The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guide



In this article, we explore 7 holiday marketing strategies to increase conversion, order value and more during the year’s most crucial sales period.


The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guide

While ecommerce retailers everywhere prepare their holiday marketing strategy for the busy shopping season ahead, there are a number of innovative tactics to consider that can drive more site traffic and increase order value and conversions. This is especially critical during a tough year for the industry where every sale counts.

As you restructure your game plan for these next critical sales months, consider these 7 personalization strategies to make the most of your efforts:

  • Holiday sales often make up a large amount of a business’s overall sales. That's why holiday marketing is crucial to your bottom line. This year, holiday shopping will look a little different.
  • For example, maybe your store’s big holiday promotion is a gift guide that includes home decor tutorials using your store’s products, and your tagline is Deck Your Halls. With your goal (new followers and more sales), your timeline (October through December) and your theme (Deck Your Halls), you’re officially ready to dive into your.
  • From Thanksgiving to December 31, 2015 vs. The same dates in 2014, the number of eCommerce transactions grew by 21 percent, while fraud attempts grew by 8 percent; Fraud attempt rates were highest on Christmas Eve (2.4 percent), Thanksgiving (2 percent), Black Friday (1.8 percent) and holiday shipment cut-off days (1.6 percent).
  • With this guide, we aren’t trying to give you comprehensive instructions on doing e-commerce in the holidays. First, there’s no real need: The same tactics that work year-round also work in the holidays. And let’s be honest, a complete holiday strategy should have been put into motion months ago.

According to the RJMetrics 2015 Holiday Trends Study, November and December each account for 10% of your annual revenue for the year, while the average month is only 7.9%. And while January’s revenue typically takes a dive, at 7.5%, this can be mitigated with some careful planning earlier in the year.

Before we dive in, here are a few reminders on upcoming holidays that impact ecommerce and main areas of focus for both brand and shopper:

December Holidays: Christmas, Boxing Day, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Eve

Your customer is focused on:
Finding the perfect gift

You should focus on:
Making it easy for them to find what they need

1. Use the wisdom of the crowd by highlighting best sellers and other product recommendations

We’ve all got them – the people on your list who you love dearly, but have no idea what to buy for. Never is the ‘wisdom of crowds’ more useful than for those gift buying decisions. By showing a customer the products that are selling well, or have been identified as particularly suitable for a certain age group or gift recipient, you make the buying decision easy for them.

On mobile, these kinds of thematic browsing options should be highlighted on the front page, as this will inform a customer’s site navigating strategy. But beware of highlighting your ‘Gifts for Dad’ gift guide on an animated carousel – unlike on a desktop, where hovering over a slide will cause the carousel to pause, this isn’t possible on mobile, so customers will often accidentally click on the wrong slide and possibly abandon your site altogether.

By highlighting best sellers, or using recommendations to show items that are frequently bought together, you’re reassuring a buyer that they’re making a good decision (while possibly increasing the average order value). Including reviews with the product details is also an easy way of answering common concerns right there on the product page, and could prevent later returns (which we’ll cover in a later section).


2. Make your site search friendly

Search has been considered the preferred method of product finding on mobile, but it’s also one of the most broken elements of the average mobile shopping site. Most often, Search was the method that led shoppers to wrongly conclude that the site didn’t carry the product they were looking for.

In order to make search work for your mobile shoppers, it’s recommended that you:

  • Always offer shoppers the option to search within the category they’re in
  • Allow shoppers to filter the search results to category level i.e. when searching for ‘gold’ allow filtering to Jewelry rather than displaying all gold product results.
  • Ensure your search function can handle misspellings and synonyms – 70% of ecommerce search implementations are unable to return the correct result unless the customer uses the exact same word as the site (‘mobile case’ versus ‘phone case’ for instance).
  • Support thematic searches, such as ‘gifts for him’.
  • Always suggest alternatives and suggestions in the event of no result.

3. Leverage user-generated content for stronger social validation

When a consumer has found a product that interests them, there is an expectation for multiple hi-resolution product images. This expectation becomes an absolute necessity during the holiday marketing season when competition is high and shoppers are frantically bouncing from site to site looking for the perfect product.

When adding images to your site for your products, here are a few quick tips to consider:

  1. The images should be shot from multiple angles and include close-ups, so that every aspect of the product is visible.
  2. Include more than three to five images on a product page to increase cart volume.
  3. Adding multiple product images also helps reduce the potential for product returns, as the shopper is able to clearly analyze what they’re buying (which minimizes any unwanted surprises).
  4. If you really want to master this tactic, incorporate a product video to help the shopper see the product visualize the product further.

By showing a customer the products that are selling well, or have been identified as particularly suitable for a certain age group or gift recipient, you make the buying decision easy for them.

Pro tip: User-generated photography is just one of many ways you can transform the way your products are shown to shoppers. Check out 6 of our top product recommendation examples that can be implemented across key pages of your ecommerce website.


4. Encourage shoppers to stay on your site with pre-exit holiday marketing content

When it comes to finding the perfect deal at any time of year, many shoppers can be indecisive. During the holidays when brands are competing to offer the best offers and products, the chances of a shopper landing on your site and leaving empty handed are higher than ever.

Some call it bribery, we call it incentive – but reeling your shoppers back onto your site with a compelling offer can mean the difference between converting them into customers and losing them to your competitors.

Enter: the pre-exit pop-up.

A once frowned-upon tactic to increase conversion has become one of the top way to keep consumers engaged with your brand. Through the use of behavioral targeting, you can keep indecisive shoppers onsite with a personalized exit pop-up based on each individual shopper’s interests and browsing history.

For example, a new visitor can be offered a pop-up containing a special discount for first-time shoppers, which helps build a positive experience from the start. You can also take this chance to collect their email address to send that discount and boost your email database in the process.

A returning visitor might see products they’ve previously browsed to encourage a purchase.

A visitor who is about to leave your site can be enticed with the products they’ve either left in their cart (if any) or with products they’ve already viewed.


5. Clearly display your product discounts to increase order value and conversion rate

It goes without saying that every part of your website should display discounted items and that these discounts should be pushed to the forefront – but some retailers struggle with finding an ideal way to display them without impacting other product sales.

One way to beef up your holiday sales – especially in your Black Friday strategy when shoppers tend to search for the best deals – is to make discounts as clearly visible as possible. Amend your styling to include the products original price, crossed-out, or even show the exact percentage that would be saved. A change as subtle as this can hugely impact order value and drive the discount home.

2015

6. Maximize the rise in email marketing during the holiday season

42% of buyers prefer to receive emails with personalized content, and it’s these emails that can boast an impressive average Click Through Rate (CTR) of 24% and a conversion rate of 6%. If a customer has bought or even just visited your store before, you can use Nosto’s Personalized Widgets, which allow you to automate the personalization of each email on a 1:1 basis.

The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guidelines

You can see below how handbag retailer, meli melo, highlights both popular gifts and previously browsed products, maximizing the chance of the shopper finding something that appeals to them. During the holiday period you can combine this approach with a discount code or further sale promotion, to really increase conversions.

The cart abandonment email

Cart abandonment emails are a great way of counteracting the sky high abandoned cart rates typical at this time of year, and are absolutely GDPR compliant. Using an exit-intent pop-up, as Vulpine does, is the perfect way to capture email addresses and prompt shoppers to go back to items by emailing them directly to them. This solves several problems: it helps shoppers keep track of their items when they browse on different devices (61% of people browse on their mobile then complete their purchase on their desktop), it allows people to email their wishlist to their friends and family, and of course, it simply reminds shoppers of items they’ve left behind.

The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guide Templates

Tip: You can set up a ‘We miss you’ email campaign using Nosto in just a few clicks!

Your holiday email marketing checklist

  • Match your sale type with your customer demographic
  • Optimize your email marketing campaign through personalization
  • Activate an email collection mechanism on your site
  • Ensure your emails render correctly on mobile devices

Extra holiday hints

  • If you’re hosting a sale, don’t be tempted to greet your customers with your more profitable items first. They know what they’re there for, so clearly signpost your sale from the front page with a big splash.
  • Delight longstanding VIP customers (according to high email engagement, lifetime value, frequency of purchase or average order value) by giving them something extra, such as early sales access or an additional discount.
  • Automate as much as you can now, for a low-stress holiday
    period!

Finally, and unrelated but still VERY important side note if your business is based in the EU: Check out our blog that covers how to make sure your email marketing is GDPR compliant. This should put your mind at rest that it’s more than possible to be both compliant and effective this holiday season.


7. Managing (and leveraging) product returns after the holidays

Realistically, your business will probably be holding a January sale in the first month of the new year, to clear out old stock and make space for new inventory. To keep the momentum going, it’s importance to create a great customer experience and the opportunity to create long-term fans out of those people who bought from you last year. However, one dreaded reality for ecommerce retailers still lingers: product returns.

The days of faking a grateful smile on the receipt of an unwanted gift appear to be behind us. Delivery company UPS has gone as far as christening the 5th of January National Returns Day, with shoppers returning 1.3 million packages with UPS alone on this day, and more than 5.8 million packages during the first full week of January.

If this sounds like bad news, it doesn’t have to be….

They also found that 45% of people made an additional purchase when making a return online. In some cases, this could even be the first contact they’ve had with your store – so this is a first impression that counts. A bad returns process won’t stop someone making the return, but it will stop them shopping with you again.

How do you make that positive first impression? Online shoppers reported that free returns shipping (60%), a hassle-free policy (51%) and easy to print returns labels (44%) as the three most important factors in a good returns experience.

Increasing Lifetime Value

You might be tempted to think that if someone is buying a gift, they might not be your target market for the rest of the year, since the purchase wasn’t based on their own likes and interests. But don’t be too hasty. An RJMetrics study found that the average ecommerce business acquires 23% of its new customers during the holiday period (the average two month period would normally see 17% of the year’s new customers). While these customers did have a 13% lower lifetime value (CLV), this isn’t too harmful, given the significant increase in overall customer acquisition.

There’s plenty of data around the fact that re-engaging oldprospects is more cost effective than going after new customers(the much quoted ecommerce stat is that it costs 5x more attractinga new customer than keeping an existing one), and yet 44% ofbusinesses10 focus on acquisition rather than retention. Creating apositive customer experience via things like returns is one strategy,but re-engaging those for whom you’ve dropped off their radarrequires something more proactive.

The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guide 2020

‘We Miss You’ emails

This is where the email portion of your holiday marketing strategy comes back into play. By using strategies such as sending an email showing other gifts within a few days of the initial purchase you may well prompt a second purchase. Another 42% made their second purchase during the following 10 months – reminding the customer about your store is absolutely worth it, whatever the time of year.

The overall lesson? Holiday shoppers are rarely holiday-only shoppers – it’s essential to get back in touch with your first time customers in January (if not before!).

Kick off your holiday marketing strategy by preparing for the Black Friday rush

With the Black Friday shopping season just around the corner, now is the time to start kicking your holiday marketing strategy into high gear. We’ve kicked off a special mid-year roundup of ecommerce marketing strategies to unveil exclusive tips and tricks for onsite optimization. With these tips, retailers can drive higher traffic, conversion, order value and more to maximize performance in a highly competitive sales period.

Prepare your eCommerce for the holiday selling season

You’re getting your eCommerce business ready for a busy and productive holiday sales season, identifying the next top products, placing your orders, planning your marketing, and overhauling your logistics process so that you don’t miss out on lucrative sales opportunities. Don’t forget to add your foreign VAT obligations to your long to-do list.

No one enjoys paying taxes, but it’s vital to prepare ahead of time to meet your VAT requirements. You don’t want to see your profit disappear in VAT fraud charges. Foreign VAT rules can be bewildering, especially if you’re new to cross-border sales, and tax authorities across the EU are cracking down on online sellers.

The EU currently loses an estimated €5 billion each year to eCommerce fraud. This means that if you make a mistake in your VAT return, you are more likely to be fined for attempted VAT fraud than to find a sympathetic ear. VAT applies to all eCommerce sellers, whether you’re selling through your own website or blog or through an online marketplace like Amazon or eBay. It’s crucial to make sure that you have the right processes in place to pay your VAT requirements correctly.

Here are some of the things you need to know to get your eCommerce shop VAT-ready.

Where do your VAT obligations lie?

The first thing you need to clear up is to understand where you are liable for VAT payments. This isn’t as simple as it sounds, because different countries have different rules regarding VAT liability.

For example, if your business is in the UK, but you sell to customers in Poland, do you have to pay VAT to the UK tax authorities, or to the Polish tax authorities? What’s more, if you keep your goods in a warehouse in Germany, you might have to pay VAT in Germany instead. How do you find out where to pay your VAT? It all relies on the ‘distance selling threshold’.

Understand distance selling rules

Under current EU regulations, you’ll need to pay VAT to the country of origin if your sales are under the distance selling threshold for that country, and in the destination country if your sales exceed that threshold. So for example, the distance selling threshold for the UK is £70,000. If your total sales to customers in Poland come to less than £70,000 this year, you’ll need to pay VAT in the UK. If they come to more than that, you’ll need to pay VAT in Poland.

However, keeping your goods in a warehouse in another country changes your VAT obligations. If you store your products in an Amazon fulfilment warehouse in Germany, for example, you’ll need to follow the German distance selling threshold of €100,000 instead. Until you pass this threshold, you’ll pay VAT in Germany, and after you cross the threshold you’ll pay it in Poland.

The 2015 Holiday Ecommerce Guide Template

Know where you’re NOT obligated in VAT

Due to the complexity of foreign VAT regulations, it’s not uncommon for eCommerce companies to be charged VAT by suppliers – VAT that they are not obligated to pay.

Let’s go back to your eCommerce business in the UK. If you order goods from a supplier in The Netherlands, you have no requirement to pay VAT on those goods, and the supplier should not be charging you. From an oversight or misunderstanding in the supplier’s accounting department, however, VAT may be accidentally added to your invoice. For this reason, it is wise to always double-check your invoice to make sure you’re not being accidentally charged or overcharged on VAT you’re not obligated in.

If you do realize that your eCommerce company has been charged – and has paid – unnecessary VAT, it is not the end of the story. Through the foreign VAT reclaim process, your company can receive a VAT refund for the overcharge.

Set up your VAT reporting system

If you set up your VAT tracking system in advance, you’ll find it much easier to keep on top of your VAT requirements. First of all, it’s a good idea to make sure that you have a bank account in every country where you need to pay foreign VAT, so that you can pay in local currency and be ready to receive any VAT refund on your expenses.

Take a few minutes to check the VAT rates on your products for every country where you might make a sale, as well as your country of origin (this is either where your office is located, or where the fulfilment warehouse that stores your goods is located). Each member state can set their own VAT rates, so they vary across the EU. Pay attention to whether standard or reduced rates apply to your products, because that’s also different in every country.

You should also prepare an easy-to-use system for recording your VAT input and expenditure, so that you don’t lose track of how much VAT you owe. This will make it faster for you to pay VAT on time, and also means that you won’t need to panic if you face a VAT audit and the tax authorities demand to see your records.

Within the EU, 18 countries have online or digital VAT reporting options, to make it faster and easier for you to report and pay foreign VAT. These include the UK, Germany, and Italy. Register for digital reporting whenever the option exists.

When you’re informed about your VAT obligations in advance and already have the right system in place, handling your foreign VAT requirements doesn’t have to be a headache. Then you can focus on your marketing, logistics, and all the other components you need to make this your highest-revenue holiday season ever.

If you realize that your company has been charged unnecessary VAT by a foreign supplier, be in touch for guidance on how to receive a refund through the VAT reclaim process.

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