It’s never too early to start preparing for peak

Holiday shopping can be both joyful and stressful—for consumers, retailers, and brands. The season brings a significant increase in customer demand, which in turn increases eCommerce sales and revenue. There is a reason it’s called the Peak season! Adding to the stress, every year, the start of Peak moves earlier and earlier and stretches longer and longer.

According to a recent study, 27% of consumers plan to start their online Holiday shopping in October 2024. Another 26% plan to start in November, before Thanksgiving and the Cyber 5 (five days between Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday), which traditionally kicks off the season.

So why is the season starting earlier and earlier? Remember the supply chain challenges during the Pandemic? Retailers scrambled to meet customer demands due to insufficient supplies, creating a logistical nightmare. Worried that their holiday orders wouldn’t arrive in time, consumers started shopping earlier in the season.

On top of that, as the cost of living crisis unfolded, consumers started shopping earlier to find the best deals available. Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days launched in 2022 forcing other retailers to also introduce special sales, resulting in steep discounts and holiday shopping before Halloween. Nobody wants to lose out on a great deal!

What’s in store for Peak 2024?

As if being fully prepared for the busiest season of the year wasn’t hard enough, it is also getting harder and more expensive,to attract new customers, keep them engaged and secure the sale.

According to the 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report from ContentSquare, over half of retail sites saw less traffic in 2023, while ad spending increased, pushing cost per visit up by 12%.

This year, retailers and brands are cautiously optimistic about consumer spending. eMarketer forecasts holiday peak consumer spending to rise 4.8% over last year. However, price sensitivity is expected to linger, and shoppers will likely start shopping for deals early this year as well.

The art of planning for peak

From inventory management, marketing and site optimization to logistics and customer service, preparing for the eCommerce peak involves many different moving parts and requires participation from the entire organization.

The pressure to exceed last year’s performance is always on, and it is never too early to start preparing. Here are some key areas that should be addressed in your 2024 peak eCommerce strategy:

• Inventory Management: Peak brings more demand and it is critical to ensure that you have adequate inventory of popular items. This includes forecasting which products are likely to be in high demand and ordering sufficient quantities in advance.
• Website Performance: Higher traffic volumes during the peak season can impact site speed. Ensuring your site can handle increased traffic without crashing or slowing down is critical for maintaining a positive shopping experience. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly.
• Marketing: The most competitive season of the year, retailers and brands will be fighting to get a greater share of consumer spending. Planning ahead allows you to create effective and creative marketing strategies and schedule promotions.
• User Experience: It is getting harder and harder to engage and convert shoppers on site. You need effective engagement tools and conversion boosters like social proof messaging to optimize the site experience and increase conversions and sales.
• Logistics and Shipping: Easy, timely and cost-effective delivery is critical during this season, not to mention the whole reverse logistics process dealing with the inevitable returns. Efficient planning and coordination with shipping and fulfilment partners allows you to streamline logistics and shipping and be ready to handle increased volume of orders, and returns without sacrificing customer satisfaction.
• Customer Service: Increased demand and sales often means increase in customer service inquiries. Proper planning includes making sure that your customer service team is staffed to handle traffic spikes and trained to promptly resolve issues, upsell and maintain overall high level of customer satisfaction.

Planning for holiday peak early, helps you better meet customer demand, maintain operational efficiency, enhance customer satisfaction and ultimately drive higher sales and profitability during this critical season.

Early and thorough planning also allows you to invest in and implement solutions that will help elevate the digital customer experience, increase conversion rates and even reduce eCommerce returns. One of these solutions is Social Proof Messaging. Read on to learn more.

Invest in social proof now to optimize peak sales potential

Retailers and brands like GoPro, Fabletics, and Revolve use social proof as their secret weapon to optimize the customer experience across the digital shopping journey. Social proof is especially helpful for shoppers during the holiday season, when we’re all struggling to come up with ideas for what to buy. Is it popular? Is it good quality? Will it fit? These are all questions that social proof can help answer, making the process of gift buying much easier.

Here are a few ways that social proof can ease gift shopping for your customers and take your peak sales to the next level this season.

‍1. Augment marketing campaigns with social proof
Consumers are inundated with marketing messages and special promotions from retailers and brands, especially during peak. By leveraging real-time social proof messaging in email marketing and display advertising, you can stand out from the crowd and create more creative and effective marketing campaigns that engage and convert. Easily incorporate real-time trends like, sales, add-to-cart volumes, trending and product views in your emails and ads to instil trust and a sense of urgency at the early stages of the purchasing funnel.

2. Guide shoppers to the right gifts
So many choices, so little time—buying the right gifts for friends and family can be a stressful experience. Social proof, which highlights bestsellers or trending items, is perfect for shoppers who are unsure of what to get. When choosing a popular or best-selling product, you can be fairly certain that it is something that the recipient will love.

Attribute Messaging highlighting key product attributes can also help guide shoppers to the right gift choice. For instance, a shirt made of organic cotton will likely appeal to someone who bought an electric car, by highlighting that key attribute, you’re helping shoppers discover gift options and narrow their selection.

3. Capture shopper attention on the Product Detail Page
Many consumers will start their 2024 Holiday shopping journeys on a search engine this year, sending traffic directly to your product detail page (PDP), making it the new homepage. Social proof messaging on the PDP highlights relevant social proof data that is proven to capture and engage shoppers, reducing high bounce rates.

Extended social proof messaging highlighting specific attributes relevant to the original search terms and aggregated review messaging will reinforce relevancy and lead to higher conversions instead of higher bounce rates.

5. Provide much-appreciated inventory insights
During peak season, demand is naturally higher, and inventory can fluctuate significantly. Missing out on items on Holiday wish lists due to sold-out status is never fun. Social proof messaging helps to ensure that shoppers don’t miss out by highlighting whether products are selling fast or running low on stock. Shoppers value this insight, and it can also help encourage them to make a purchase decision faster.

6. Get creative with seasonal themes
Seasonal-themed social proof messages that align with your brand are not only fun but also effective. By theming the icons and copy associated with social proof messages, you can deliver more dynamic experiences that can help your brand stand out. This will provide extra relevance and timeliness to your messaging, further boosting conversions.

7. Reduce high return rates
Nobody likes returns. They are inconvenient for customers and gift recipients, costly for retailers and bad for the environment. Social proof messaging can reduce return rates by helping shoppers select the right product the first time. By showcasing what is trending and best selling and adding aggregated fit and review messaging, shoppers can easily discover what’s popular, how other customers rate a product or if the sizing information is correct. By increasing the likelihood that customers make the right purchases, you can reduce return rates, lower associated costs, prevent margin erosion and support sustainability ambitions.

Get started with social proof today and make the most of your peak season

Retailers and brands who plan effectively can deliver better customer experiences, offer better deals, provide faster shipping, and ensure a smoother shopping experience, giving them an edge over competitors who may not be as well-prepared.

Social proof messaging can help you deliver a less stressful gift shopping experience for your customers, who will return the favor with higher conversions, trust, and long-term loyalty. Customers will appreciate the help, and your bottom line will thank you.

Integrating and implementing Taggstar’s social proof messaging is fast and easy. And the results are fast, too—our retail customers experience significant uplifts in sales and conversion rates almost immediately. We’ve even successfully implemented social proof during peak and code freeze.

Are you ready to make the most of the peak season this year?

Try our conversion calculator, explore how we’ve helped other retailers and brands across industries accelerate growth and contact us for a quick demo.