Retaining customers throughout the year is difficult in itself, but its especially important to reactivate lapsed customers, while igniting new customer relationships for the holiday eCommerce season. How can retailers gain competitive advantage in the holiday online retail market without tiring out their customers with months of promotions? Data is the key.
Work Smarter
Holiday is not the ideal time for A/B testing, heavy UX experimentation, or not knowing target demographics inside-and-out. Best-of-breed online merchants will already have worked out the optimal experience for their consumers well before the holiday buying season begins. Providing customers with a relevant, targeted experience should happen several months before Quarter 4, in summer and early fall.
There are endless choices for site monitoring, analytics and reporting. But one platform stands out from the pack for Magento merchants: Magento Business Intelligence. After an acquisition of an award-winning analytics firm, Magento absorbed the proprietary technology and adapted the platform to serve Magento clients as one true source for making intelligent, data-driven decisions. Harness the power of the specialized holiday dashboard, as well as native features such as traffic sources, trends, demographic and geographic insights for a more efficient and productive holiday strategy.
The Back-end Affects the Experience
Ensuring optimal performance during peak traffic times such as holiday requires a scalable, agile solution. Magento has native features built in to decrease load times, support large and complex product catalogs and eliminate diminished performance during seasonal load times.
Shaving off even just a few seconds from each page load time is proven to decrease customer exit rate and increase conversion rate. Ensuring a stable back-end frees up time for associates to focus on strategic initiatives for holiday customer experience rather than worry about improper back-end configuration.
In addition to the integrity and quality of the back-end architecture, administrators and customer service associates need to have robust and easy-to-use tools to make on-the-fly changes that the holiday season often requires. Magento supports multiple concurrent administrators, and brands that run multiple sites can access all of the site functions in one centralized dashboard. To cut down on warehouse resource drain, customer service associates (CSRs) can create, edit and modify orders directly in the Magento panel, as well as send out tracking information and updates.
Streamlining manual functions is critical to gaining customer loyalty through holiday and beyond. Magento has built-in these considerations to their eCommerce platform, it’s a winning combination for this vital 25 percent of the year.
Create Loyalty-driving Experiences
Current Magento merchants know the benefits of the sizeable Magento 1 and Magento 2 Marketplace of partner-developed modules. The marketplace contains enhancements and integrations ranging from shipping, to sales, marketing and website optimization. The unique nature of the Magento platform encourages partner and developer collaboration; creating a community of unique, cutting-edge optimizations that can be integrated into any Magento site.
In addition to the marketplace, the Magento 2 platform developers have truly incorporated the key marketing and promotional capabilities merchants and solutions providers were asking for. With customer email inboxes overflowing with offers and the online marketplace saturated with percent-off promotions daily, marketing and promotions need to reach a higher level of creativity to win customers. Magento 2 Enterprise Edition natively supports inbound and outbound marketing features such as:
- Wishlists, Registries and Loyalty Programs
- Rewards Points
- Customer Reviews
- Segmented Customer Capabilities
- Private and Invite-only Sales
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Enhancements
- Cross-sells, Up-sells and Related Products
- Marketing and Sales Email Configuration
- Support for multiple Currencies and Languages
The ultimate end-of-the-road of any online commerce merchant is to stand out from—and ultimately lead—the pack. A reliable, scalable eCommerce platform that is jam-packed with forward-facing features, such as Magento, is indispensable to reaching this summit. Learn more about leveraging Magento for holiday, let’s chat!
