3 Common Mistakes to Avoid This Holiday Season

By Bill Hustad

Routines are easy to fall into. Whether it’s getting ready for work and out the door each morning or tackling customer acquisition and conversion strategies, you’ll never discover a better way to approach these tasks if you stay inside your comfort zone. Similarly, it’s easy to recycle tried-and-true approaches to your retail strategies, especially for the upcoming holiday shopping season.

As we enter the last quarter of the year, you may be in the midst of ramping up your e-commerce site the same way you’ve done in the past in an effort to reach more buyers, convert more sales, cross-sell and upsell. Hey, it’s worked before so it should work again, right? Well, maybe. What if there's a better way of managing your digital strategy that could make sales skyrocket this holiday season?

There are three common traps I see retailers continually fall into year after year. Are you making any of the mistakes? If so, luckily there’s still time to adjust your strategies.

1. Limiting personalization to past purchases and other historical data. On-site personalization can be a great way to make the shopping experience more relevant to visitors. During the holiday season, shoppers often need product suggestions or don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. Therefore, personalized features can be extremely useful.

During the holidays, however, people aren't shopping for themselves. They're shopping for their husband, wife, children, mother, friends, etc. Many common personalization tools that are focused on a shopper’s previous behaviors and purchases won't be as helpful in this case. For instance, last month a consumer may have been looking at a leather coat for himself, but right now they want to buy something for their young nephew. If you recommend a motorcycle helmet to that visitor, you’ve wasted an opportunity to serve content based on their current shopping intentions. Consider personalization approaches that can understand your visitors’ current interests as they navigate your site.

2. Freezing your site. Retailers tend to freeze their site the last few months of the year because otherwise something might go awry. Playing it safe might be comforting, but by putting a stop on all website updates you’re selling yourself short. What if you acquire a strategic insight into web traffic in the middle of the season?

For instance, let’s say you feel strongly that changing the navigation of your website could dramatically increase clickthroughs and conversions. Would you leave it be? I hope not. Ensure your digital teams are digging deep into website analytics to identify what changes will offer the greatest advantage to your business. Hold any updates until January that are unlikely to substantially move the needle, but make the tweaks that could make a big difference on conversions.

3. Failing to refine a gift selector strategy. A no-brainer strategy among retailers every holiday season is to make it easier for shoppers to find great presents through gift selector features. The secret to making a gift selector strategy work wonders is relevance. Merely offering up a fixed set of products that aren’t aligned with a consumer’s tastes won’t get you far.

Creating relevancy for your customers is a balancing act between choosing products you want to move and the products your customers want and need. The savviest retailers know how to walk that tightrope and are adept at making gift selections that represent a finely tuned and thoughtful mix of products. The result? A win-win for both your bottom line and your customers.

Bill Hustad is the chief customer officer at Baynote, a provider of e-commerce personalization solutions. Bill can be reached at bill@baynote.com.