Get ready for Christmas with your e-commerce social media
Christmas comes but once a year and, for many businesses, it’s the most lucrative time of the year – if they play their cards right.
Here are five tips to ensure that your social media supports a successful sales period.
Do any testing well in advance
Your aim is to make sure that the busy Christmas period comes off smoothly so, at the absolute latest, you should have finished any testing you need (or want) to do by the end of November.
After that, leave well alone until the New Year unless you absolutely have to make a change.
On the subject of testing, load testing is a must. You do not want to be in the situation where you create wonderful adverts only to have your visitor abandon your site due to loading issues, particularly since this may result in a hit to your organic search results, too.
Don’t overdose on discounts
Everyone loves a bargain and some people will go to great lengths to get one, but offering endless discounts can actually dilute both the significance of the discount and the perceived value of your offering.
Instead, focus on demonstrating value and inspiring trust. Remember, for instance, that most people shopping around the festive season are buying items that need to arrive by Christmas so you need to inspire confidence that you will make sure that your customers get their gifts on time.
Look at last year’s statistics for inspiration rather than instruction
You can learn from what went well and what didn’t but do keep in mind that times change and you need to adapt to them.
For example, mobile keeps getting more and more important so, even if you didn’t do as well with mobile as you thought you should have last year, you want to stick with it instead of giving up.
Put mobile front and centre of everything you do
On that note, it may be impossible to overstate the importance of catering to mobile users in everything you do.
Remember that you’re highly unlikely to be the only one who’s rushed off their feet during the festive season. There’s a strong possibility that this will be the busiest time of the year for your customers too and hence that they be fitting in a spot of Christmas shopping on their mobiles whenever they have a spare few minutes.
Have your customer service/social media team on yellow alert at all times
If there’s one time of year when your customer service/social media team has to be at the absolute top of their A game, then it’s at Christmas. You must be ready to deal with any complaints/negativity promptly and professionally. It would be brutally ironic if you prepared to deliver an outstanding social media campaign with everything needed to support it, only to have it completely derailed by a complaint or a negative review. Remember, too, that, quite bluntly, complaints and negativity don’t have to be justified to have an impact on your reputation – unless you are ready to deal with them effectively.