The 2021 holiday shopping season is set up to be yet another challenge for brands looking to grow profitably, with consumers’ shopping habits and spending behaviors transformed by the events of the past year and a half. The brands that don’t proactively anticipate roadblocks or face challenges head-on will be left in the digital dust.
As we approach a post-pandemic world, everything is unprecedented. The 2021 holiday shopping season will be no exception.
Your brand’s holiday strategy can’t succeed without a secure foundation in place. These tips will help you ensure that your brand is set up for success this holiday season.
1. Keep a Close Eye on Your Product Feeds
Providing your shoppers with accurate information is step zero. Ensuring the data in your live product feed stays up-to-date is absolutely critical, especially if holiday seasonality brings lots of changes to your pricing and availability.
If you want to get alerts if something unexpected happens and a certain percentage of products get removed, consider utilizing Google Merchant Center’s Product Data Alerts feature.
2. Be Proactive About Supply Chain Strain
Product availability is top-of-mind for brands selling on Amazon this holiday season as supply chain strain remains a global concern. Consider using FBM or direct fulfillment as a backup method to ensure you have strong inventory at Amazon before Cyber 5 and throughout the holiday season. Off Amazon, make sure to call out shipping details in your ad copy.
To encourage shoppers to make a purchase, craft copy that emphasizes your product availability and inventory. Countdown timers can be used to show customers how much time they have left to make a purchase to guarantee their gift arrives in time for the holidays.
3. Optimize Your Organic Presence
There are lots of things you can do to proactively ensure your website’s SEO is in top shape for the holidays, like optimizing your pages ahead of time for products that are more likely to be given as gifts.
Make sure any dedicated pages you create for email marketing are tied into your current navigation or redirected to the most relevant page once the event ends. If you have any seasonal pages, don’t delete them and create a new page every year. Keep the same page, update it, and reuse it with an evergreen URL.
You’ll also want to submit your page to Google Search Console at least one month prior to your big sale and include promotional dates in your copy in case it shows up prior to the beginning of the sale.
4. Use Personalization to Connect With Customers
Provide personalized recommendations to shoppers. Many sites utilize recommendation sections like “You May Also Like” or “Customers Also Shopped For” on their product pages. If you don’t use this feature already, be sure to enable it before the holidays to boost your average order value (AOV) for each order.
Already using this functionality? Consider modifying the language to match the intent of the user by relabeling these sections as “Additional Gift Options,” “One For You, One For Them,” or the like.
Tying It All Together
The holiday shopping journey is a long, winding path from beginning to end. The key to successfully navigating 2021’s unprecedented shopping season is to take an omnichannel approach and make it as convenient as possible for shoppers to buy from your brand.
A solid foundation is critical to a successful holiday strategy. Keep a close eye on your product feeds, be proactive about supply chain strain, optimize your organic presence, and use personalization to help ensure your brand is set up for success this holiday season.
As consumer habits continue to fluctuate with the coronavirus pandemic, does your brand feel prepared to exceed your goals not just this holiday season but into 2022? Our proven digital experts can help you uncover profitable advertising opportunities, optimize your website, generate leads, and more to accelerate your ecommerce growth momentum.
Get in touch with the proven digital experts at ROI to join in on the opportunity to achieve your brand’s biggest goals and see how we can help you across Google, Amazon, Facebook, and more.
