The holiday season is undoubtedly marked with new found excitement for the festive season which includes mandatory shopping, whether it’s choosing gifts for your loved ones or revamping your home decor to welcome the new year. you have to find great place to shop to make your holiday unforgettable.
From a retailer’s point of view, the holidays are not only about increasing your profits manifold, but also covering sales losses due to off-season reasons. The fun created during the holiday season may be short-lived and as gifts are opened and holiday shenanigans end, the impact of the retailer is then analyzed holistically.
This is where impeccable customer service comes into play. Businesses that take advantage of the holiday season and cultivate a positive customer experience starting from social media interactions to marketing their brand to converting them into loyal customers ultimately lead to satisfying word of mouth marketing.
Understanding consumer preferences
In this highly dynamic world, retailers need to understand how the consumer’s mind functions, especially millennials and baby boomers who pay great attention to the small and intricate details. Retailers need to understand the practical steps of online shopping for the new generation.
It starts with making choices about product types, exploring available options and alternatives, and most importantly doing comparative shopping. Following these trends helps give consumers what they want.
Unrivaled customer service
Online stores differ from brick and mortar stores in that they cannot humanly welcome shoppers but they can certainly humanize and personalize the digital experience. The expectations set by physical stores have set high standards and need to be competed fairly by online shops.
Although online shopping every day is much more convenient, of course need to cover the personalized consultation that the physical store provides. 64% of shoppers believe their purchase decision is heavily influenced by the in-store experience.
MANDATORY delivery incentives
Ecommerce giants like Amazon have captured a large share of the online market by outpacing customer experience year after year. They not only provide products and services of superior quality but also leave no stone unturned in ensuring that from the very beginning of purchase to its delivery, customers have no complaints.
Obviously, that all brands cannot afford to lose on free shipping services but can definitely offer promotional time periods when shipping costs are minimal or completely free during the holiday season. 88% of shoppers prefer a merchant that offers free shipping over a retailer that doesn’t.
The trends observed in recent years clearly highlight the fact that consumers have drastically switched to online platforms to shop. This holiday season is expected to take the online shopping experience to another level The latest 2016 holiday shopping survey. The budget allocated for online Vs in-store shopping turned out to be the same, thus recording an increase in sales from 2015.
