Holidays bring a fresh feeling and new trends about how people live and spend. Previous years’ data show that many people spend a greater percentage of their annual shopping budget in the last quarter of the year. That late-fall season is here, and e-commerce businesses will want to tighten their belts and rethink their whole marketing strategy to get the most out of the 2021 holiday season.

Last year, the e-commerce industry saw a growth of about 32% due to the challenges brought forth by the COVID-19 health crisis. This shift appears to have continued in 2021 even as people still battle with the pandemic and post-pandemic effects. Online shops and stores can tap into this if they restructure their digital marketing to accurately meet the trends people are forming and following during this holiday season. To help you, we’ve broken this into the following marketing insights to make you the go-getter choice for online shoppers.

1. Revamp Your Content

Over the past year, many things have changed, so has what people are searching for and buying. Most online buyers would prefer to key in a phrase of what they want in their search engines instead of directly visiting a specific shop’s site. Therefore, SEO is vital, and if you still want to rely on last year’s Black Friday or Cyber Monday keywords to get you on top of Google search results, you might miss a lot.

Research which 2021 holiday keywords people might mostly be interested in. Create content for your blog using select keywords that really matter and have low competition in your industry, especially from megastore competitors. Additionally, tailor in new content and guides that are informative and helpful to your potential customers.

2. Optimize Your PPC

While pay-per-click campaigns can reap booming profits, knowing exactly where to put your bucks is critical in order to realize this level of success. A good place to start is to understand your competitors and what you can do to beat them. This includes reviewing data from previous years to know where they outperformed you, plus your campaigns that didn’t chart as successfully as ones that did.

By conducting a digital marketing assessment, you can easily review and organize your campaigns and digital assets to help you separate them into more focused, specific campaigns this year. The upshot is that you need to create and schedule holiday-specific ads that take into account holiday keywords.

3. Your Cart Has Hidden Potential

Cart abandonment is a common pain for most e-commerce businesses, especially during holiday peaks like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But all is not lost; you can still position your brand to make the most out of people’s pending cart. Here is how to achieve that this holiday season:

• Optimization: Most visitors are likely to leave the cart if your checkout process is long and sluggish. Streamline your checkout to make it as easy as possible for buyers to complete the order. Optimizing also means the customer should know about other costs, such as shipping and taxes, as early as possible. Cart optimization can reward you by up to 35%.
• Notifications: Use on-site notices as well as pop-ups to target your site visitors after they have put something in the cart. This could read something like, “checkout now to qualify for a 20% Black Friday discount!”
• Messages: You can mix both pop-ups and email notifications. Use pop-ups to encourage visitors to finish their purchase when they want to leave your site. Or you can send emails to remind them of the items in the cart. Make sure you personalize them, e.g. “We thought you might need this item X that you left on the cart during this coming Thanksgiving Day….” This is also an excellent opportunity to offer special coupon discounts to encourage them to make the purchase. Abandonment messages can generate up to 10% conversion rates.

4. Prepare Your Site

The above three approaches can’t work for you if your site is slow, has poor UI/UX, or is experiencing frequent downtimes. Therefore, it’s vital to factor in the increased traffic you expect on your website during the holiday season. Assess and make any necessary improvements to your e-commerce site’s speed and user experience. Additionally, if possible, change to a holiday theme and declutter landing pages to remove superfluous info.

The digital landscape is an ever-changing environment, and so is digital marketing. Focus your expertise and energy on your day-to-day business operations while we take care of how to grow and sell your brand through proven digital marketing strategies. Connect with our expert marketing team today to get started.