We’ve put together a guide to help you create a winning holiday eCommerce strategy. Read on for top tips and make sure you end the year on a high!
2020 and 2021 saw massive growth in holiday eCommerce sales, and that trend is set to continue. Planning for the holidays in eCommerce is crucial, especially as shoppers are set to start holiday shopping as early as October this year. With big ticket events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’ll likely see big boosts in traffic on your site.
For online retailers, delivering best-in-class customer service paired with seamless online experiences is the secret to any successful holiday marketing strategy.
This comprehensive holiday planning guide has a bunch of actionable takeaways, including how to:
Overall, nailing your eCommerce holiday strategy will mean you can welcome and delight festive shoppers at every stage of the buyer journey.
Access the Guide – How to Create a Winning Holiday eCommerce Strategy:
During the holiday season, customers are on the lookout for specific products for their nearest and dearest. Competition will be rife and site traffic will be at its peak. Having eCommerce holiday plans in place gives you more time to focus on delivering the seamless online experiences customers expect to boost holiday season sales.
Over the festive season, there are a ton of key dates you need to prepare for. Therefore, you’ll likely have a bunch of different promotional campaigns running. With a checklist in place, you have a clear view of what needs to be done when driving your holiday eCommerce strategy.
The festive period can be stressful, but the online shopping experience shouldn’t be. So, focus on creating completely consistent customer experiences that exceed expectations to set yourself apart from the competition. Add some festive cheer to your eCommerce operations and make sure the process is simple and straightforward for your customers.
Brands driving growth with Pimberly:
In this 6,000-word comprehensive guide, we use the Ansoff Matrix to explore the hidden growth potential in your product ranges and business. We’ll discuss how eCommerce has made “no-go” areas of expansion the “go-to” place for businesses experiencing exponential global growth. This whitepaper walks you through the strategic growth options for your business and gives practical guidance and examples. It will challenge your current thinking and demonstrate why eCommerce makes expanding into previously designated high-risk areas much more accessible. In reading this whitepaper, you’ll get a full overview of: We explain how extending your existing product range, doubling down on your best sellers, and expanding your product lines fit into the overall growth strategy. Discover why technology is key in creating seamless online experiences when increasing product ranges. Whether you’re selling new products to existing customers or selling existing products to new markets, having streamlined processes is key. Processes such as creating, validating, and optimizing your product data, images/videos, and supporting documents for different target markets can be totally streamlined with PIM. As such, it’s an essential tool to consider if you’re looking to extend your product mix.
~20 min read (circa 7000 words)
Access the whitepaper for free now: Growth by Expanding Product Ranges – The Ansoff Matrix:
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The Ansoff matrix is a simple effective tool that can help businesses weigh the options and risks involved when making strategic growth decisions. The matrix outlines four possible avenues for growth, which vary in terms of risk. If you ignore these principles, you may be implementing high-risk strategies when an easier growth path exists.
You have invested heavily in your brand to create a loyal customer base who trust you and enjoy the products and services you delight them with. Extending your product ranges into similar or adjacent lines that resonate with your brand will be rewarded by more customers buying more from you. As a result, you’ll see increased average order value and revenues.
Adding new product ranges drives customer loyalty, increases basket size, and accelerates new customer acquisition. Whether you’re selling new products to existing markets or expanding your product reach across new markets, product range expansion is a surefire way to gain a true competitive edge. Overall, it gives your customers more reason to keep coming back and recommend your brand to others.
A successful product range expansion will be heavily dependent on you leveraging the resources you have to hand, as well as making the most of various distribution channels. In other words, it will increase the complexity of your business. So, deploying the right technology will enable you to accelerate growth and outpace your competition.
Brands driving growth with Pimberly:
Access the whitepaper for free now: Growth by Expanding Product Ranges – The Ansoff Matrix:
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The benefits of product variety are vast, however, project management plays an essential role in the success of your product range expansion strategy. When you get your products to market ahead of your competitors, you’ll strengthen your position as the go-to online retailer for anyone looking to make their latest purchase. This whitepaper will equip you with everything you need to know about extending your product scope to drive growth and more online sales. All in all, you’ll discover how to create a scalable, sustainable business model that enables you to grow your eCommerce offering.
Increasing End-of-Life stock sales at the end of every season is crucial in reducing the volume of excess inventory you hold. Ideally, you will have sold all your products at the full list price, however, this isn’t always the case. You may end up with excess stocks of SKUs that you need to sell so you can free up valuable warehouse space to make room for your lovely new products.
Choose the right avenues for your Clearance Sale of EOL products, and you’ll enjoy better profit margins. But, what are the avenues you can use, and how do you make sure you sell your End-of-Life stock at the optimal price?
A Clearance Sale enables you to clear excess stock levels that have reached the end of their shelf-life. Think Christmas decorations in December or BBQs as autumn approaches. EOL Clearance Sales often offer customers higher discounts for a reduced period of time. There’s a sense of urgency, and customers will be eager to get a good deal, so it’s a super-effective way of keeping your inventory levels to a minimum.
Now, how can you make sure you clear as much EOL stock at the best prices, all whilst protecting your brand image? You don’t want your products to be perceived as poor–quality because of associated low prices. So, it’s good practice to extend product reach across a variety of sales channels.
For instance, you could clear End-of-Life stock on social media, or on different marketplaces. That way, customers visiting your eCommerce site won’t see loads of discounted products which could result in them losing confidence in the quality of your goods.
When it comes to making sure you sell products at the optimal price, there are a variety of tools and technologies you can use – enter PIM!
PIM offers a centralized source of truth for all of your product data. It enables you to streamline the way you gather, store, manage, enrich, and distribute product information and digital assets in real-time. This enriched product data enables you to create online experiences that are perfect from start to finish.
PIM also has extensive capabilities outside of product data enrichment and managing your product’s lifecycles. For instance, it’s super easy to set up new channels so you can adopt a powerful omnichannel strategy. Powerful automation means you can massively reduce the time it takes to get your products to market. Moreover, there are tons of different integrations you can enjoy. Think connecting to AI tools to offer customers a hyper-personalized experience. To add to that, you can create unlimited API connections to a wide variety of different applications and platforms. This is where you can get really clever with your EOL sales….Let’s dive in!
Implementing an efficient PIM system to sell End of Life stock will streamline the entire process from start to finish. Through powerful data management, time-consuming and tiresome procedures are eradicated. As a result, you’ll have more time to focus on perfecting your EOL sale strategy to clear all excess stock.
Automations enable you to sit back and relax while price reductions are taken care of. How? Well, you can use lifecycle stages and workflows to determine what prices should be applied when your stock hits a certain level. This means you’re always going to be selling your EOL stock at the optimal price. To add to that, you can upload your promotional material and digital assets into your PIM well ahead of time. So, you’ll be ready to go with a few simple clicks, reducing time to market and optimizing selling days when it matters the most.
A common route to take when trying to increase EOL sales is to list on multiple sales channels. With PIM, setting up new marketplaces is a breeze. Whether you’re selling through TikTok or Instagram, or uploading products to Amazon, PIM will publish your channel-specific data in real-time. This channel-specific data is crucial in ensuring you meet the different requirements of each of your sales channels. In turn, this will boost your product’s performance meaning they’ll be more likely to get found first.
Remember, choosing the correct marketplaces for your EOL stock is a crucial element of brand alignment. Consumer perception is heavily affected by the channels products are listed on, so be mindful of this when considering options.
With PIM, it’s easy to do this right down to the SKU level. Like with marketplaces, this can be a great way of protecting your brand image, as customers don’t instantly see massively reduced prices. Furthermore, customers have a central site where they can check out all of your best deals.
You can boost conversion rates by up to 25% by having a dedicated “SALE” landing page on your eCommerce site, so it’s well worth considering! PIM makes the process of updating your sale page straightforward thanks to powerful automation. Determine rules for when certain products should be published on your sale page, then you can sit back and relax.
You have the ability to create unlimited product relationships which you can then display as “kits & bundles”. You might offer 2 for the price of 3, with the cheapest being free. To add to that, you can add specific copy and imagery to display these kist and bundles to further tempt customers.
This is always going to be front-of-mind for any eCommerce business. So, if a sale is going really well and you’re selling tons of SKUs, it’s important to be able to quickly list them back at full price. Again, this is super easy with PIM, as you can determine specific rules for when a products’ price should change depending on stock levels.
If you’re looking to maximize the sales volume of End-of-Life stock, PIM is the obvious choice to boost your eCommerce revenues. Streamlining the data journey to various sales channels and generating tailored, audience-specific content that resonates with varying demographics. Above all, this will ensure the sale of clearance stock at the right time and at the right price. Not to mention, you also have an instantly available catalog of digital assets ready to make your products shine!
