How retailers can prepare for digital holiday traffic.

More than halfway through 2022, consumer behavior continues to change in surprising ways. Inflation has hit near-record levels, and not even higher-income households are immune to its effects. Across the board, consumers are buying less or looking for cheaper alternatives in response to rising prices.

If there’s anything retailers can count on for the upcoming holiday season, it’s to expect the unexpected — again. But, even with so much uncertainty, there are still things you can do now to get ready for this year’s holiday sales.

Let’s look at how you can prepare the digital experience ahead of the 2022 holiday season with two retail examples.

Testing new features before the rush.

After the time back-to-school shopping calms down but before the holiday season picks up, a large beauty retailer launched its annual 21-day campaign in which many in-demand products were 50% off.

Working with Quantum Metric, they discovered that during the campaign, customers were clicking 2.4 times (on average) on non-clickable elements. While users were clicking on the product image and expecting to be redirected to the PDP, the actual path required that they click on the “Shop now” link to arrive at the PDP. This was impacting 2.5K users during the 20-day deal period. And despite the deals, conversion rate dropped by 2.33% during the promo period.

In order to improve this experience, the retailer updated all of their templates for promo pages moving forward.

To test this update ahead of the holidays, the retailer leveraged the new product template for their “Holiday Gift Guide,” which allowed customers to click on the product or title image to arrive at the PDP. The team removed the “Shop Now” button altogether.

With Quantum Metric, the retailer determined that the change led to a 5% uplift in conversion rate, or $4.98M in annualized incremental revenue.

Ensuring seasonal promotions aren’t working against you.

Promotions and discounts can have a huge impact on delighting customers and protecting margins. But only when the digital promotion experience acts as intended.

For example, an American footwear brand relies heavily on promo codes to drive conversion. So much so, that they house a “promo drawer” or “shoveler” at the bottom of every page on their site which features three or more promo offers.

But one month they noticed that customers were exhibiting frustration on their PDPs when trying to click on an image within the image carousel. After troubleshooting within the Quantum Metric platform, the team discovered that the promo drawer was blocking much of the PDP—preventing customers from clicking on an image. The impact: a 3.8% drop in conversion rate.

By sending a clear link to a replay of one of the PDP sessions to the rest of the team, the brand was quickly able to not only fix the issue, but also see an uplift in conversion rate by 5.6% and an incremental $280K in annualized revenue.

Deck and double check those digital halls.

As with anything digital, it’s important not to set and forget. What the 2022 holiday season has in store remains to be seen, and retail teams need to stay nimble as consumer behavior changes.

Need help getting ready for the busiest time of the digital retail season? Check out our 5 points to future-proof your digital program before the surge. Inside, you’ll find a guide for preparing for the unexpected with key points for digital success.

Download the complete guide here.