Last year’s Cyber Monday set the record for the largest online sales day ever, according to BlackFriday.com. This year, they’re expecting upward of $7.25 billion in sales. Is your company prepared for the upcoming holiday season?
These are three tips to help you ramp up on your holiday retail preparation and ensure success through early 2019.
- System Health Check: Before you jump in, it’s important to ensure that your systems and applications are ready for the influx of sales and web traffic. Evaluate last year’s peak load metrics. Did anything fail? Was there unnecessary downtime resulting in loss of sales? Outline the mishaps and create a game-plan in the event that something fails this year.
- Quality Assurance and Testing: This might be one of the most important steps in order to avoid mayhem during the increased traffic periods. After you evaluate last year’s peak metrics, implement any necessary enhancements or updates. Then, test, test, test! In order to ensure that your systems, applications and, who could forget, the various departments affected, can hold up to increased demands.
- The Follow-up: Extend your sales into early 2019. Your marketing and IT teams should meet on a regular basis to develop strategies that capture customer information (even if they didn’t make a purchase). Then, work together to create a follow-up campaign that targets abandoned shopping carts, unique visitors, etc. You can even re-target customers. This way, your success can extend into the slower season.
Bottom line, it’s not too late to start preparing for this holiday season. Sirius’ dedicated team provides continual human monitoring of your commerce environment, as well as periodic updates on the health of the system. Get started by downloading the Sirius Holiday Readiness Plan
