Salesforce Retail — Top 9 Holiday Survival Checklist

Salesforce Retail — The 10th Annual celebration of the Singles day celebrated on November 11 in China marked the world’s biggest online shopping extravaganza with Alibaba alone making a record high sale of over $30 billion in just one day! Online shopping on Black Friday in the U.S crossed the $6.22 billion mark for the first time, up 24% from last year, while Amazon declared Cyber Monday as the highest U.S e-commerce sales day in the history with revenue of $7.9 billion. Salesforce Marketing Cloud enabled billions of Einstein engagement scores throughout Cyber Week helping retailers segment their audiences and reach the right customer at the right time with the right message.

During the 2018 holiday season, the e-commerce sale is estimated to reach $134 billion, topping the record of $110 billion the previous year and digital is set to surpass 10% total retail sale for the first time. And of course, Mobile will be the No.1 platform for browsing.

Consumers will be in brick-and-mortar stores, on the web while in store, constantly engaging with their favorite retail brands on their mobile devices, while also checking out BOPIS (Buy Online, Pickup In-store) options. Here’s a 9-point checklist to help you handle the retail rush with the next-gen capabilities of the World’s #1 CRMSalesforce.

Salesforce Retail — 9 Holiday Survival Checklist

  1. Make search Smarter and Easy with Salesforce Retail features — Salesforce Retail Shopping Index Data shows that shoppers who use plain old search are 2.4 times more likely to buy, they also drive more revenue, spending 2.6 times more, compared to those who don’t use search. Optimize Product Search and Filtering features in Salesforce Retail Commerce Cloud to enable site-wide search, faceted navigation, Product filtering, and Sorting., etc
  2. Surface Relevant Products at the Opportune Moment — Take advantage of the Recommendation features in Commerce Cloud for Salesforce Retail (cross-sell/up-sell, promotions, guided selling) to offer personalized recommendations based on past buyer behaviors.
  3. Create Shoppable Posts — For instance, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud Shopping on Instagram enables retailers to connect product catalogs on Instagram, tag products in posts and offer shoppable content to deliver a seamless shopping experience for customers. (41% of brands studied provide shoppable content on Instagram, according to Retail Dive)
  4. Salesforce Retail to Add Local Search Features to your App –Integrate Salesforce Retail Store Locator features to help shoppers easily locate and navigate to your Physical store by Zip code, city or GPS. (50% of consumers who do a local search on their smartphone visit a store within a day, and 18% of the searches lead to a purchase.)
  5. Leverage Data to Build Seamless Commerce Experiences — The Fourth annual Salesforce predictions for Retail in 2019 indicates that Customer Data and Data integration across enterprise systems will become a strategic imperative in 2019. Maximize Einstein AI features to get a 360-view of your customer data to make better decisions and deliver personalized shopping experiences through Salesforce Retail specific features.
  6. Shoppers will be using Multiple Channels, so Optimize your Websites and Mobile Capabilities –6 in 10 Internet users start shopping on one device but continue or finish on a different one. Take advantage of Salesforce Retail Commerce Cloud Multi-channel support features to deliver seamless shopping experiences across channels (Mobile, Social, Web, Point of Sale, Catalog)
  7. Ensure that your Support Team (or Bots!) is Available to Assist Shoppers in the Moment — The need for consumer-brand interaction will be at its peak during the holiday season. Ensure that you take advantage of Salesforce features like Salesforce Live Message and Salesforce Einstein Bots to automatically address customer concerns like Order Tracking, resetting a lost password., etc
  8. Let your Customers know when your Support Team would be Unavailable — Salesforce Support Holidays feature allows you to specify the dates and times your customer support team wouldn’t be available, so your customers are informed and can reach out to you in advance in case of any service inquiries.
  9. Simplify and Speed-up Checkout – Ensure that your shoppers can purchase right away with simple Salesforce Checkout and shipping options that enable frictionless payments including Single-Click Checkout, Order Summaries, receipts in Salesforce Retail etc;

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