How to optimize your brand’s eCommerce site around key online shopping days

There are three key online shopping days: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Amazon Prime Day. 

These virtual events play a powerful role in the steady growth of retail e-commerce sales, which are expected to reach a global value of $6.3 trillion in 2024. When events like Amazon Prime Day approaches, other e-commerce sites prepare their own savings events to attract customers. This is because e-commerce brands know savvy shoppers will search for deals, compare prices, and find alternative products to better meet their needs during major shopping events—and the data supports this behavior.

62% of consumers research deals ahead of big summer sales events, and 48% will wait for specific deals before making a purchase. And, according to Adobe Analytics, shoppers spent roughly $38 billion between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday last year—up 7.8% year-over-year. Overall, this leads to an ideal situation where e-commerce brands can expect to see an influx of visitors to their sites when they advertise for special events like summer sales. 

This benefits all online retailers and presents an opportunity to reach more shoppers, record large volumes of sales, and collect important retail data to help shape future marketing, advertising, and sales strategies, regardless of business size or industry. When more shoppers visit e-commerce sites, they can provide businesses with relevant information to understand their audiences, identify industry trends, and forecast potential growth opportunities. 

For retailers looking to take advantage of this summer sales period, adding e-commerce analytics will better inform strategies to increase profits and enhance the customer experience.

Leveraging E-Commerce Analytics to Grow Business
Data is crucial to business success. In e-commerce, data gives businesses insights into who their customers are, what they’re looking for, when they make purchases, which channels they use, which products perform well, and more. This is also known as e-commerce analytics, and it enables businesses to collect and analyze data from online retailers to shape business objectives, follow customer journeys, and optimize marketing strategies. This creates a blueprint for businesses looking to better understand their customer journeys, define their KPIs, and understand sales trends. 

For example, an online shoe retailer might see a spike in sales activity around Prime Day, Black Friday, and other major shopping events one year. By leveraging this information, the business can anticipate an increase in sales around the same periods the following year. As the business dives deeper into the data, its marketers might notice that paid ads on Instagram drive a large portion of traffic to the site, with most shoppers falling under the same demographics. Now, the business has a better understanding of how to target this audience and create an optimized marketing campaign to make the most of this opportunity.

While this is just one example of the role analytics can play in shaping a marketing strategy, it provides businesses with a glimpse into the potential ways they can enhance their sites to welcome increased sales around key shopping dates. 

Here are some more ways businesses can leverage e-commerce analytics to boost sales.

Incorporate a Holistic Approach to the Customer Journey
The internet has unleashed a seemingly endless loop of products, sales, and brands for customers to choose from throughout the buyer journey. It may seem impossible to stand out in a crowded marketplace, but businesses that prioritize the customer journey will uncover secrets to successfully beat the competition.

The first step to enhancing the customer journey starts with understanding the diverse ways customers engage with brands, not focusing solely on the number of clicks it takes to complete a purchase. Finding out how customers found a brand, how much time they spend on the site, and the funnels they travel through to convert tell a clearer story about the content customers engage with and how it informs their experience. 

Once these areas are identified, businesses can invest more time creating similar content to engage shoppers and seamlessly move them along the customer journey.

Understand the Expectations of Shopping Online
Personalization, speed, and ease of use are also key components of the buyer journey that might lead a shopper toward one business and away from another. Online shopping maximizes convenience for shoppers, but it can also create friction. 

Quickly identifying and resolving pain points eliminates some friction, but more must be done to enhance the shopping experience. Online retailers should also prioritize mobile optimization and seamless operation across all devices, a smooth purchasing process, and a wide selection of products to choose from. 

Leveraging KPIs helps businesses identify metrics that can elevate performance. For example, advertising a sale right before Prime Day might lead to a higher engagement rate for some brands, encouraging shoppers to return to a brand’s site in the days that follow to compare prices or close a sale. 

Keeping track of other KPIs, like new and repeat customers, product sales, and average order value by channel, can also help shape marketing strategies around major shopping events. 

Implement the Right Tools and Connect the Data
Data is essential to helping businesses understand shoppers and the content that drives them. Customer data platforms (CDPs) have emerged as tools to help e-commerce businesses collect data from other platforms in one place. This may include information from email or other messaging platforms, conversations between customers and chatbots or representatives, CRMs or automation platforms, and more.

By bringing this information together, CDPs make it possible to activate crucial data rather than spending time combing over data that might not be relevant or isolating data rather than looking at the bigger picture. 

With the right information, e-commerce businesses gain better insight into the customer journey and learn more about their audience demographics, acquisition metrics, and customer behaviours. As more and more online businesses enter an already crowded marketplace, CDPs can be the difference between standing out or vanishing into obsolescence, especially during sales periods. 

Monitor and Make Adjustments When Necessary
Are sales seasonal? Does one product outperform another? Have targeted social media ads sent more users to the site? How often are carts abandoned? 

Trends, patterns, and behaviours are key factors to consider when planning campaigns, but they mean nothing if brands don’t track the motivators behind them. When businesses pay attention to which products are selling the most during certain periods, they can better forecast sales and other metrics to accommodate shoppers’ spending habits, adjusting to meet buyer demands and saving the business money in the long run. 

E-commerce optimization is an ongoing strategy that requires brands to closely monitor customer behaviour and analyze data before, during, and after shopping events. This reveals opportunities to cross-sell, upsell, craft unique purchasing journeys to fit different customer segments, retarget customers with elevated content they are more likely to respond to, and more.

Additionally, data activation enables businesses to optimize their platforms and benefit from enhanced customer experiences, increasing customer retention, brand loyalty, and revenue during the summer sales season and beyond. By continually refining strategies based on data insights, businesses can stay competitive and responsive to market trends, ensuring long-term success.