Holiday season generates maximum business in the shortest period for most of the online businesses. The preparation for holiday season starts at least 6 months earlier in most of the businesses. Few businesses are little late and they start waking up just before the holiday season. This article is for these businesses to get their act together for holiday sales seasons in the shortest possible time.
1. Your website :
Your website is your face to the world. Use following check list to check about this.
- Responsive design : Make sure that your website is responsive. What we meant by responsive is that it should render correctly on mobile devices viz mobile and tablet. Remember, according to survey 60% of the visitors visit via mobile devices. So if your website is not mobile friendly, please work on this aspect on war footing. Talk to us if you need any expedited help.
- Website content : Please check your website for the appropriate content. Writing clean and original content improves your website ranking and helps in SEO.
- Metadata and Keywords : Please make sure that you use correct metadata and keywords so that your site can be found by search engines.
- Set up google analytics : Set up google analytics for monitoring the visitors, goals , behaviors etc of your visitors. Analyze the traffic at all times and make the appropriate corrections
- Security vulnerabilities : Check if your site has any security vulnerability. Speak to experts and get the audit done.
- Load Testing : During the holiday season, the traffic to your site may increase multi-fold. Work with your IT team and get your site load tested to avoid crashes during the peak season.
2. Products and pricing :
- Product upload : Create appropriate images and upload your products to your site. Double check for any errors in descriptions, features etc. As far as possible automate this uploading process. It can be very time consuming and frustrating to upload 100s and 1000s of products to online e-commerce system.
- Also set up your pricing appropriately
3. Supply chain management :
- The success of any online business also depends on how efficient their supply chain is. You can get into terrible situation if there is a demand supply mis-match.
- Talk to your suppliers and set up your supply chain network appropriately
- Stock your warehouse . Deploy warehouse management system / Inventory management system for better control
- Set up automatic connectors between your e-commerce store and inventory management system. This saves tremendous time and increases productivity by leaps and bounds. Check out our e-commerce, crm, accounting, email marketing and inventory connectors on ready connectors page.
- Set up your drop ship arrangements.
4. Customer Support :
- Remember, these days customer support is new sales.
- Set up customer support process.
- Set up the escalation process as well.
- Clearly mention support timings on the website.
- Set up communication process
- Train customer support agents properly. Excellent customer support delights the customers and forces them to remain loyal with your brand. It takes lots of efforts to get new customers whereas getting repeat order from the same customer is very easy if you maintain highest standard of customer support.
5. Marketing/ Sales :
- Set up your simple marketing campaigning system as mentioned in ( How to create a perfect campaign management system in 7 steps for Holiday season?) if not already done
- Plan your email campaigns / ad-word campaigns / social campaigns
- Set up budget for these campaigns
- Create campaigns, execute and monitor them
- Create customer feedback system and monitor for any issues
If you need any help in automating some of these activities, please talk to us. Good luck !
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