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The Best Ecommerce Holiday Planning Checklist Guide for 2022

The Best Ecommerce Holiday Planning Checklist Guide for 2022

By | Oct 19, 2022

Holidays are the busiest times of the year, but it’s also the most exciting time for ecommerce stores. If you sell a product that can be sold and purchased online, preparing early is best to ensure you’ll maximize your revenue.

Below is our ecommerce to-do checklist that you can implement leading up to the busy holiday season, will help increase your sales this year, and gain you more visibility to have continued sales in the next year. As you begin planning, keep these e commerce holiday checklists bookmarked as a reference.

How were your sales the previous year?
Have you ever heard the quote “you don’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been”? Well that applies to sales as well. How were your sales last year? This will help you understand what you can expect for this year, as well as the necessary adjustments to make

Become familiar with upcoming holiday dates?
Knowing the exact date of the holiday allows you to prepare when you’ll release your promotions, when and how to market, and helps you plan for the influx of new orders you’ll receive. Here are some of the most important end of year holidays that you should be aware of:

  • Black Friday [2022: Friday, November 25]
  • Small Business Saturday [2022: Saturday, November 26]
  • Cyber Monday [2022: Monday, November 28]
  • Giving Tuesday [2022: Tuesday, November 29]
  • Christmas Day [2022: Sunday, December 25]
  • New Year’s Eve Day [2022: Saturday, December 31]
  • New Year’s Day [2023: Sunday, January 1]

Business goals for the holiday season
What sales goal do you want to achieve this year in the months of November and December? Write this goal down so you’ll know how to strategize to make sure you accomplish it.

Create a holiday promotion calendar and automate this on your e commerce website
Based on your revenue goal for the holiday season, what sales, special deals and promotions can you offer to customers this year? What holidays do you want to offer them? Create a calendar that’ll allow you to see this plan by filling in what promotions will go into effect on before, during and after these holidays.

Is your website ready to go?
This is one of the most important and critical pieces to this checklist. Your products are being viewed, purchased and processed online. The experience your customers receive and their first impression when they land on your ecommerce website will dictate if they’ll do business with you or not. A poorly performing website can immediately decrease your sales. Here are a few details to give attention to on your e comm website:

  • Make sure your website is visually appealing to your audience. A poorly designed e commerce website doesn’t feel trustworthy to new customers
  • All products should have categories for online shoppers to easily find products they’re looking for
  • Repair any functional issues that can occur when a customer is checking out or entering their credit card information
  • Allow customers to make purchases with different forms of payment such as credit card, Paypal, Google Pay, Klarna, and other e commerce payment types that fit their needs

Automation saves you time and money
Automate your processes as much as possible so you can focus on managing orders. E commerce automation eliminates repetitive tasks that you typically do manually for each customer, but allows it to be completed in the same way and according to the same criteria. Here are some of the most important e commerce automation processes you’ll need to have set up:

  • Sync your customers to an email marketing platform such as Mailchimp
  • Gather feedback after a purchase by asking for reviews
  • Automate your inventory management so you know when a product is low in stock
  • Send abandoned cart email when a customer abandons their car
  • Print shipping labels and send out tracking numbers with one click

Can your products be found online in google search?
Optimize your SEO on your website and product descriptions for the holiday season. For those that aren’t familiar, this means using specific keywords on your website that users will use to search for your product. Do this on every page of your website, and create static landing pages for each holiday season so they can be published live when ready. Your products being found online by customers is one of best ways to significantly increase your sales.

Get Creative With Your Sales
If you sell single products, see how you can package some of them together to increase sales. For example, if you sell candles don’t only sell them one by one. Bundle some of them together. You can create a “mood candle package” and sell bundles of candles based on the mood your customer is in, or would like to be in such as relax, cleaning, refreshed, etc.

Cybersecurity is Serious
Look, customers are entering their personal information on your website with the trust that none of their information will be breached or hacked. You need to ensure that our website is fully, 100% secure.

Technical Support
It’s technology people. Something can always go wrong. It’s best to plan and be prepared to have someone on hand that can fix any technical issues quickly and efficiently. Holiday season is busy but it’s a very small window you have, and any hiccups need to be troubleshooted and fixed immediately.

Final Checklist Thoughts
Planning is critical to your success. All information within this article has been proven, yearly, to work seamlessly. If you have any questions or need any assistance, our team of digital marketing experts will provide you with a strategy that fits your holiday season business goals at no cost. Just contact us on the form below and we will get back to you within 24 hours.

5 Tips for B2B Marketing in 2021

5 Tips for B2B Marketing in 2021

By | Mar 12, 2021

Over the past year there have been dramatic shifts in the way business runs in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the economic landscape and affected consumer habits and priorities. It has also altered the infrastructure and internal processes of many companies, leading to an increased focus on remote employment and digital services. Some industries—such as hospitality and tourism—have experienced major financial setbacks, while others—such as healthcare services and social services—are flourishing and expected to grow significantly in the coming years.

This means that B2B companies need to reorient themselves to the current business climate and pivot their marketing strategies to address the needs and priorities of 2021. We are living in a new type of society with new values, and experts predict that many of the pandemic-related changes are here to stay. For example, studies show that nearly 50 percent of consumers are avoiding leaving their homes and are purchasing more goods and services online. This shift will affect businesses of all types and sizes—whether they offer a digital-based product or not.

Here are five tips for B2B companies that will help them keep up with the times and tailor their marketing strategies to more effectively reach their target audience.

  1. Create new buyer personas. Perhaps you have already identified your target demographic and analyzed them in great detail. Well, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Because of the pandemic, businesses now have different priorities in reaching their customers, which means your B2B company needs to reevaluate your target audience’s pain points, needs and channels.
  2. Optimize your website. More than 80 percent of shoppers visit a company’s website before purchasing a product or service. Business buyers also conduct thorough online research before moving forward with a particular company. In addition, the online spending of B2B buyers has been steadily increasing. This means that if your B2B website is not updated and optimized you will be missing out on leads and leaking potential profit.
  3. Focus on social. One study found that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level executives rely on social media to make purchase decisions. Social media engagement and interaction can potentially have more impact than cold outreach, such as email marketing campaigns, so it is important to heavily invest in social.
  4. Consider video and virtual events. A recent study by Cisco estimated that online video content will account for more than 82% of consumer internet traffic by 2022. Circle S Studio also predicts that virtual events and conferences are here to stay. If your B2B company isn’t taking advantage of video content and online events, you will be forfeiting leads and profit to the competition.
  5. Improve buyer enablement. In today’s digital-first world, buyers are seeking a personalized, self-directed buying process that focuses on their needs and allows them to lead the conversation. Buyer enablement means reducing friction in your online marketing channels and creating user-centric design and content that seamlessly leads prospects through the awareness-consideration-purchase process.

ATX Web Designs offers branding strategy and digital brand development services. For more information, drop us a line!

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