BACK TO SCHOOL TIPS FOR ECOMMERCE RETAILERS
Wednesday, September 2, 2015Global Administrator
As with any seasonal change, back to school is a great opportunity for online retailers to make an impact on their customers and their own bottom lines. Depending on what you sell and who you sell to, the back to school craze can often help you reach a new audience of customers. Here are a few tips to make the most of it!
1. Make sure your search functionality is clear. When customers come to your site for a product this time of year, chances are they know exactly what they are looking for. That being said, make sure that they can easily find it through a search bar. If this is hard for you to do with your current design, put the back to school items in a featured section above the fold on your homepage. This could be in a slider, a featured blog post or anywhere else on the homepage. Just ensure it’s easy for users to find.
2. Deals are everything to a back to school consumer. Most of them are families who are price conscious and on a strict budget. Make sure you clearly illustrate your deals at every opportunity. Remember, you don’t want to annoy them with pop-ups and other tacky gimmicks, but give them enough opportunity to take advantage of the deals you’re offering.
3. Being content driven is obviously important, but make sure your copy doesn’t overwhelm the customer and what they are looking to accomplish. Content is good for SEO, just make sure it fits the context and it’s actually copy that users and potential customers want to read.
4. Although price is always important to a consumer, value is up there too. Value adding features like free shipping, one-day shipping, in-store pick up and a good return policy are important as well and should not be underestimated.
5. Since the back to school season usually spans over a couple of months, this gives you ample time to track what your customers are buying and what is popular for the season. These are good indicators of what you should be promoting and using as your deal items. In addition, this information is also good to use when incorporating product recommendations. These are a good way to maximize the user experience.
6. To build off of number 5, if you don’t have product recommendations on your product pages, now is certainly the time to add them! For returning users, it would be wise to use patterns from their last visit to target and nurture them further using product recommendations.
Back to school is, as they say,
the most wonderful time of the year and it has some serious potential to be even better for online retailers!
Did we miss any other good tips? Share in the comments below.