Mastering conversion optimization is essential for navigating the holiday shopping season’s peak demand. In our latest webinar, we explored key strategies to boost conversion rates by creating more personalized customer experiences and optimizing site performance. You’ll also learn how to get your backend systems ready to handle the increased holiday traffic, so your business can boost sales during the busiest time of the year.
What we learned:
- How to boost holiday sales with personalized targeting strategies
- Effective backend process strategies for the Holidays
- How to use customer data to tailor experiences and drive sales
Speakers:
- Matt Gehring, CMO, Dutch
- Celia Mulderrig, VP of Ecommerce, Naked Cashmere
- Jason Nickel, SVP Marketing, Ten Thousand
- Angie Mistretta, VP of Global Demand Generation, commercetools
- Tovi Heilbronn, Senior Director of Technology Strategy, Apply Digital
- Moderated by: Allan Dick, Co-Founder, CommerceNext
Watch the replay here or read the recap below.
How to Boost Holiday Sales with Personalized Targeting Strategies
To effectively personalize your retail strategy, especially during seasonal periods like the holidays, it’s essential to focus on three key steps. First, start by defining seasonal KPIs, which may differ from your regular metrics, like encouraging longer dwell times for new customers. Second, analyze past performance, identifying trends and lessons from previous years. Third, avoid oversaturating customers with sale messaging after multiple purchases. Aditionally, prioritize three key customer segments: gifters with low intent, researchers with medium intent and big spenders with high intent. Use prominent sale banners and product page highlights for gifters, urgency-driven tactics for researchers and personalized recommendations and exclusive offers for big spenders.
Effective Backend Process Strategies for the Holidays
For efficient holiday operations, coordinate with shipping carriers to update delivery timelines and communicate changes across all customer touchpoints. Keep BOPIS, curbside and delivery options accurate to meet rising customer expectations. Regularly verify inventory levels to prevent overselling and audit prices to avoid costly errors. Lastly, monitor fulfillment centers closely to ensure timely, efficient order processing and shipping during peak demand.
How Industry Leaders Are Using Personalization
Dutch emphasizes the importance of tailoring messaging to resonate with customers at different stages of their shopping journey. During peak seasons like the holidays, the focus shifted to other elements that drive immediate consumer engagement and conversion, showing how core values can play a secondary role depending on strategic priorities.
Commercetools posits that content must be personalized at every touchpoint of the shopping journey to enhance customer experience and drive higher conversion rates. This involves customizing content from the initial acquisition phase through to the final purchase to create a more engaging and relevant experience for the customer. Effective personalization helps maintain customer interest and improves conversion by addressing specific needs and preferences at each stage.
Aply Digital emphasizes the importance of understanding customer needs at different stages of the funnel. For instance, on product detail pages, the goal is to build confidence and encourage the customer to complete their purchase. In contrast, on product results pages, where customers are still exploring options, the focus should be on simplifying the navigation and making it easy for them to find relevant products.
“By being empathetic to the customer’s context at each stage, content can be tailored to better meet their needs and facilitate their journey.” — Tovi Heilbronn, Apply Digital
Naked Cashmere highlights the need for consistent and relevant brand messaging throughout the customer journey. Given that many customers’ first touchpoint is often a product detail page, it is crucial to ensure that these pages effectively communicate key brand messages and provide the information needed to build confidence and drive conversions.
“The analogy of a customer walking into a fitting room illustrates this point: just as the fitting room must reflect the brand and reassure customers, PDPs must provide compelling and relevant information to support the customer’s decision-making process. This approach ensures that no matter where customers enter the platform, they encounter a cohesive and persuasive brand experience that enhances their confidence and drives conversions.” — Celia Mulderrig, Naked Cashmere
How to Use Customer Data to Tailor Experiences and Drive Sales
Dutch emphasizes using data to tailor personalized experiences, particularly during high-traffic periods like the holidays. By analyzing customer behavior and setting up alerts, brands can adapt strategies to target last-minute shoppers effectively and respond to real-time changes in conversion rates.
Naked Cashmere supports this approach, emphasizing the success of segmenting audiences and tailoring messaging, such as “don’t mess this up” for male shoppers, which has driven high engagement. They also utilize their CDP and AI to send personalized emails to high-value customers, boosting repeat purchases and reducing churn. This data-driven strategy ensures effective targeting and maximizes conversions during critical shopping periods.
Finally, Aply Digital recommends the use of zero-party data to enhance personalization. They suggest collecting and storing customer preferences, such as size, style, favorite brands and store locations and integrating these preferences into the shopping journey. On a product results page (PRP), customers should be able to effortlessly filter results based on their saved preferences, showcasing the value of their data and making the shopping experience more convenient and relevant.
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