3 Crunch-Time Strategies for Holiday Season Success

How much is bad customer experience really costing you? Most brands, especially ahead of the holiday season, pour a lot of effort into attention-grabbing campaigns, boosting product options and inventory, and becoming hypercompetitive on pricing. While all are important, the issues lie deeper into what makes the holiday shopping season crucial to driving profit and business intelligence for the year ahead: customer experience (CX).

Customer spend, loyalty and trust are rooted in how good (or bad) experiences are, and disappointing interactions put brands at risk of getting a smaller slice of the annual holiday consumer spending pie — a pie that will be between $979.5 billion and $989 billion this year.

What’s at stake doesn’t just end after the new year, either. CX during the holiday season sets the tone for the future of customer relationships; repeat business and word-of-mouth marketing being obvious areas that are directly impacted. Here are a few crunch-time strategies for ensuring a successful close to the holiday season:

1. Identify potential problem areas.

In 2023, U.S. e-commerce sales reached $1.119 trillion, up 7.6 percent from 2022. Two in five (40.2 percent) of last year's Black Friday website and app visits saw frustration, as convenient, intuitive digital experiences are crucial for major revenue channels.

Forty percent of all online visits in 2023 included avoidable friction, including technical website errors, slow page loads and rage clicks. Sites that are slow to load and perform poorly reduce engagement by 15 percent. Any time you adjust digital elements that make up the online experience, test, tweak and test some more. Look out for known issues, like the placement of content, page load times, and actionable elements that don’t work as intended ("add to cart" should indeed add the item to the cart).

There are also opportunities to make online navigation seamless, like sticky scrolling or fixed elements, and conversion turnkey, with features like quick pay options and auto-populated personal details. This is especially important for mobile commerce, a growing revenue channel every year. When brands narrow in on enhancing ease, convenience and speed, consumers will notice. To take it a step further, successful brands dive deeper into granular data analysis, experiment and test new features often, and are constantly on the lookout for removing obstacles throughout the customer journey. This level of close monitoring and attention to customer needs matters. Customers will convert. And they will come back.  

TIP: Optimize your website and focus on clean navigation, speed and convenience during the conversion process, and look out for elements that cause rage-clicking.

2. Understand the journey to improve the experience.

When identifying friction points throughout the customer experience, brands have the opportunity to understand user preferences and behaviors on a high level. Understanding how site and app visitors navigate through their journeys provides a unique understanding of where CX can improve.

Integrating analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics allows proactive CX optimization by creating a comprehensive monitoring framework.

When you understand their journey, you can design and deliver experiences that align with what customers desire and expect. For example, questions brands should ask themselves include:

• Do customers interact with dynamic creatives or do they generally go straight to the search bar or sale page?
• Does your brand receive a large portion of conversions from social campaigns or are your email subscribers a stronger revenue driver?
• Does the large majority of your customer base use coupon codes or abandon cart if there’s no free shipping?

Knowing how your customers find you, what they look for, what they ignore, and what they find useful or convenient is the premium level of intelligence to generate (and duplicate) success.

TIP: Prepare for traffic spikes and implement retention tactics to turn holiday shoppers into long-term customers; communicate openly about inventory, shipping and delays; be ready for the influx of inevitable customer service requests, returns and exchanges 

3. Make technology work for you, not the other way around.

The martech applications market has exploded in the last decade or so, with about 150 available for the martech stack in 2011 to now over 11,000. Deciphering business-critical tools and consolidated solutions to build the right tech stack for your specific business needs can be a daunting task. And while technology has come a long way, what’s grown in parallel over the years is the amount of time and attention it takes to properly manage tools that are, essentially, supposed to make your life easier.

When deciding what tools you need, a brand must identify its goals and then work backward. This strategy can be immensely helpful in creating data and technology strategies that focus on high value — for both employees and customers. Strong integrations with large foundational platforms (like a CRM) and channel-specific insights can come together with a level of business and customer intelligence that helps the brand interact, respond and inspire with greater success.

Integrate analytics tools like voice of customer, APM, web analytics, and A/B testing to optimize CX ahead of peak season by creating a comprehensive monitoring framework and leveraging artificial intelligence for data insights and responsive problem-solving.

TIP: If you find yourself struggling to manage tech solutions, or devoting an exorbitant amount of time to managing them without impactful insight, it’s time to look in a different direction. Look specifically for solutions that help you identify key customers, nurture them, and keep them. Those tools should also be able to grow with you. And as your business evolves and expands, work together with other tools to tell a bigger picture without compromising access to the details that matter. 

As the holiday season ramps up, remembering these key tips will help your brand harness the power of technology to better understand customers and their experiences, and ultimately be a destination your customers want to revisit time and time again.

John O’Melia is the chief customer officer of Contentsquare, a digital experience platform.