On the 20th of September we co-hosted an event together with dotMailer at their offices in London Bridge. Our strategist Stephen presented best practice advice on how to tackle the Holidays from an eCommerce perspective. In our world Holidays worth celebrating include more than just Christmas and Easter.

Know your dates – Why take made up holidays seriously?

First thing to get right when planning for campaigns are the dates. Did you think made up holidays for shopping were just a fad? Think again, as not participating in these holidays could result in missed opportunities for extra revenue. Last year the week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday generated more than £1.1 billion in sales in the UK.

More unknown holidays such as Green Monday, occurring on the second Monday in December marks the biggest spike in Christmas shopping, as it traditionally marks “last chance” to order gifts in order for them to arrive in time. With today’s delivery capabilities the date is likely to be pushed closer towards Christmas.

Know your emails

To begin with, and the array of marketing emails being sent, optimising the subject line is crucial in order to draw your customers interest. Another key thing in today’s sea of emails is making the sure emails have elements of personalisation and segmentation, which you could provide. Adding an element of urgency can also give your campaign an extra drive. The fear of missing out gives a sense of urgency and can therefore lead to an increase in conversion.

Know your data

Have a look at how your eCommerce store performed last year. Analyse the data from last year’s sales period in order find patterns in what has worked well. You could analyse the optimal discount in order to not risk an unnecessary loss in revenue, investigate peaks in timings and what particular SKU’s worked the best to optimise stock levels and check support to not risk your website crashing.

You can also study the email and adwords data, in order to identify key phrases that worked particularly well during the same period last year and implement the ones still relevant.

Know your marketing

Plan and define what channels you want to be active in prior and during a campaign. Use data to see what channels performed well the year before and make them a priority.

You could create gift ideas in various price ranges in order to create easily selectable brackets. Use the data from the particularly popular SKU’s to optimise these.

Consider things like pop-ups, although often causing a bit of annoyance, they do prove to be an efficient tool for conversion.

To find out more about Stephen’s presentation email Stephen at stephen.hill@vaimo.com