Whether it’s during summer sales, end of year sales or during special promotions like Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Christmas Sale, your e-commerce activity is variable and can be very intense during these specific periods. In this blog article, Wordans provides you with the keys to prepare your business for these peaks of activities.
Check the performance of your website
Even before defining the sales and marketing strategies to be implemented to take advantage of high sales periods, Wordans’ experts advise you to perform a step that is often forgotten, but necessary to avoid missing out on any opportunity: perform an audit of your website! Your website is the place where customers will validate their shopping cart. It is therefore impossible to let computer problems affect your sales. A bug, a slow website or a complicated interface could frustrate a potential customer and make him leave your online store before the sale is completed. We strongly recommend that you check the speed of your website before the targeted period, but also to consult the feedback of your customers on their shopping experience in order to improve the possible navigation problems. Finally, it may be a good idea to review the different payment processes offered on your page, as well as how well they work: make sure the payment methods are easy, reliable and fast.
Adapt and decorate your website
During your peak periods of activity, the traffic of your website will increase a lot. Whatever the period, it is wise to adapt the theme of your website and your advertising visuals to the time concerned: for the Christmas holidays, your potential customers will appreciate being lulled by a warm atmosphere when they visit your page, decorated with garlands, baubles and even Santa’s little elves. For Black Friday, your landing page should immediately immerse customers in the surrounding shopping fervor, with promotional percentages and discount labels clearly present on your site. For Valentine’s Day, hearts and the sweetness of pink and red passion should flood your landing page. You will have understood, whatever the period, the important thing is to decorate your website, its tabs and its different pages, in accordance with the theme of the period. A pleasant site to visit is a site on which customers will enjoy browsing. And if the omnipresent atmosphere lends itself to it, they will be in the best conditions to buy.
Prepare your promotions in advance
An optimal preparation must allow you to arrive ready with all your promotions, on the day of the beginning of the sales increase period, so that you only have to press a button to launch your campaigns and analyze their reach. To do so, you will have to select the products that will be promoted in advance. On Wordans, you will be able to use our own campaigns to choose your products from the best suppliers. You can also compose batches of products according to the period (for example, special batches for Christmas). Each product will have to be linked to a discount or a promotional offer clearly defined in advance according to your business plan. This way, on each day of the high activity period, you will only have to launch the planned promotions to boost your sales.
Develop your communication plan
In order to make the most of the sales’ opportunity in the holiday season, sales or Black Friday, the trick is to plan. A good communication plan will allow you to attract more customers and put all the chances on your side to get the maximum benefit from these periods. We recommend that you first identify these moments of high activity for your business. Then, you will have to define the different communication campaigns for each event, and the different channels of diffusion of these campaigns. You can define specific communication strategies via Google ads. On social networks, each campaign will have to be adapted: for instagram for example, favor short and catchy videos. In order not to be caught off guard, it is better to prepare these videos and the texts that accompany them several weeks in advance, so that you can modify them and adapt the trends if necessary. On social networks, a well-prepared campaign is guaranteed to generate buzz.
Plan your inventory
Last but not least, adapt your logistics and stocks. Indeed, a promotional campaign designed to increase sales during peak periods will not work if you do not have the capacity to ensure the corresponding logistics behind it. To be able to take full advantage of the end of year sales, for example, you must make sure that the products you choose to promote are in stock in sufficient quantities at the time of the promotion. It is therefore necessary to anticipate these periods as much as possible in order to get supplies early enough from your suppliers, and not to be unprepared. In order to calculate the best quantities to order according to your sales forecasts, you can use a CRM tool that will do the work for you by analyzing your data and those of your purchases. Don’t let yourself be surprised. Think that competitors also anticipate these periods of peak activity, and your suppliers’ delivery times may be disrupted. Finally, ask yourself if your company has the capacity to meet a large volume of orders in a short period of time. If not, you will need to plan to employ additional staff on an ad hoc basis to fulfill orders or prepare shipments in a timely manner.
You now have all the cards in hand to make your e-commerce as efficient as possible during peak sales periods. Visit our website www.wordans.co.uk to discover our thousands of references at the best prices, and discover all our special offers on our instagram page @wordans_europe.
