Don't Just Sit There! Ready Your E-Commerce Site for Cyber Monday With These 7 Easy Tips
Unquestionably, you understand that Cyber Monday is the most important shopping day of the year for e-commerce. Last year's Cyber Monday sales totaled an all-time high of $10.8 billion. Before Cyber Monday 2021, on November 29, here are some key takeaways from last year’s event:
Cyber Monday 2020 had a 46% rise in traffic, so a similar or even more significant increase is possible.
Because smartphones accounted for 37% of Cyber Monday purchases last year, your website should be mobile-friendly. If your website is not mobile-friendly, Google will rank it lower in its search results.
Expect an uptick in site visits later in the day because the last four hours of Cyber Monday produced 25% of total purchases in 2020.
Invariably, your bottom line will suffer if your conversion funnel is impeded by things such as a sluggish website or bad content during the busiest time of year. However, using the tips provided below, you can guarantee that your website is prepared to handle a surge in visitors and sales.
Continue reading to learn some straightforward tactics for raising your sales in a short period with only a few strategic updates.
Scrutinize your purchase funnel
When was the last time you purchased something from your e-commerce site? When was the last time you saw someone who had never been to your website proceed through the buying funnel? Is it clear what site visitors should do next at any stage in the process?
Is there anything that might prevent a customer from completing a purchase? It would help if you also considered the percentage of clients who leave their shopping carts unattended. Although desertion can occur for various reasons, this symptom could suggest purchase funnel problems.
Benchmark your competition
The word "benchmarking" was used to describe the process of building elevation markers. As a starting point, the "basic benchmark" would be sea level.
For e-commerce, you can use a benchmarking tool to see how one website stacks up versus the competition. This information helps you to evaluate your position in relation to your competition. Also, it may be valuable in determining your own and your rivals' market positioning.
Without question, benchmarking is an essential part of creating and implementing a strategic strategy.
What should you do?
Examine your top three competitors to see what they're doing well and where they're falling short. What are the keywords they're using? In addition, what are the similarities and differences between them and your brands? Also, what is their most effective marketing strategy? Are they using social media?
How are you ensuring your site stands out? To improve your website and marketing efforts, try to identify three things that each of your competitors does well.
Benchmarking may be done on any quantifiable area of your e-commerce or lead-generation activities. Some of the most popular areas where you can monitor temperature include:
Marketing performance
Usability
Financial performance
Site performance
Search performance
In every one of those areas, you should set targets. The number of benchmarks you select and what those benchmarks evaluate is determined by your company's needs.
There are several significant e-commerce benchmarks to consider, including:
Bounce rate: A metric that gauges how many site visitors go beyond the first page they see (the landing page).
Benchmarks for lead generation channels: Show how well each part of your lead-generation promotion mix is performing.
Website visitor stats: Depict you how well your site attracts visitors. Overall traffic, in turn, is a crucial factor in calculating bounce rates and conversion rates. In the United States, Amazon.com is by far the most visited website. Every month, it receives an impressive 183 million unique visitors. Either way, you can see how well your SEO, marketing, and inbound marketing initiatives are doing by comparing your traffic to that of your rivals.
Conversion rates (CR): These have the power to make or ruin your e-commerce site. They measure anything from how many visitors opt-in to your distribution list to how many people arrive at your site as visitors and depart as customers. Why is this important? It helps to determine the efficacy of your strategy and methods. Per the Compass e-commerce Conversion Rates study, the median conversion rate (CR) for e-commerce traffic coming from organic search results was 1.18%. However, the average CR for top-performing sites was 3.7%.
Wouldn't it be fantastic if you could increase your conversions by 10% or more? With relevant email marketing, top sites were able to do so (9.89% average).
Cart abandonment rate: Indicates how many potential purchasers pick one or more things to buy, begin the checkout process, then abandon the transaction before finishing it. It's a sad metric: You worked so hard to get someone so close to buying something, yet they didn't complete the most crucial step. According to Baymard, the average e-commerce cart abandonment rate is 68.81%. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could improve this metric? Even if your site is average, if you can reduce the abandonment rate to 50%, you've just raised revenue by a significant amount.
Products per transaction: This is a great metric to use in conjunction with cart abandonment. What if you could lower your abandonment rate (raise your sales percentage) while increasing the number of goods per order? For instance, when you add in a benchmark for Average Order Value, you establish a convergence that can drive your bottom line earnings to the moon.
Build and manage relevant content
Creating fresh material based on popular themes might be beneficial for two reasons: For starters, Google is a huge fan of current events. News that is currently trending throughout the globe typically rises through search engine rankings faster than other media. Second, by adding new material, you are aiding your website's long-term SEO.
Remember to keep your content up to date! Because Google ranking is partially based on high-quality backlinks, the more high-quality backlinks a website has, the higher it will rank. It is well-known that old but updated material is far more potent than brand-new content. It's time to modernize your content/media if it's been a while. You not only develop fresh material, but you will also gain from the backlinks you've already established.
Add structured data (schema)
Do your products implement structured data (schema) so that rich snippets like star ratings, review count, inventory levels, price, and product details are displayed at the top of search results? This can considerably boost product exposure and the overall organic rank of your website. And besides, schema is a component of your website's SEO.
So, what are the essential aspects of your website? Here are five examples:
Customer feedback
Ratings
Pricing
Recipe details (if your website is about cooking)
Operational hours
You already know how vital these features are to your website. But how do you get search engines to improve your rankings? The solution is schema markup and rich snippets.
Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are many schema apps/plugins available, including:
Schema Pro adds rich snippets to your site quickly and easily.
Schema and Structured Data for WP & AMP provides support for 33 schema types.
So, how do you pick the best one for you?
It's pretty simple. All you have to do is define your requirements.
Do you have a straightforward website that doesn't necessitate complicated and rich snippets? If yes, choose a user-friendly, free plugin.
Do you have five websites and blogs as an affiliate marketer? If so, you should invest in a plugin with the most up-to-date capabilities. What happens next? Well, you're now ready to employ a powerful tool that will increase your click-through rate as soon as you've integrated it.
Create one or two specific holiday promos
There's nothing like a one-time-only unique offer to entice people to buy. With a seasonal campaign, you can generate interest in your products and services. Consider a gift-with-purchase, a BOGO (buy-one-get-one-free or buy-one-get-one-half-off). On the other hand, you might want to offer a purchase with purchase (a discount on an additional product or an upgrade) or even a fixed-amount contribution for every transaction.
Apply analytics for user tracking
If you aren't already utilizing Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to measure website visitors, you should be. The software assists you in tracking the consumer journey on your website by generating conversion rates, bounce rates, and other vital data. You may also evaluate which channels do well (social, organic search, email, and so on) and which sites are most frequently visited. All of the insights you get from Cyber Monday user tracking can serve to enhance your current marketing strategy.
Give your customers a valid reason to share your newsletters and emails
Your website may generate a lot of transactions on Cyber Monday. Still, to appropriately capitalize on the event, you should be collecting emails so that already-interested prospects can stay “in the know” all year. Many websites will give you a bonus percentage off or free delivery if you sign up for their newsletters. This might be an intriguing bargain for Cyber Monday consumers who are already looking for ways to save money. It also creates a vital data stream for your site.
Get your online store ready for Cyber Monday
To summarize, all of the advice I've given you is perfectly possible to execute between now and CM. Undoubtedly, this massive shopping day is significant not only in the United States, but also worldwide.