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Jan 11, 2024 | 11 minute read
written by Seamus Roddy
Hundreds of billions in online spending made 2023’s holiday commerce season the biggest ever. But in many cases, a major drop in digital spending is for merchandisers as strong a New Year’s tradition as sparklers and a midnight smooch.
Flipping the calendar to January doesn’t have to mean pressing pause on aggressive, innovative merchandising. You can maintain your holiday momentum and generate significant customer engagement, conversions, and revenue in the first few months of this year. It requires a different approach than during the holiday season, but with Elastic Path, you can conquer the Q1 commerce landscape. Check out the merchandising strategies that win attention, sales, and revenue – and see how Elastic Path makes it possible.
Why it’s important right now: Too often, brands think that holiday promotions aren’t applicable once the holidays end. In reality, promotions are more important than ever in January and February, as consumers have fewer buying deadlines and are more willing to shop around. To maximize post-holiday sales, extend successful holiday promotions with modifications. For example, if you ran a Buy One, Get One sale on products that worked in December, modify it to a Buy One, Get One Half Off promotion in January. This way, your effective holiday promotion becomes a fresh, relevant New Year’s promotion.
How Elastic Path can help: Elastic Path Product Experience Manager provides advanced product merchandising capabilities. You can extend and alter promotions and product descriptions without relying on IT or dev work. Plus, if your promotions involve unique pricing strategies such as geo-based pricing or account-based pricing, you can extend and alter it with zero coding required.
See Elastic Path in action: Discover how business users set up and manage promotions in minutes with Elastic Path Product Experience Manager.
Why it’s important right now: Personalization is always a merchandising best practice, and its importance is heightened early in the calendar year. Some shoppers are going to be fatigued after an onslaught of advertisements and buying during the holidays. Providing a buying experience that offers pricing, promotions, and content based on a buyer’s attributes helps your brand stand out and make consumers feel valued. For some brands, this might look like a customer who showed interest in fitness gear in December being shown health and wellness products in January. For others, it may mean tailoring experiences for specific geography or set of B2B accounts.
How Elastic Path can help: Elastic Path offers advanced personalization capabilities across our suite of composable products. For example, CX Studio allows you to rapidly launch turn-key storefronts and shoppable landing pages that feature data-driven personalization. Without code, your team can create, optimize, and launch personalized customer experiences that elevate your products and boost conversion and revenue.
See Elastic Path in action: Watch to see a personalized shoppable landing page set up in less than two minutes.
Access a free Elastic Path trial today to see our leading composable commerce solution in action.
Why it’s important right now: Discount bundles are an essential part of merchandising after the holidays. Even without holiday demand, merchandisers are responsible for driving revenue. Plus, the lull after the holiday rush can inflate inventory levels. Discount bundles address both those challenges, increase AOV, and keep your digital commerce humming. An example of discount bundling is a clothing retailer that bundles slow-moving sweaters with more in-demand products at a reduced price. This way, you sell products that are languishing and get an effective markup on more in-demand items.
How Elastic Path can help: Product Experience Manager has advanced product bundling capabilities that boost UPT, AUR, AOV, and all the other acronyms you care about. Brands using Elastic Path as their commerce engine have always had access to those capabilities, and now, so do brands using Shopify or Shopify Plus. Shopify’s limited bundling capabilities and limits on variants and pricing long stifled brands. Now, as part of Elastic Path Composer’s Shopify integration, you get Product Experience Manager’s bundling capabilities without having to leave Shopify.
See Elastic Path in action: First, watch how Product Experience Manager allows you to create a dynamic product bundle in five minutes.
Now, watch and see how Elastic Path Composer’s Shopify integration – available on Integrations Hub – enables Shopify brands to directly create bundles in Product Experience Manager that auto-populate in their Shopify storefront.
Why it’s important right now: Without traditional buying deadlines until Valentine’s Day, generating urgency can be difficult for merchandisers in the early part of the year. Flash sales create an exciting, time-sensitive shopping experience for consumers and should be part of your Q1 merchandising plans. Like discount bundles, flash sales are an effective way to boost AOV and clear inventory, and can be launched for hours, days, or weeks depending on your business and products.
How Elastic Path can help: Product Experience Manager has revenue-boosting flash sale capabilities that you can launch in minutes. It’s easy for merchandisers to set special pricing for specific products – and to extend or shorten flash sales based on the response.
See Elastic Path in action: Watch a time-boxed flash sale created in minutes with no dev work, coding, or complications.
Why it’s important right now: Merchandising during the holiday season is typically predictable: there are surges in traffic and buying around Black Friday/Cyber Monday and shortly before Christmas. Q1 is different – consumer behavior is harder to predict, which means that brands that are equipped to analyze customer data and behavior in real time can adapt and adjust tactics. For example, you may find that a certain type of product is surging or a category of buyer is more active on your storefront. Take the data you have about consumer behavior and use it to inspire tailored merchandising experiences on your site.
How Elastic Path can help: Merchandisers using Composer have access to a one-click integration with Twilio Segment. The integration makes it easy to analyze customer data and build personalized frontend experiences on CX Studio based on a customer’s past interactions with your brand. You can present winback offers, personalize a loyal user’s homepage experience, and evaluate this data across channels – email, social ad, online storefront, brick-and-mortar store and more.
Hear what a customer has to say:
“For Vivrelle, a luxury membership club, providing a white-glove experience is essential to our brand; the integration between Twilio and Elastic Path allows us to deliver that experience digitally with personalized experiences that truly delight our customers. We were able to implement the integration in a matter of minutes and expect this to save our engineering team over 60% in data analytics implementation time long-term. The impact on our members was immediate, and we can see members finding bags they love faster than ever.”
– Jeff Neil, VP Software Engineering, Vivrelle
See Elastic Path in action: Watch the demo of Elastic Path’s no-code Twilio Segment integration to see how all brands – not just those with massive budgets and dedicated data teams – can activate their data to create commerce experiences that maximize revenue.
With Elastic Path, you get all the capabilities required to pursue aggressive and innovative merchandising. Don’t accept a mediocre start to your commerce year. Talk with an Elastic Path expert today about how our commerce solutions can help you drive conversion and revenue fast at every time of the year.
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