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If you're an
online retailer looking at the impending holiday season, you
might think it's too late to make any changes to your website
that will affect holiday sales. You might even be thinking
you'll just have to see how the season shakes out online and
make changes next year.
For you, here's an early holiday gift: It's absolutely not too
late. Retailers still have a solid month before the heavy online
shopping season begins, and there is still time to make website
enhancements or tweaks that can improve your shopper’s
customer satisfaction and impact your bottom line.
Specifically, here are six enhancements you can put to good
effect right now, for this season:
1. Price cautiously during the holidays.
Be sure the impact of product pricing and shipping will have the
intended effect on increasing revenues before you rush into
making ”free shipping" offer.
2. Focus on search and advanced search
functions. It may sound obvious, but many retailers
don't understand that the holiday season brings the highest
percentage of first-time visitors to their site through shopping
search engines and aggregators. The biggest complaint I hear
from online shoppers is that the search function is difficult to
navigate or the advanced search is hidden.
3. In a study about online holiday shopping my company did last
year, the two things that emerged as having the highest impact
on whether customers were likely to buy were product
browsing and ordering process. Product browsing can
be dealt with by addressing search functions as mentioned above,
but when it comes to ordering process, make sure you have
adequate and easily available online help.
Many retailers
"hide" their 800 number or help functions because they
may not want to staff them. But remember: If someone is looking
for help on how to buy his wife or son a widget for Christmas
and he can't find it, he'll go elsewhere to buy.
4. Even if you
don't normally have one, turn on a continuous
"red alert" customer feedback channel. It
is especially important during the high-volume holiday season to
capture customer feedback in real time so you can address
problems quickly. Many online customers won't pick up the phone
to call customer service if they hit an impasse — they'll
click to a competitor's site.
5. Be aware that Spanish speakers
are now the largest minority in the country and, according to
Shop.org, they are the single fastest growing segment of website
shoppers. Do not ignore this audience. It is not too late to add
product descriptions, ordering processes and surveys in Spanish
in order to capture this valuable segment.
6. Review your recent click stream and
customer satisfaction metrics with an eye toward
last-minute changes. It is not too late to make enhancements to
your website that could have a huge affect on your holiday
sales, and you could be overlooking something quick and easy.
One of our clients was able to make a quick website adjustment
after customer satisfaction metrics identified that shoppers
couldn’t find what they wanted to buy online because they were
confused by the category titles (for example, when home decor
items are organized by collection name rather than by the room
they’re intended for).
After spending
months trying to prioritize website changes, customer
satisfaction metrics identified a simple change for this
retailer that they were able to implement in just a few days
time. Almost immediately, the change led to a significant
increase in conversion rates.
These are six issues that we consistently see having the
greatest impact on customer purchasing behaviors. All six are
things that companies are aware of on some level.
The trick,
especially this late in the season, is to put aside
experimentation and guesswork about web development. Instead,
it's time to understand and emphasize factors that have a direct
impact on the depth of customer satisfaction and loyalty,
therefore paying direct dividends.
Highly satisfied
shoppers will shop more often and spend more. Focus your
efforts, both large and small, on improving their satisfaction
and improving your success — both this holiday season and
beyond — and you will win your customers’ loyalty. |
