As we start yet another exciting new year in ecommerce, now is the time to take stock of 2024 and start analyzing, planning, and tweaking your strategy for 2025.
As everyone in an industry that sees such ebbs and flows as ecommerce and retail knows, you really need to make time to sit and plan for future busy seasons if you want to make the most of these opportunities. Once the Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) rush and the holidays are over, you should jump into your data for these periods to optimize your strategy for next year’s busy periods.
In this blog, we’ll break down every step you should be taking to use your existing data from the past year to seize fresh ecommerce growth opportunities in 2025, with some tips and tricks along the way to ensure you’re saving as much time, money, and energy as possible.
Conduct a Post-Holiday Data Audit
What’s a better stress test for your entire operation than the period from Black Friday to Boxing Day? Your first step towards planning your ecommerce growth strategy for 2025 is to look backward at the data you have from your last busy period(s). With ecommerce in, there isn’t really anything busier than November and December, so you should start your audit here.
Areas to Review
When reviewing past sales and campaigns, here are the best areas to start with, as they will give you a good picture of what went right and what could use some improvement:
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Cart Abandonment Rates: Analyze abandonment patterns to uncover issues in checkout flow, payment options, or shipping fees. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) starts with understanding where and why people leave your checkout process, after all.
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Search Terms & Keywords: Identify common site search terms to determine if there are gaps in your product or keyword alignment. Search trends change over time, so reviewing your site’s SEO effectiveness should always be a part of your periodic audits.
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Top-Performing Campaigns: Review past successful campaigns to replicate high-impact strategies. If a specific coupon code, bundle, or sales email worked really well, why not give it a shot again next time?
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Low-Impact Campaigns: Find your campaigns with the lowest engagement or ROI to refine or replace them. Maybe there was a disparity between your messaging and targeted audiences that could be tweaked, or maybe some campaigns didn’t resonate as well with your customer base as you had hoped. Take what worked and change or trash what didn’t.
Pinpoint Areas for Improvement
Now that you’ve reviewed some campaigns and keywords, look at areas you can improve for future busy periods. Here’s where you should focus your efforts:
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Low-Performing Acquisition Channels: Examine channels with below-average conversion rates to optimize or reallocate resources. Sometimes, a campaign on a certain channel might not be doing as well as expected. Review whether it’s worth it for you to continue investing resources in that channel or stop altogether. If your audience is no longer using Twitter/X anymore, for example, consider moving resources to another social media platform–or even to something completely different, like SMS or email.
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Short Sessions on Key Pages: Review heatmaps or analytics to understand why certain pages may disengage visitors. That page’s design may be confusing or overwhelm shoppers, for example. Consider changing the layout/design or reviewing the content/copy to ensure it conveys the right message to your audience.
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Underperforming Products: Assess products with lower conversion rates and consider updating descriptions, pricing, or promotional strategies. Maybe you’re better off no longer carrying these items, as well, if your shoppers aren’t interested in them and your margins may be too small to consider a price cut. Build a list of your lowest sellers and analyze them on an individual basis to come to a decision.
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Web Performance Optimization: Verify that your website is properly optimized for various devices and internet connections. There’s nothing worse for shoppers than a bad user experience when it's time to buy. Remember, while having an image/graphic/animation-heavy website is excellent, not everyone uses the latest mobile devices on the best internet connections. If your pages make it difficult for a segment of your customers to buy, you might be better off toning it down to ensure they can shop online at your store.
Use Customer Feedback as a Compass
While you’ll be able to gather a ton of helpful information during your post-holiday audit, some of the most important data you can get as to how to prep for ecommerce growth in 2025 can come from your customer service team.
Identify common complaints and issues seen by your CS team so that you can act on them. This is a great way to start identifying topics for new blogs, improvements to your FAQ page or help center, or even updates to your product descriptions and product page copy. If you have any AI chatbots or automated CX flows, the optimizations you make to these pages will also automatically improve their accuracy and helpfulness, as well–ultimately enhancing your site’s self-service options.
Do you often receive similar comments on social media? Is there a recurring theme in your team's emails and chats from potential shoppers? Use these questions to drive your optimization strategy and plan out your content for the New Year.
Implement UX Insights with Session Loss Data and Proactive Bug Monitoring
Viewing session playback data with proactive monitoring software like Noibu can help you visualize user behaviour in your online store. This will show you what areas of your pages are capturing the attention of store visitors and help you uncover any bugs or issues that may be preventing them from adding items to their cart or completing the checkout process.
Noibu can help you identify elements (e.g., navigation and CTAs) that can be repositioned or redesigned based on user engagement patterns. From there, optimize your high-traffic areas by refining your content or design to ensure optimal user experience.
Additionally, you can leverage your session loss data to discover areas that are close to becoming problems for your website. By tracking lost sessions through Noibu, you can set thresholds for sessions lost over the last 7 days, and you will be notified that issues are beginning to impact your customers.
Finally, Noibu can help with performance optimization by identifying areas of your website that are causing your site’s speed/performance to tank so that you can focus your efforts on making small fixes with big impacts.
Noibu can be set up to run on your site at all times and notify you when it discovers bugs so that you can act quickly on the ones that will most affect your conversion rate before your customers encounter them. Don’t let your online sales suffer by waiting for someone to complain about an issue on your site before you make any changes!
Use Benchmark Data and Trend Reports to Determine your Strengths and Weaknesses
When planning your campaigns for the next 12 months, there’s nothing like having data to compare yourself to to see where you may want to focus your efforts in the upcoming year. Klaviyo, for example, offers benchmark reports that allow you to analyze your account data in relation to best practices and other companies using the platform in your industry.
You can use this feature to compare everything from open rates to average order value (AOV) and view a list of your top and bottom metrics compared to your competitors. This data can help you understand where you’re standing out and where you might need some extra work.
Klaviyo also offers campaign trend reports where you can chart how certain differences in your campaigns impact your open, click, and conversion rates. Do certain days and times for email sends work better than others? Are newsletters sent weekly more or less successful than those sent monthly? This information can help inform how you plan to structure your email automations and campaigns in the future.
Set Targets for the New Year
The most important target you need to consider is revenue. This should be broken down into quarters, months, and finally, weeks. Depending on your product/market, not every period should have one consistent, unmoving target. For example, if you sell winter boots and other seasonal accessories, your Q2 and Q4 targets should be different to reflect buying habits/customer behavior.
When setting your revenue targets, here are a few things to consider:
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Can your marketing budget support the ads you’ll need to run and the content you’ll need to create to hit your revenue targets? Can all marketing work be done internally, or will you need to contact an agency to help achieve your goals?
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Do you have enough inventory available or in production to sell to both match demand and hit your targets?
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Are you considering seasonality/searchability when planning your targets? You may need to invest less in ads at certain times of the year if organic searches for your popular search terms ebb and flow seasonally.
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Are your targets in line with market growth projections or shifts in customer behaviour? Do some research before putting anything down on paper.
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Consider your growth plans. Are you planning to open a new retail store or start selling in a new market? Consider these new geographical regions or customer segments.
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Are you making changes to your tech stack? Factor in ROI from investing in tools like personalization software, AI-driven analytics, or improved website UX.
A lot goes into setting yourself up for success, but above all, keep your goals consistent with your plans for the new year and avoid making unrealistic plans just for the sake of “thinking big.”
Plan Content, Promotions, and Improvements for the Year
Once the holiday rush ends, use the end-of-year lull to work on your content and promotional calendars. Start brainstorming ideas for blog articles, videos, tutorials, email automation flows, sales, etc.
When considering changes or improvements to your store website, plan updates for low-stress times to optimize the site and campaigns for peak times like BFCM or the holiday season. This way, if you encounter any issues mid-change, you’ll have the time to handle them–and sales won’t be affected by any problems or downtime.
Finally, while you should be heading into every year with a clear plan and direction for your business, none of this should ever be set entirely in stone. Don’t be afraid to make changes as time passes, and keep iterating on your monitoring and adjustment strategy as you gain new insights and as the world and market change around you. Plan time in your calendar for ongoing quarterly data reviews throughout the year to ensure timely improvements.
Conclusion
As we barrel through 2025, the time to act is now. By diving deep into your 2024 data, you're not just reflecting on the past but laying a solid foundation for future success. Conducting a thorough post-holiday audit allows you to uncover insights into your customers' behaviours, preferences, and pain points. By pinpointing areas for improvement, leveraging customer feedback, and utilizing things like heatmaps and proactive monitoring, you can position your ecommerce business to meet and even exceed your goals.
Remember, setting realistic and well-informed targets is most important. Align your revenue goals with your marketing budget, inventory capabilities, and market trends. Planning your content, promotions, and site improvements ahead of time will reduce stress during peak seasons and ensure you're always a step ahead of other online retailers.
Need help with auditing and planning for future ecommerce business growth? Our team of developers and marketers at Blue Badger can help you with everything from a full audit to developing an entire ecommerce marketing plan/campaign strategy to help you make the most of 2025 and beyond. With a focus on ecommerce store development, app integration, and more, we have the skills you need to grow your ecommerce business in the new year. Contact us today to get started.
