While there’s much to love about the summer, many of those things commonly associated with this time of the year, including warm weather, vacations, and a lack of holidays, can pose a lot of problems for many e-commerce retailers.

Despite that, there are a lot of things you can do to put your e-commerce business in the best position to succeed, in both the short term and the long term, including the 5 activities we've compiled below.

Get Creative with your Marketing

Traffic is typically not so hot in the summer and that’s why it’s important that you try and stand out from the crowd. One effective means of doing this, while building your brand and awareness, is working on being more creative with your marketing approach.

While integrating summer-themed visuals and texts is a great start, you should go a step further to really get the most out of your efforts. Consider some of the following:

• Fun and engaging social media content/contests
• Blog/Vlog about relevant summer topics‍
• Focus on some of the more off-beat or obscure summer holidays

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Weather Segmentation

This technique is starting to become more popular these days and may be worth considering for your own e-shop. Plus, if you’re already segmenting your customers based on their location then you’re already halfway there.

This idea capitalizes on two fundamental principles: identifying and crafting marketing that speaks to each individual customer and harnessing the inherent mood and behavioral swings that are brought on by changes in the weather. When it comes to the latter, the idea behind it is that if there’s a torrential downpour outside, for instance, those customers will be more likely to be in front of their computer/device and ready to shop.

You can think of it as an extension of our previous tip, getting more creative with your marketing, and allows you to capitalize on any extreme swings in the weather. Of course, the efficacy of this will vary greatly based on your industry and involves a bit of extra work but is definitely worth a try even if you don’t approach it from a marketing content perspective but rather from a marketing timing perspective, pushing harder on days where you project to have more people tuned into your marketing.

Give your E-shop a Tune-up

The natural shopping downtimes of the year, like summer, present you with an opportune time to do all of those pesky maintenance-related tasks you’ve been putting off since your Black Friday sale.

Some things to consider giving a tune-up: 

• Optimize images and descriptions: Make sure your images are selling your products properly and not too big in size and that your descriptions are succinct, focused on need-fulfillment, and use keywords effectively
• SEO: Check that all of your meta tags are complete and optimized and do some keyword analysis and subsequent research, inputting new, more effective texts where necessary
• Check your links and forms: Test all of your links and forms to make sure they’re working properly and not ending with an error or a 404
• Customer analysis: If you haven't already, now’s the perfect time to start working on your customer journey mapping and identifying your ideal customer. Armed with this information, you can head into the holiday season knowing exactly who to target and how to approach the marketing.
• Back up your site and data: You don’t want to be in a position where a hard disk gets corrupted and you’re in need of a backup but don’t have one. Back up your site, customer and order data, statistics, visuals, and anything else you couldn’t do without. You may be sorry you didn't!
  

Have a Summer Sale with Purpose

Beyond trying to increase your revenue or awareness, summer sales provide you with a great win-win opportunity to focus on selecting and discounting products that are clogging up inventory space and need to be cleared out.

While people are less inclined to open their wallets in the summer versus the autumn and winter, shoppers are always looking for a deal and by offering up products you want to get rid of with an impactful discount, you're hitting two birds with one stone.

Best of all, by getting people to shop now, even at a lower margin, you gain valuable customer data you can use for future marketing purposes, giving you a great opportunity to get them to continue shopping with you and gradually increase their AOV and CLV.

Capture Emails w/ Welcome Campaigns

Capturing emails from your visitors is the perfect accoutrement to running a sale, capitalizing on the increased traffic coming to your site. When you get down to it, the vast majority of your visitors are simply going to leave your website without taking any action, resulting in a plethora of lost sales opportunities.

By injecting an incentivized welcome or exit-intent pop-up, which captures a visitor’s email, you’re turning a likely lost sale into a potential customer when you consider the overall efficacy, in terms of open and click-through rates, of welcome emails.

We’ve put together some tips and strategies for pop-ups and Samba now allows for the integration ofJavaScript into pop-ups, completely enhancing their overall functionality and design capabilities.

RELATED ARTICLES

• 10 Great Use Cases for E-commerce Pop-ups
• Enhance your Pop-ups & Product Widgets with JavaScript
• Finding and Targeting the Ideal Customers
• Get your Low-CLV Customers into the Flow and Spending More
• Identifying and Working your Ideal Customer

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