The Ultimate Guide to Owning Holiday eCommerce [Free eBook]
Testing and optimization have become a standard practice for many eCommerce teams. These activities help you create experiences that convert more visitors and grow sales.
However, during Peak eCommerce holiday shopping times – we’re talking about Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday all the way through Christmas to the New Year – merchants traditionally baulk at the idea.
The Risk-Free Way To Grow Mobile Holiday Revenue is designed for eCommerce teams who want to maximize revenue during their busiest trading periods. Even if you haven’t seen success here in the past, this guide will walk you through how to apply proven best-practices to your conversion rate program. You’ll learn how to optimize your site to capture more holiday sales–especially from mobile devices.
You can get the eBook here (it’s 100% free), but here’s a quick overview of what you’ll be getting:
- Chapter 1: Why Holiday Optimization Is Important – With insufficient tools and little external pressure, it has been too easy for merchants or service providers to accept the status quo and buckle in for a holiday trading period. Using the same optimization strategies deployed during the rest of the year just won’t cut it.
- Chapter 2: Rethinking Your Holiday Optimization Strategy – What was once thought of as the riskiest time of the year to experiment is now the most lucrative. See the real merchant-data from our 2018 holiday study.
- Chapter 3: Putting Optimization to Work This Holiday Season – Deploy specialized experiments at the time of year when they’ll have the maximum impact on your bottom line.
Why Optimize Holiday eCommerce?
Most merchants experience the highest-volume trading periods during the holidays, yet few choose to optimize and learn about the seasonal shifts in their customers’ behavior. There is a tremendous revenue opportunity here that has historically been left on the table due to the limitations of the testing methods being used.
The data and insights gained from deep testing, in combination with an engine that shifts traffic between different experiences in real-time based on their performance for each unique shopper, creates a holiday eCommerce strategy that is almost incapable of failure. Maximizing wins and mitigating losses, through the use of adaptive algorithms, will ultimately protect a merchant’s bottom line while testing and allows them to recognize massive gains from the treatments that are successful.
The more eCommerce continues to evolve, the more we will have to reevaluate what we think we know “for sure.”
There is no such thing as a best practice that works for everyone all the time. The future is continuous optimization – we can never stop learning about what works best for the individual customer, at any point in their buyer journey, and at any given point in time.
Through the combination of this optimization technology, with a tailored bundle of tests hand-picked to excel specifically during the holidays, HiConversion is uniquely equipped to help merchants make significant gains in their holiday eCommerce numbers for all seasons to come.
How Timex Overcame the Fear of Holiday Optimization
In eCommerce, customer experience optimization during the holiday season is typically off limits. Companies fear that the risks associated with testing new ideas during the high revenue season will outweigh the benefits.
Recognizing that online consumer sentiment and preferences are constantly changing – especially during the hectic holidays – The Timex Group put aside their concerns and extended an existing adaptive optimization campaign that was running on their product detail page during the high-stakes season. The test started during the pre-season and continued throughout the peak and post-holiday period.
Much to their surprise, and delight, the experiment yielded +20.40% in new revenue while uncovering a winning ensemble of optimization treatments that had +36.35% lift.
More importantly, the Timex Group campaign is an industry game-changer that debunks conventional wisdom (pre-holiday results, in fact, may not work as expected during the holiday season). Therefore, it is imperative for eCommerce sites to continually optimize the customer experience throughout the holiday season for maximum revenue.
Here are some smart experiments Timex ran to achieve significant revenue growth during the holiday season of 2018:
The Best Way to Maximize Holiday Revenue
The key is bringing merchants together to learn from each other, as opposed to everyone testing in isolation and being limited to their own data.
This creates the perfect insights-driven testing environment, enabling:
- Larger sample size for more accurate data
- Faster results from experiments
- Resources and support from mCommerce pros
- Improvements in User Experience and Revenue Per Visitor
The advantage of collaborative testing is that it gives merchants the ability to leverage community data into insights that can help guide testing efforts towards the most probable victories, in a world continuously limited by time and traffic.
At HiConversion, we love to take commonly held optimization beliefs and help merchants challenge them with their own customer data–we’re often proven right (yay!), and even when we’re not we ALWAYS discover something new and insightful.
Download the eBook here, and if you have any questions just drop me a note to [email protected] – I read every email.
