When it comes to online holiday shopping, site traffic matters more than ever. The most effective online retailers tailor their site content and marketing campaigns to maximize their return during these busy seasons. If you need to know how to get customers to your online store for their holiday spending, consider this information as you plan for success.
Understand when people shop online
Black Friday brings the year’s greatest discounts and, of course, draws the biggest crowds. Many online retailers maximize their presence on this day, but there are other days to consider as well. Most experts rely on comScore information to view online spending habits from year to year. This information shows enormous growth of online spending from one year to the next, but it’s biggest surprise comes from the birth of two new shopping holidays. ComScore tracks e-commerce, non-travel spending every year. This includes all sorts of sales, but it excludes airfare and hotel accommodations. According to their data, the biggest online shopping day of 2020 was not Black Friday but Cyber Monday, three days later. Even Green Monday, which follows a week behind Cyber Monday, drew in 1.4 billion US dollars, more than 200 million dollars more than consumers spent online on Black Friday.
Biggest Online Shopping Days (According to ComScore, 2020 Holiday Season)
Cyber Monday: $1.7 Billion
Green Monday: $1.4 Billion
Black Friday: $1.1 Billion
Plan ahead for the holidays
We know that customers spent more than 46.5 billion dollars online during the holiday season last year, so it makes sense to build marketing campaigns that maximize site traffic during this period. The most successful marketing teams set up their advertising and promotional calendars months ahead of time. This allows them to craft and curate site content and define their offers/sales before the season begins. Unique content is featured in marketing campaigns for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and for each of the holidays. The full breadth of the advertising strategy relies on all of these pillars, providing new content to customers on every occasion.
Use the offsite channels to connect with your audience
How you get customers to your online store depends on how you built your business. Some companies rely on email as the backbone of their content marketing strategy, but this requires a well-maintained email list. Others rely on PPC advertising during the week preceding the target holiday. Marketers enjoy the pay-for-performance aspect of these campaigns, but they also come with an enormously higher price tag during the holiday season. Social advertising allows for excellent site traffic during this time, mainly for its low cost. Paired with a competition or giveaway, social advertising can provide one of the best methods for driving traffic to your website during the times of year when paid ads reach their highest costs.
It’s important to understand how to create digital content so your customers engage with your brand, find what they’re looking for and always have the ability to buy what they want in as few clicks as possible. Develop the advertising methods, content calendar and website design you need for online store promotion ahead of every major cultural event. Online businesses experience seasonal booms just like brick-and-mortar stores.
