Five ways to delight your customers online this Christmas

As the end-of-the-year shopping rush nears, finding ways to please your customers is key to driving sales and meeting targets. Discover our top strategies to give your customers a positive online shopping experience during the holidays and ensure they remember your brand after Christmas has passed.

October 18, 2022

4 mins read

Catz Thompson

1. Personalize your offer

With Christmas fast approaching, ensuring your customers have a good shopping experience that leaves them with a long-lasting positive impression of your brand is crucial.

Below, we share five strategies to delight your online customers this holiday season and make sure they remember your brand long after the rush of the festive season has passed.

By collating and integrating individual data from site activity, you can create highly personalized offers to share with your customers to boost their holiday shopping or even remind them of a wished-for product they had forgotten about. Looking at purchase history or items that have been added to wish lists can help inform highly targeted promotional marketing campaigns to attract and encourage purchases of items at an individual consumer and SKU level. By doing this, you’ll be able to offer products and services that you know are relevant to your customers’ preferences and needs, increasing the chances of them completing a purchase.

2. Make shopping efficient with multichannel customer service

During the hectic shopping period, brands that remove the hassle of online shopping will thrive. Just as customers don’t want to wait in long, time-consuming shop queues, they want to avoid feeling as though they’re wasting time online searching for products or returns information that would be complementary to them making a purchase.

To make the shopping experience more efficient, create simple, user-friendly ways for customers to access the information they most need at the critical point of purchase, making sure it is clearly explained and easy to find on your site. Include in-depth product descriptions, customer reviews and detailed data on things like shipping times and payment methods to minimize hesitation before a purchase. Likewise, update your FAQs page to reflect any common holiday-period questions, and consider opening up additional communication channels where shoppers can seamlessly reach out for additional support if they need it. Social media platforms often become a go-to during the peak retail periods, so ensure your social teams are adequately trained and supported to deal with an increased influx of queries in the comments section and direct messages.

3. Offer seamless shipments

Speed and convenience are key factors when it comes to shopping online — and they become especially important when it’s time to get those last-minute presents. Fast dispatch and delivery is becoming increasingly crucial for consumers, particularly in sectors such as beauty, where buyers expect their products to arrive in less than a day (McKinsey). Exploring options to be able to provide this kind of service could be a good idea to attract customers during the Christmas period.

However, making sure your customers receive their orders in the shortest possible time is just one component of a positive delivery experience. Making returns easy (and free), sharing updates on the progress of an order and working with a reliable shipping partner all contribute to making deliveries seamless and easy, creating a positive brand experience that will keep customers coming back to your website for more.

4. Reward buyers with a gift with purchase

Gifts with purchase (GWPs) are a great way to bring the fun of Christmas into the online shopping experience. Offering samples, mini-sized products or simply additional, full-sized items with higher value purchases is a great way to surprise and reward customers with a fun enhancement to their shopping experience to keep as a treat or give away as a gift.

GWPs can also be a useful strategy to drive up average order value (AOV) by offering higher value gift options based on basket size. They can also be a useful way to test out demand for new or recently launched products. Plus, providing samples of popular products can increase the potential for a customer to return to purchase the full-sized product at a later stage, so make sure you make it clear that GWPs are on offer and for which specific products to avoid any confusion.

5. Create inspirational holiday content

Content is a vital tool not only to introduce consumers to your brand and products but also to help guide their shopping journeys. Ahead of the Christmas period, ensure the search functionality on your site works smoothly and effectively to support your consumers’ decision-making process and ease the purchase journey. Likewise, creating additional holiday content such as gift guides, ‘the perfect gift wrap’ tutorial and gift ideas for ‘the person who has everything’, for example, can help to inspire and aid customers who are looking for ideas as they browse through your site.

Partnering with other brands to offer tips and advice on how to use popular gifts can also be a good idea to enlighten and inspire your customers, so they can, for instance, learn to set the perfect table, make homemade decorations or whip up delicious Christmas cocktails through short videos or how-to articles with your brand’s support. This approach will help broaden your audience’s experience of shopping on your site with ideas that will bring the magic of the holiday period into every interaction.

For the past 18 years, THG Ingenuity has helped brands across the globe deliver peak retail periods online with its end-to-end ecommerce solution. Get in touch today to learn how we can support your business this holiday season.

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