And customers have already seen most of this year after year. What will keep you afloat during the chaos? It is personalized content and a marketing strategy. It will help connect with the customers at a personalized level. You can pitch on gift guides and customized offers. Think beyond personalizing the email with their names in it and go for chalking out buyer personas to smart target the savvy shoppers. If you are a global brand, think on the lines of the time difference, different thanksgiving dates (as USA and Canada), and other variations impacting the shopping habits. Also, keep in mind the SEO best practices while generating content.

2. Leverage Peak Holidays

Most eCommerce businesses will saturate the digital space with Santa Claus memes and holiday catchphrases before the holidays. But think about the two busiest shopping days of the year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. According to Google Trends, people often start shopping during September, and by the mid of October, the shopping spree is in full form. This indicates the benefits of planning and pushing forward marketing campaigns early on to target the peak shopping holidays. Prepare a holiday calendar to send out day/date-wise campaigns and target the early shoppers with some ‘early bird’ tactics. Segmenting your clients according to their past shopping habits would give you the leverage of having them as your recurring customers. Also, don’t just focus on the BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday) rush. Think of the shoppers who would like to get past these days and shop before or after these busy times.

3. Focus on Holidays specific eCommerce email campaigns

Email marketing is one of the most effective holiday marketing strategies. But you have to stand apart in an overflowing inbox. While creating Holidays specific eCommerce emails, you can keep a short text message accompanied by eye-catchy visuals. You can also create a holiday or discount/offer countdown to remind the customers of the shopping window, providing them with the best deals, attractive discounts, free shipping, etc. Customers are likely to take action while knowing that the deal will not be around for long. Hence, play with the FOMO emotion by offering limited-time deals. Never forget to include a clear call to action leading to your eCommerce store. Make sure to follow a personalized approach by segmenting your email lists and sending the customers relevant content. Lastly, you will have to optimize your holiday eCommerce emails for mobile, as the number of users engaged in mobile email viewing and mobile shopping is rising every day.

4. Cash on Video and Animated Advertising

Video adverts are known to capture the undivided attention of users. So, your next Holiday eCommerce marketing campaign can have a section about leveraging video and animated ads on platforms like YouTube and Instagram Reels, and IGTV. Gen-Z and millennials are supposedly engaged more by video ads. Many platforms launched dedicated ad formats like the Instagram Reels Ads and TikTok Ads. Consider these during your eCommerce Holiday Planning 2021.

5. Pay Attention to Eco-Consumers

So many consumers are moving towards eco-friendly lifestyles these days. Shopify Plus reports that about 57% of shoppers are willing to change their purchasing habits to help reduce negative environmental impact. You can leverage this personal living choice of the consumer by highlighting the eco-conscious and environment-friendly efforts made by your eCommerce company. Start by cashing on some of the easiest ways to comfort concerned shoppers while reducing your carbon footprint. A win-win situation for all. It would be wise to let your shoppers know about the eco-acts like reducing the packing material, recycling boxes, eco-friendly transportation, and many more.

6. Focus on Social Media on Mobile 

Insights from Salesforce indicate the rise of holiday shopping via social networking platforms. Also, a large part of this shopping is contributed by mobile ordering, with the sales skyrocketing during Christmas and Cyber weeks. This gives you ample reason to make your eCommerce store easy to navigate through mobile devices. If you act quickly, your early organic social media campaigns can give you results as good as your paid promotions. Consumers can now easily purchase products directly, right from the app, via social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.

7. Create an eCommerce Holiday Gift Guide

A gift guide is a fun, creative, and effective way to grab your customers’ attention. You can either slip up a gift guide in the monthly email newsletter or promote it over social media. This will not only make your brand visible but also make the shoppers familiar with your products. This will connect with the customers through convenience, giving them relevant options and saving them time and effort in scrolling through page after page of your eCommerce store. You can create holiday-specific content, including products and special promos, and publish it as a gated guide or an ebook to provide value to your customers.

8. Keep a Check on the Review Section

Around 91% of customers in the age range of 18 to 34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. This proves that reviews are of incredible value. Often online shoppers tend to take a pass on products with no or negative reviews. So, adding a review section to your eCommerce store is a great way to build consumer trust. User-generated content is also proving to be a driving force for successful marketing campaigns for eCommerce brands. Reviews are bound to make an excellent case for your brand and the products during the holiday season.

9. Leverage Page Tracking Journey

Page tracking journey, also known as flow visualization by Google, can help you identify your customer’s every move by tracking the cursor at every shopping stage throughout the checkout. This will help you gather valuable intel about the strengths and weaknesses of your eCommerce store. You can use the information to enhance your eCommerce store and make it easier to navigate and facilitate purchases.

10. Enhance the Customer Service

Customer service is a great way to retain customers, facilitate repeat purchases and decrease the churn rate. While running an eCommerce store, too, during a holiday season, no brand can risk unhappy customers leading to negative online reviews. Also, it is always beneficial to retain existing customers in addition to attracting new ones. This makes your customer service experience extremely important during the holiday season. You can include FAQs, Live chats, automated chatbots, and after-hours phone calls to virtual assistants.

11. Use Traffic and Order Volume Predictions

Wild guesses are often not encouraged when it comes to the most critical eCommerce opportunity of the year. An information-based approach is the need of the hour. You can review benchmarks using the Business Intelligence for eCommerce businesses to serve you as a guide while making valuable traffic and order volume predictions for the upcoming eCommerce Holiday Season 2021 and beyond. It helps you determine your eCommerce store’s traffic load over the past six months, during the previous year’s peak season dates, the percentage increase in the prior year’s peak season traffic over six months average before the season, and the year-on-year percentage growth rate in traffic. You can analyze these numbers and consider the pandemic impacted eCommerce demand to calculate the needed resources for this holiday season.

12. Test Run your Resources

You can use your predicted resource model for the peak season as a base to test your infrastructure and resources. This will allow you to know how your eCommerce store will hold up with the surge in traffic. No eCommerce business wants a site crash or downtime during the peak holiday season. For Adobe commerce sites, use the test deployment for load testing. This test would usually expose several flaws, but it is possible to improve upon the deficiencies by having a robust system in place.

13. Optimize your eCommerce Store

eCommerce store performance is essential to enhance consumer experience and improve the core web vitals score to boost ranking on the SERPs. And eCommerce site optimization is the way to go about it. You can use a content delivery network, CDN, to create a global cache network of your static media files to decrease load and improve response times. Full-page caching is a great way to speed up your eCommerce store. Merging and minifying JS and CSS files is another step to improving load times and the store’s overall performance. Also, you must optimize your images for a faster store as they are critical pieces of content and impact the consumer experience negatively if left unloaded or loads slow.

14. Monitor your Performance

It is always recommended to use monitoring tools to check performance. There are various tools available in the market to help you take advantage of monitoring services to evaluate your eCommerce store’s performance before you hit the peak season.

15. Stay Connected to your Technical and Digital Marketing Partners

Last but not least, we will always recommend you to stay in touch with your eCommerce platform service provider and your digital marketing partner. This will help you execute your digital marketing campaigns and facilitate the smooth functioning of your eCommerce store when the traffic hits during the peak season. It would help if you discussed your support plans for the holiday period in case something unexpected arose.

Good Luck with Your eCommerce Holiday Planning 2021

The holidays are a time to celebrate!

Having a proper eCommerce holiday strategy will help you and your business handle this busy season with ease. You can make meaningful long-term relationships with your customers and your partners during this time and emerge as a profitable eCommerce venture on the other side. For more holiday-related information and to ramp up your eCommerce business to the next level, contact us. Krish will be glad to become your end-to-end eCommerce solution partner.