We’re already hearing businesses talking about the ‘C’ word, but there’s a bigger event to consider – Black Friday & Cyber Monday. This five-day period (24th-28th November 2016) is one of the busiest shopping periods of the year, generating £3.3bn in sales last year alone.
This year is set to be even bigger, with experts predicting shoppers spending £5bn over the cyber weekend. So here are our top five tips for getting your business ready:
1. Mobile-friendly website
Mobile devices and tablets are quickly overtaking desktops as the way that consumers browse and shop online. If users have to scale and pinch to browse your site, they’ll quickly browse elsewhere.
Make sure your site isn’t one of them. Nettl: Commerce sites intelligently adapt and scale to the device viewing.
2.Integration with Epos
There’s nothing worse from a client’s perspective than having browsed for the product they want, placed the order to then receive an email from you that the item they wanted has sold out. It doesn’t lead to great customer satisfaction. So it’s important to make sure that your customers can see if a product is in stock, but also when a product has sold out.
Do you share stock between your retail outlet and website? Then making sure you have your stock in order will be especially important. Nettl:click&collect is a powerful web shop which works seamlessly with your real shop.
3.Houston, we have a problem
Make sure your shop is running as expected. You don’t want to experience any downtime because of a site bug or a spike in traffic that’s crashed your server. Nettl:cloud is powered by an elastic cloud server, so your hosting can scale as you gain more traffic.
4.Marketing, Marketing, Marketing
You’ve made all this effort to get your site ready, make sure your customers know what you’ve got planned. Email campaigns, Social Media, Flyers, In-store Posters and Displays are all great ways to get your message out there. We talk about marketing needing to be ‘omnipresent’. Your customers are more connected than ever and across a number of different channels, you need to be connecting with your customers via these channels too.
5.Turn those deal-seekers into brand advocates
Your marketing efforts shouldn’t stop there. You should be thinking about how you can nurture these new customers and generate repeat business. Keep your customers engaged with regular emails and keep active on social media. Didn’t sign up to your mailing list? Consider retargeting so these customers are still exposed to your brand. Talk to us about our Nettl:Concierge to see how we can help you generate traffic.
Want in on the action?
If you’ve considered e-commerce in the past or are thinking of adding e-commerce to your business, then there’s still time. We design and build beautiful web shops that work seamlessly across desktop, tablet and mobile. Contact your local studio for a free consultation today.
