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:

1. Early Prep-emails at the beginning of August: hustle and create intro emails
2. 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.