With Halloween beckoning and Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and the New Year sales season in sight, we are entering the most important and busy period of the year for online and traditional retailers. At MOR Digital, we have been spookily strategising with a variety of big, established brands and upcoming ventures to ensure they get most out of this time of year and avoid any shock-horrors when it comes to both their digital and physical sales readiness. Here are some of our top tonics to help you avoid entering a sales crypt this time of year or if you’re already in one, get out of it before it’s too late!
Enjoy — Louisa. CEO, MOR Digital.
Simple but scary, practical stuff
With the pending influx of shoppers (if you have marketed yourself right), make sure your website can handle increased traffic from eager-to-purchase visitors. The load speed of your site is also important to keep pace with both frantic first-timers and frenzied fanatics. You most likely don’t have time for a whole revamp now but you can make small, impactful design or feature changes to website homepage and banners to resonate with your audiences who are sporting a Halloween and / or other vibe and looking for you to be doing similar. Multi-device, multi-browser and mobile compatibility / responsiveness are more important than ever. A consistent, timely and relevant presence on social is important to help drive busy buyers to your site. Consider plugging in a live chat feature on your website so you speak to them when you have them there, improving the user experience.
The bare bones essentials
Build up confidence with new visitors by having a quality design that reflects your offer, brand and establishment in addition to a considered layout that speaks to your audience and ticks all the online security requirements these days including the new mandatory requirement for an SSL certificate. If you are a product company, photography is key. If you are a services company good content is key!
Put yourself in your customer shoes costume
No point in designing and developing a website for yourself – you won’t really be on there. Practically every decision for your shop window should be made with the customer front of mind. After all, they will be the ones using it! The key question to ask yourself is not ‘ do I like it ‘ but more so ‘ am I proud of it ‘ given my audience and what they want to see and do.
If you just build it, they won’t come
For many traditional retailers jumping online is often a reactive response to struggling sales. However, without a thought-through strategy that looks at the whole sales, marketing, order fulfilment and customer experience process, its often doesn’t lead to anything. Without an integrated effort across the business, the best site in the world won’t deliver a result. This can be for a variety of reasons:
- Nobody knows about the new cool site, you haven’t promoted it!
- It’s a marketing tool — sales teams may see the shiny new shopping cart as competition!
- The back-office can’t step up enough to fulfil the new orders coming through!
By stepping back and thinking through the overarching strategy, these pitfalls can be addressed at the outset before you start mixing your magic potions. A performing website is more a manifestation of a thought-through marketing plan with promotion at its core. It harnesses the organisations traditional sales strengths and empowers or enables existing sales resources.
Meanwhile a phased approach to building the new presence or enhancing the existing one means you can get the balance right between your resourcing constraints and online order fulfilment. If you have an existing but underperforming site, it also a good place to start as you can audit what may be going wrong and where – is it the content, the flow, the journey or the experience. Does it differ to the offline experience and send mixed messages?
MOR Digital is an award-winning digital engagement company. We have been assisting small and large businesses and organisations with their website, strategy and digital footprint for 18 years. In each and every case we are on the journey with you.
To get some quick wins on your digital and physical selling presence in time for Christmas, get in touch with MOR Digital today. If you would like to strategise around your plans for 2019, we are in a festive mood for that too! hello@mordigital.ie / +353 (0)41 980 1000.
