Are you gearing up for back-to-school campaigns on your site?
As we are sure you already know, back-to-school is the 2nd busiest shopping season of the year. If you want your e-commerce business to rock the back-to-school season, you have to start now, because according to emarketer, the 2016 back-to-school shopping season will grow around 2.6% over last year. Below are some ideas that you can still implement!
Customize Your Home Page
Creating a special back-to-school landing page or customizing your home-page in August is a great way to put out all of your related products and sales information in one place and engage with your shoppers immediately. If you have a number of categories within back-to-school to promote, highlight them upfront and make it easier for your customers to find what they are looking for.
Add product videos to your marketing strategy
Video marketing is becoming more and more important. Actually 4x as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than to read about it. Posting a video of back-to-school trends this year increases your chances of attracting shoppers to your site. You can make a summary of the most popular picks, choose one special product to highlight or add user-generated content to increase the social proof.
Offer extra incentives & urgency to buy
Back-to-school period is a great time to offer free shipping and attract shoppers who are looking for the best deals. However, the opportunity window is very small — one 2 weeks — so you have to give your customers a high incentive to come to your website. One effective strategy that always incentivizes customers is to offer free shipping: In a study by Synchrony Financial, 75% of shoppers say they are more likely to choose a retailer during back-to-school that offers free shipping.
Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing campaigns around July and August can help to drive significant e-commerce sales. Back-to-school shopping lists might include everything from clothes to office supplies, backpacks to tech gadgets. Sending an email promotion with on-sale items makes a lot of sense.
Most popular campaigns you can include:
- Early Prep-emails at the beginning of August: hustle and create intro emails
- Sweepstakes, Discounts & Promotion Emails
Personalization and Product Recommendations
Using personalized promotions and relevant recommendations is a must-have during the back-to-school season. Today´s shoppers know what they want to buy – therefore making new product discovery easier is a really important part of the shopping experience in order to increase AOV and cart sizes. Start by suggesting relevant complementary items & accessories to the main purchase that the customer has come for. Strands Retail sees cart sizes increase an average of 8.5% when retailers use our product recommendations and suggestive selling techniques.
Back-to-school shopping trends continue to evolve, so it’s important to stay on top of trends year-after-year, because what was at one point the summer lull has truly become one of the most important seasons of the entire year for e-commerce.
Bringing the Positive Change: 3 Personal Projects to Share Today
Hello beautiful friends! Happy International Women’s Day! On this special day, I wanted to share a bit more personal way of how I bring back to the community and focus on building a positive future for other women, men … and our planet too. One step at a time. With...
read more30 Books that got me through 2020
For many, 2020 was a year that saw them develop a deeper knowledge of passions or rediscover a new interest when regular life has slowly eroded. In books as in life, 2020 was a year of many great revelations about design, leadership, sustainability, and nature for me....
read moreBuilding my own Linchpin: Becoming a Better UX Leader
In his book - Linchpin: Are you Indispensable? - Seth Godin poses a challenge: Take your gift, whatever it is, and use it to change the world. Godin argues that everyone, me and you (not just the Einsteins of the world), can find a linchpin inside of them that needs...
read moreGet in touch
I believe your product should celebrate what makes you unique and foster strong relationships with your customers. Reaching out with a question, an invitation to speak or just want to say hi? Drop me a message here.
*Usual reply time: 1-2 days