10 Articles To Strengthen Your Holiday eCommerce Strategy

10 Articles To Strengthen Your Holiday eCommerce Strategy

by | Oct 15, 2019 | Commerce Strategy, System Integrations

As Thanksgiving quickly approaches, retailers and e-marketers have a lot on their minds. With touchpoints coming from multiple directions across your customer journey, it’s easy to overlook critical components that can immediately affect your revenue goals. To keep you on track, we created this holiday roadmap that covers every part of your funnel. Grab some hot chocolate, scroll through our list, and rest easy while your holiday sales jump like Jordan.

1.   The Difference Between Good & Great Content.

There are multiple ways to leverage content to hit different audiences. However, doing so well enough to generate leads, encourage customer loyalty, upsell, and build trust can prove challenging. In these 3 blog posts, we share a few gems to help you produce content that engages and will continue to drive value far beyond the holiday season. If your content marketing strategy doesn’t utilize these key principles, it’s not too late to inject them into your plan. Take a look and maybe grab an idea or two to spice up your content.

Content marketing should be a major cornerstone in your marketing arsenal. By providing valuable, free content, that builds customer empathy, you will attract and convert new prospects into brand-loyal customers. The caveat to producing great content is having the foresight to produce content that aligns with customer interests, while continuously delivering new content that your customers hunger for.

— Christopher Yin, Creative Director, Redstage

Revenue Increase With Good Content

Key Take-Aways:

Know your audience and create content that hits them on a personal level. What are their interests and hobbies? What are the causes they care about? With a more complex buying process, B2B companies may want to consider producing content that hists each part of the sales funnel. Are you helping your audience think critically about the industry? How can you make your customers better-skilled professionals Furthermore, how can you align your brand with these things in a way that’s authentic and true to your brand?

The Difference Between Good & Great Content Marketing.

Top 5 Trends in B2B Personalization & Social Selling.

What Prime Day Can Teach Us About Holiday Sales.

2.  How to Stop Your Store from Crashing

Thanks to your engaging and authentic content, customers are flocking to your store. Lucky for you, holiday spending is expected to increase by 5% this year, but most customers won’t be visiting your physical location. More than half (around 53%) of your holiday customers will shop exclusively online. This surge in traffic has the potential to cause a lot of stress on your server, causing crashes or bugs that leave your customers aggravated or empty-handed.

You’ve worked hard to build trust and develop customer loyalty, you can’t fail them now, and with our help, you won’t.

The holidays are a time of increased profits, but that comes with a huge load on websites. So if you haven’t done proper stress testing to account for higher demand, you won’t know how your online store is going to react.

— Adam Morris, CEO at Redstage

Revenue loss and Conversion Rate

Key Take-Aways:

Proper preparation prevents poor performance. Your customers won’t let you off the hook if you give them a poor experience, especially if you’re a wholesaler or manufacturer who has an inaccurate count of inventory. Twitter can be your best friend or worst enemy. Check out these articles to ensure you stick with the former by properly monitoring your site and completing our performance checklist. These 4 articles will help you optimize and digitally strengthen your store for the holidays.

Ghosts Of Black Fridays Past: 3 Crucial Warnings For Retailers.

Black Friday Countdown: 4 Critical Last-Minute Store Optimizations.

Black Friday Countdown: 8 Omnichannel & Back Office Final Touches.

Q&A with Redstage’s Adam Morris: Prep for Black Friday 2018.

3. How To Unlock More Mobile Holiday Revenue

By now you have done the research and collected the data. You know your customers’ buying habits, likes, and dislikes.  You now only have 1 shot and a couple of seconds to impress them with frictionless and secure customer experiences. 32% of consumers change their minds about making a mobile purchase by abandoning their carts. Getting this step right can potentially cut your mobile cart abandonment in half. A part of stress testing your site is assessing your checkout funnel and you can do so with the Mobile Optimization Initiative. This blog can get you thinking with a mobile-first customer experience mentality so that you are not missing out on your share in over $500 billion.

Smart A/B testing based on data-driven analysis gives you insights that lead to successful, simple changes that can have a big impact on increasing your revenue per visitor.

— Benjamin Shapiro, Solutions Engineer, Redstage

Revenue Loss and CART ABANDONMENT

Key Take-Aways:

Doing it right the first time can save you the trouble in the end. Potential consumers and corporate buyers want to check out with ease, the sooner you begin simplifying the check-out process the better your site will perform The sooner you start, the better your site will perform. Better performance means staying one step ahead of your competitors.

How to Unlock More Mobile Holiday Revenue.

4. How to Defend Your Store from Cybercriminals

You have done your due diligence and can sit back and enjoy your holiday. Not exactly. While customers are increasingly shopping online, there is a huge risk that their data can be exposed. You may have heard of some common hacks such as phishing, payment fraud, and account take over.  With an expectation of a $22 billion loss this year due to fraud this section is a must-read. Here you will find the top 3 tactics hackers will use to attack your eCommerce site and how to keep your store and customers safe. We also joined forces with our trusted partner Trustpilot to give you 7 ways to improve your website’s trust signal.

Merchants need to start with an honest evaluation of what fraud costs your company. This isn’t just the money you lose on fraudulent orders you ship; it also includes all the time your staff puts into screening orders as well as the revenue lost to rejected orders which may have been safe. When you add up all these costs, the price of top fraud prevention solutions starts to look a lot more attractive.

— Oliver Sosinsky, Sr. Solutions Engineer, Redstage.

Revenue loss through payment fraud

Key Take-Aways:

Your customers deserve the same amount of protection as your store and protecting their privacy must be a priority. Monitoring is both crucial and necessary in keeping your customers and store safe. However, investing in a well-vetted Anti-Fraud Solution can ease your worries.

7 Ways to Improve Your Website’s Trust Signals.

3 Tactics Hackers Will Use Against eCommerce Store Security This Holiday.

3 Stopgaps to Ensure Your Holiday Strategy Goes As Planned…

Ready or not, the holiday rush is coming, and it is up to you to properly prepare. B2C companies are rising at a steady pace and facing many challenges starting at the top of the sales funnel. However, B2B companies can learn a thing or two as they play a key role in ensuring B2C’s and their customers are benefiting from their product or services. Customers and their unpredictable demands and expectations are inevitableTo produce a safe, frictionless, shopping experience, both B2B and B2C companies must work in sync to increase conversion.

Whether it be online or a brick and mortar, your ultimate goal for this holiday season is to make a profit while increasing brand loyalty. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors here are 3 action steps, you should take.

  1. Learn more about the Mobile Optimization Initiative and sign up for a free consultation here.
  2. Schedule a free consultation to find out what testing feature is best for your site here.
  3. Schedule a consultation to find out which security bundle fits your site’s needs here.
The Difference Between Good & Great Content Marketing

The Difference Between Good & Great Content Marketing

by | Oct 5, 2019 | UX/UI Design

Whether you’re a retailer or service-based business, content is your secret weapon to driving business onward and upward. Creating content that resonates and aligns with your brand (and audience) isn’t an easy task. However, experts agree it’s worth taking time to produce quality content. If content marketing isn’t a key part of your strategy by now, consider making it a top priority in the new year.

“Content marketing should be a major cornerstone in your marketing arsenal. By providing valuable, free content, that builds customer empathy, you will attract and convert new prospects into brand-loyal customers. The caveat to producing great content is having the foresight to produce content that aligns with customer interests, while continuously delivering new content that your customers hunger for.”

— Christopher Yin, Creative Director, Redstage

There are many platforms and channels that make it easy for people to find, consume, and share content. As a result, it’s even more challenging for companies to connect with consumers. Retailers understand that creating a holistic consumer experience is a significant challenge. On the other hand, B2B companies are challenged with building loyalty and relationships within their customer base. However, there are still traditional touchpoints like email, case studies, social media, e-books, and mobile apps that customers rely on to fulfill their content needs. Each of these channels is a spoke on the content marketer’s flywheel. Here‘s how to produce “Evergreen” content that can continue to drive value far into the future across all channels.

1. Empower Customers with Brand Storytelling

Content is a form of storytelling. Your end goal may be selling a product or service, but your customers want to know if that product can relate to their journey or benefit their business, before completing a transaction.

Melanie Allen, the CMO of Brooks says “I don’t focus on the brands, I focus on the runners,” stating the importance of getting into your customer’s head to create effective content that engages customers.

2. Resonate

Technology and human nature are now intertwined. Understanding this can help with the creative process. To resonate with and evoke emotion from your audience, your content needs to:

  • Create impact and opportunity
  • Drive purpose or connect to a social cause
  • Contain thought leadership
  • Feel organic, authentic, and true to the brand

 

3. Source Creativity, Rather than Influencers

Influencer marketing is meant to impact consumer behavior and drive sales through the use of public figures with large followings. However, this strategy is becoming overused and influencers pitching product after product seem inauthentic to audiences. Additionally, it’s important to select an influencer that has a direct connection to your brand messaging and mission. Constellation brands, for instance, chose an influencer who published photos regularly, sharing her love for Corona Extra and all things summer. It was a natural choice to pick her to move forward with additional promotion strategies.

Also, the Corona brand delved into cause marketing this year with a “Pay With Plastic” campaign to clean up beaches. The plastic waste collected was turned into Adirondack chairs, which were repurposed for in-store displays. When you think of Corona, you think of summer and the beach, so what better way to connect with customers on a more intimate level than with a cause today’s consumers care about?

According to several panels at Advertising Week New York, the best marketers are those who give equal attention to both content, products, and data. They do this by testing various methods, analyzing the results, and incorporating a natural message. Think outside the box to create a conversation between your audience and your brand. Help them think critically about the industry. Remember, visual communication resonates better than written when it comes to online, mobile, and OOH audiences.

4. Data Quality Is Everything

There should always be a purpose behind creating content and each piece of content should have a specific objective you want to achieve before your pen hits the paper. Not even a simple twitter post should be published without a particular goal in mind. Here are some KPIs today’s top brands use to track content engagement and value:

  • Interaction: How much time is your audience spending interacting with your content?
  • Emotional Engagement: Is your audience finding, reading, loving, remembering and sharing your content?
  • Brand Building: Is your brand expanding, lifting and converting?

 

Think about the ritual your customers go through when engaging with your brand. When do they use your product? When do they buy it? How do they buy it? Determining the “Magic Moment” when your product solves the customer’s problem should be the epicenter of customer stories and content that revolves around that ritual. For runners, content about different routes, trails, or morning routines could be a trigger to buy a new kind of shoe or water bottle. If new mothers are your target, a blog about a child’s first steps or first finger painting can touch your customer’s heart and connect with them with your brand products on a deeper level.

Final Thoughts

There are many creative strategies to ensure you are producing the best content possible for your audience. B2B companies should be producing content at every part of the sales funnel to see an ROI. While these tips can be helpful in the planning process, it is also important not to limit yourself in the creative process. Don’t be afraid to dream big and be bold or educate and entertain, as long as your ideas are anchored to your customers’ lives, habits, and connection to your brand. With content marketing comes the need to personalize, track, and measure the effectiveness of your messaging. Learn more about the top 5 ways eCommerce companies are making the most of their content marketing in our blog post: Top 5 Trends in Personalization and Social Selling!

If you missed out on  Advertising Week this year, be sure to check them out for further updates and information.