Strategies to increase holidays sales of your online store – Part 2
The Key to Boosting eCommerce Conversion Rate This Holiday Season (Part 2)
eCommerce will be driving the growth of US retail eCommerce this holiday season. On the flip side, online retailers will also face increased competition as more businesses and merchants recognize the opportunity.
In Part 1 of this series, we showed you how to deliver an outstanding shopping experience to increase eCommerce sales through personalization on your online store.
In this article, you’ll learn how to extend the personalized experience beyond your eCommerce platform to create an outstanding customer experience with targeted content and email marketing automation.
Email isn’t dead!
Contrary to what many are saying, email is far from dead.
In fact, it’s one of the best marketing tools for the busy holiday season when consumers are bombarded with generic messaging from online and offline channels:
- Email works well with mobile, which accounts for 48% of holiday shopping traffic.
- Email offers instant buying options.
- Email can marry targeted content with a specific call-to-action aimed at driving sales.
- Email automation allows you to deliver relevant offers effective and efficiently.
Here are a few ideas to help you increase sales by using personalized email automation:
Saved cart and reminder emails
Cart abandonment statistics from a recent report show that desktop has a 61% abandonment rate, tablets have a 71% abandonment rate, and mobile has an 81% abandonment rate – which translates into over $4 trillion of merchandise left unpurchased in shopping carts!
To recover some of the sales from abandoned carts, you can send out reminder emails to shoppers who have registered on your site.
This is a very effective sales recovery tactic. Research has found that nearly 50% of all abandoned cart emails are opened and over 33% of clicks lead to purchases back on site:
Targeted content
Gift guides create some of the most popular content during the holiday season. Take it to the next level by personalizing them for specific segments of your audience.
Create gift guides that focus on different target markets and send personalized emails to specific segments of your customers, directing them to the content.
You can further customize shopping experience with an interactive gift selector, such as a quiz on your website, to help shoppers narrow down their choices.
Besides gift guides, publish other holiday-related content that maps to shoppers’ preferences and customer lifecycle and share it with your audience via email and retargeting campaigns.
Deals and discounts
Another way of utilizing email marketing to increase sales is ending personalized offers to your customers.
Email segmentation makes it extremely cost-effective to deliver deals and discounts tailored to the preferences and purchasing behavior of your audience.
By delivering relevant offers, you can increase conversion rate and drive more sales.
Personalized email automation also allows you to send out action-triggered messages. For instance, you can recover abandoned carts by offering a special discount on the specific items in a shopper’s cart via email.
Make personalization automation work for you this holiday season
Personalization is the key to cutting through the clutter by delivering an outstanding customer experience designed to drive sales and improve loyalty.
Thankfully, today’s marketing automation technology means you can put these strategies into action in no time. So, don’t let another year go by without upping your online retail game!
