Build Better Customer Relationships This Holiday Season

Yesterday, I reported that a recent study shows that for ecommerce merchants, engaging directly with customers during the holiday shopping season is a more effective method for driving sales and conversions than focusing on traditional marketing strategies.

While the survey provided a lot of useful information about why it is important to connect with customers online, it didn’t really address the question of how this is supposed to be done. I decided to do some research of my own to discover some effective ways that ecommerce merchants can connect and engage with customers during the biggest shopping season of the year—and all year round.

Look At Your Site Through Your Customer’s Eyes

Let’s pretend that you are an online shopper during the holidays—probably not much of a stretch for most of us. You have a vague idea of what you want to buy, and you’re ready to make a purchase.

Let’s say you go to a store that sells pajamas online and the navigation is confusing. There are more categories of pajamas online than you even knew existed and they are all poorly categorized.  Once you finally find the right pair, you start the checkout process only to discover that it is even more confusing than the selection process. What do you do?

If you guessed, abandon the cart and move on to a competitor’s site, you’d probably be correct.  All of the holiday sales and promotions in the world won’t help you net any sales if your site isn’t visually appealing and easy to use in the first place.

Speaking of pajamas online, checkout the examples from Elizabeth Cotton below:

The site is easy to navigate, the products are well organized, the design is visually appealing, and the checkout process is quick and easy.

Use Social Media Carefully

In other words, it’s good that you have some Facebook fans and Twitter followers, but it doesn’t mean that you need to post/update your status 6 times a day, even during the holiday season. You can promote your store’s sales and promotions just as effectively with less updating, especially if you weren’t doing a lot of social media promotion before.

Focus on the “what” rather than the frequency. A sale on your most popular products is something that you should promote, but it isn’t necessary to repeatedly remind people every hour on the hour. Sharing anything just for the sake of sharing something is also a bad idea—again, it is about the quality, not the quantity of your company’s social media engagement that matters. This is especially true during the holiday season, when your customers are likely receiving many more notifications of sales and online promotions than they would normally.

Alphabet Signs is very creative with their social media use. They take common objects-signs, and make them interesting and relevant to their followers and fans with “Sign News,” a daily update from their blog that features sign-related news from across the United States.

As the survey from yesterday pointed out, appealing to traditional holiday themes of family and gift-giving isn’t always the way to go. Some of your customers may not celebrate Christmas or Hanukah, and might just be visiting your store to take advantage of holiday discounts.

This doesn’t mean that you need to completely overlook the season either. Internet shoppers expect ecommerce stores to acknowledge holidays—see Michael Serna’s guest post about seasonal banner creation for some tips on how to do this, but focusing too narrowly on themes might end up alienating some of your potential customers.
I Do Engravables, for example, does a good job of appealing to their primary demographic (brides, grooms, people searching for unique wedding gifts) while still making sure to highlight the other uses of their signature product, Engravable Signature Photo Mats.

By pointing out that these mats make great gifts for retirements, birthdays, graduations, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, etc, IDE appeals to a wider demographic while focusing on their target at the same time.

With the holiday season just around the corner, I know that many of you store owners are making preparations. How are you getting your store ready for the holiday season, and how do you plan on connecting with your customers this year?