7 Tools To Keep You Ahead Of The Game During Cyber Week
Ready or not, here comes the 2020 Cyber Week - undoubtedly the biggest shopping event of the year! And this year’s Cyber Week will be unlike any other. The 2020 holiday shopping season is shaping up to be highly different from past seasons.
Customer spending has been shifted online to a large extent, and away from brick-and-mortar, which of course is not solely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but also for convenience’s sake. It is believed to continue well into the holiday season and beyond.
Both retailers and customers look forward to this low price season, as there are countless rewards for both, the buyer and the seller if the right strategies are put in place and effectively implemented.
However, my focus for this year’s Cyber Week is on the retailers. There are a number of tools to help companies that intend to be an active part of this experience, reap the benefits of the event.
In a survey by Shopkick, 34% of U.S. shoppers indicated that they would make their holiday purchases before Thanksgiving. In other words, the clock is ticking and retailers have to get to work! Nothing should be left to chance.
There are certain steps that must be put in place ahead of the Cyber Week for a smooth and hurdle-free experience. Each strategy has at least one tool that can aid in preparation and planning endeavors of retailers.
- Shopify
- K6 cloud
- Growth Channel
- MailChimp
- Social Media and Online sales channels
- Google Alerts
- Google Mobile-friendly tool
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows businesses of any size to set up an online store and start selling right away. It is now the leading commerce platform. With Shopify comes a plethora of tools to help increase sales and revenue, as well as help serve your customers better.
During Cyber Week, customers are looking for ease, speed, great prices, and good service. The goal is not just a spike in sales for the week alone, but to keep sales high and retain customers, even after the holiday season.
Tools such as Shopify online store speed report can help you check and fine-tune your store and check its speed and performance. The importance of this function cannot be over-emphasized because a lot of traffic and competition comes with the week, so ensuring you offer the best service in terms of your website and other business areas are paramount.
Shopify has invested a lot of time to ensure their servers can handle huge spikes in sessions and sales, specifically for events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and New Year’s sales. Also, within Shopify come tools for discounts and marketing.
2. K6 Cloud
Testing and ensuring your website can handle a surge in traffic is one of the steps to take in preparing for Cyber Week as a retailer. For those stores that do not use platforms like Shopify, K6 Cloud is a go-to. The K6 Cloud is a cloud-based load testing service that complements K6 to accelerate and scale your performance testing. Like said, the K6 cloud helps to test the server load capacity of your store.
This tool is particularly great for Cyber Week as it helps you generate a personalized marketing plan according to your niche. Growth Channel AI will create your personas, map their customer journey, and define the growth strategy for your next campaign within days, not weeks. Growth Channel just launched a plan specifically for Holiday Marketing and it promises to be exciting. Endeavor to check it out.
4. Mail Chimp
For Cyber Week, it is important to adopt the use of email marketing which has to be tested, in order to know what works best for you ahead of the week. For this purpose, MailChimp is a great option. It’s cheap, simple, boasts great reporting, and automation, and it can easily handle things like A/B tests to ensure you get the most out of each campaign.
5. Social Media and Online Sales Channels
As more and more buyers move to the online space, retailers have to take advantage of the various online sales channels available to meet the needs of both existing and potential customers. Cyber Week is definitely not the time to begin to ‘test the waters’ with various channels. Every retailer should try out Multi-channel selling ahead and find out what gives them access to more of their actual clients. Some of the Online sales channels include:
- Walmart
- Amazon
Ahead of Cyber Week comes with the responsibility of keeping track of what the competition is doing and what is happening in the industry you are in. Google Alerts is a simple and free way to monitor what’s going on in your industry, what your competition is doing, and find out where your customers are. Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service offered by Google which keeps you updated. It works by sending emails to the user once set up.
7. Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool
According to research, about 3 billion people use smartphones while just about 1.6 billion people have computers. It is important to think mobile-first when designing your website.
According to Pete Polgar, Chief Marketing Officer at Clikz Digital, a digital design and marketing agency based in Little Falls, New Jersey, A phone is more versatile and provides more value to the end-user than a computer. “You will see a massive increase in phone usage over the next few years as the technology gets cheaper,” he says.
The responsiveness of your website will determine your conversion rates and the rate of returning visitors. You don’t want to lose potential customers now do you? Definitely not. Google’s Mobile-friendly tool is a great way to test the responsiveness of your website and the best part is that it’s free. Amazing right?🙃
In the end, there are numerous tools that can help prepare you for Cyber Week. These are the ones I have explored and they work for me. Now it’s your turn to share!
What other tools have you tried?👇
