Understanding how your business impacts its customers is your logistical duty and financial imperative. Conducting year-end reviews and creating a business checklist gives you an overview of your achievements, missed opportunities, and mistakes–which ultimately empowers you to serve your customers better. Sound complicated? It is. But, fortunately, you don’t have to go it alone. You can utilize a smart merchandising tool to understand the past better so you can pave a more promising future.
Here’s why reflecting on the past year’s performance should be a no-brainer and how a merchandising tool can help your business pave the way for a more fruitful year.
Building Your End-Of-Year Business Checklist
Making it to the end of a successful year calls for celebration. But if you want cause to celebrate even harder the following year, make sure to carve some time out to build a business checklist:
Conduct Year-End Reviews
Year-end reviews are important because they set your sights for the following calendar year. As you conduct the year-end review, you’ll notice things you could have done better but failed to address at the moment because you were just too close to them. Hindsight is 20/20, after all.
Make a business checklist of all the challenges you encountered and the skills you or your team learned in the past year. In that same spirit, try to find out whether your business fundamentals are as strong as they were when the year started.
Another area that needs your attention in the year-end review is financial evaluation. Check cash flow and cost base, and measure the financial growth. Use all this data as a measuring stick to assess your year’s performance.
This will also help you find out about new opportunities and help you increase customer satisfaction levels.
Reviewing Your Business Plans
The year’s end is the perfect opportunity to review your existing business plans, make changes, or make a new one altogether. While the goal for all for-profit companies is to turn a profit, what it takes to get there is subject to change. As you review your plan with your go-to merchandising tool, consider the following:
- Is your existing market analysis the same as before?
- Does your marketing strategy still work with your target audience?
- Does your SWOT and Competition analysis still hold weight today?
- Are your back-end logistics strong enough to supply next year’s demand?
Catching Up With Customers
It’s no secret that eCommerce businesses gear up for the holidays months in advance. While you pour your heart and soul into the holiday season, you must ensure that your customers don’t forget about you once they’re over.
You can stay top of mind by sending them a post-holiday email, asking for product reviews, and keeping your social media channels up-to-date. Or, you can go even more direct and pitch old customers with new products at a discount.
Whatever it takes–lowering prices, adapting to new trends, or even offering freebies–you must remember that the holidays are a blip. Get creative to keep your customers engaged all year long.
Building Action Plans
A new year brings new hopes, opportunities, and challenges. The right action plan will tackle all of those challenges to capitalize on all those opportunities.
To build an action plan, make sure to first go through your eCommerce strategy again. Check your online store’s design, infrastructure, buyer personas–everything- and ensure they’re all still relevant moving into 2023.
Goal-Setting for the New Year
Goals are a business’s ‘why’. Having clear goals frees you to build a bespoke eCommerce business strategy. Start with these 3 simple steps to start smashing your goals in no time:
- Define them. What is it that you’re truly after?
- Create relevant content that aligns with the year’s events.
- Build mobile-optimized web design.
While these are good places to start, you can also inspire action with mindful marketing through omnichannel distribution. Use the SMART framework to set goals and stay committed to them in all circumstances.
How a Merchandising Tool Can Help
Merchandising is an impressive way to get new customers and build a business that generates higher revenue. Here’s how to use a merchandising tool to improve your business reputation and become their go-to eCommerce store.
Hyper-Personalization
Hyper-personalization is about taking the customer’s experience with your brand to the next level. In this, the tool will use data and artificial intelligence to create a bespoke user experience journey.
Effective hyper-personalization can help brands build strategies that engage with their customers and generate new leads with accurate targeting. As a result, it leads to higher customer loyalty and improved customer retention rate.
Improve the Mobile Shopping Experience
Over 54.8% of the world’s web traffic happens on mobile phones. That’s right, over half of online searches happen in the palm of our hands. That’s why creating eCommerce stores that run smoothly on mobile is the best gift you can give your brand this year. Creating an optimized design for your eCommerce brand will help you bring in more customers without breaking the bank.
To improve the mobile shopping experience, optimize your content. This includes adding small-sized images and fewer videos, which improves the page load speed. Moreover, when creating a bespoke mobile shopping experience, push your customers through a sales funnel with a minimum number of clicks.
Also, implement cross-channel customer experience campaigns. This includes sharing marketing material over email and relevant social media channels.
More Data, More Insights
Data-driven eCommerce businesses see better results because they are number-driven rather than emotion-driven. Implementing a data-driven infrastructure will empower you to better understand your customers, identify opportunities, and engage with your market. In turn, you’ll elevate the customer experience–ultimately keeping your customers coming back for years to come.
Pro tip: Keep an eye on the conversion rate and aim for a higher rate by breaking down the acquisition source. Improve your Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), reduce the churn rate, and implement strategies that lead to a higher Average Order Value (AOV).
Start The Year Right With Smart Merchandiser
Gearing up for a brand new year ahead is no easy feat, particularly in today’s fast-paced, ever-changing business landscape. However, it’s far from impossible with the right tools in tow.
Whether you want to gain better data insight or implement automated strategies to get you closer to your goals, Smart Merchandiser can help. As a merchandising tool, Smart Merchandiser helps you optimize the product catalog, access analytics insights, and manage inventory.
Contact Us to learn more about how Smart Merchandiser can take your business to new heights in the new year.