Now is the time to ensure your e-commerce business is ready to face CNY 2022!
Customers are drawing up their shopping lists filled with CNY goodies, which means that businesses must make preparations. If you’ve already rounded up the best-selling items to stock up on, the next step is to get your customers to interact with your business.
COVID-19 led to a rise in online shopping amongst Malaysians and while we’re getting closer to life as it was before the pandemic, we anticipate that many customers will continue to take advantage of the efficiency and convenience of online shopping for CNY 2022.
What Did CNY 2021 Look Like?
According to Jonathan Tan, Managing Director for public relations agency Vox Eureka, CNY 2021 was a subdued affair. Due to the MCO, Malaysians were forced to turn to digital solutions to keep the festivities alive.
During this period, pre-packed yee sang deliveries and e-wallet angpaus were some of the ways businesses boosted the CNY spirit.
It being a period of financial uncertainty also led to consumers being more price-sensitive, making value deals a popular fixture. However, compared to other Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Singapore, Malaysia experienced the largest surge in online shoppers during the Chinese New Year period.
How Can Online Businesses Prepare for CNY 2022?
Further data from Marketing Interactive revealed that CNY-related searches often begin as early as three weeks prior. Which means now is the time for you to ramp up preparations to avoid being overwhelmed by the holiday rush.
Managing the influx of customers coming your way during peak periods of the festive season can be challenging. To minimise any disruption to your workflow and keep your business top-of-mind, below are five things you can do today to prepare for the 2022 Chinese New Year celebrations.
Audit and Automate Your Website
Online store traffic is often heavier during the festive season. To minimise disruptions for CNY 2022, this is the time to audit it for usability.
Some of the basics include…
- Checking if your website is mobile friendly
- Eliminating broken links and 404 errors
- Improving your webpage load time
- Ensuring the images on your site are high-quality with alt-text that is relevant to the content
To strategically approach this step, a website audit checklist will help you cover all your bases.
Website automation is also something that shouldn’t be overlooked. To keep up with the pace of your customers’ holiday shopping, automating certain processes can speed up your workflow and free up time for you to focus on other matters.
Some of the tasks you can begin to automate include:
- Order fulfilment and management
- Purchase order approvals
- Inventory
- Payment solutions
- Email marketing
- social media post scheduling
- Reminder emails to customers
Create Relevant Themed Content
Content is one of the best ways to attract your customers and keep them engaged. For many Malaysian Chinese, the Lunar New Year is a special time because it allows them to celebrate the traditions they hold dear. Creating content centred around these themes will help to elevate your brand above the competitive noise and build a relationship with your customers.
We suggest customising your CNY 2022 social media posts, website visuals, and blog posts accordingly. You can even create custom content such as product reviews, best-sellers pages, gift guides, videos, and more that celebrate some of the most meaningful Chinese New Year themes.
We loved Tiger Beer Singapore’s homage to family and the joys of coming together in it’s 2018 Chinese New Year campaign. Titled “The Reunion Project”, it was based on the concept of reuniting families that had been separated for an extended period of time.
The brand created a microsite for the project and launched a digital activation campaign encouraging Singaporeans to nominate a family member to receive travel vouchers for a trip home in time for the CNY festivities.
In addition to that, the microsite was built with an e-gifting feature that allowed customers to gift themselves or loved ones a 24-can crate of Tiger Beer and receive an additional 6 cans of TIger Radler Lemon for free. Customers could include a personalised message for the recipient!
Maximise Your Usage of Seasonal Keywords
Planning for Chinese New Year required advanced planning. Google data reports that search volume accelerates five weeks into the New Year and peaks during the first week of Chinese New Year.
Here are some of the ways to optimise your keyword usage for conversions during this period:
- Include targeted keywords in your page’s meta title and description. Try to use your keyword in the beginning of the title and while your meta description does not directly influence your position in Google’s search results, it can influence clicks from your target audience.
- Create content such as blogs and product descriptions that is relevant to your target audience and use your keywords in the body text. To avoid being flagged for keyword stuffing, use keyword variations.
- Once you have a list of keywords you want to use, use a mapping strategy to help you map the keywords accordingly. This will help to avoid cramming all your keywords onto a single page on your website or using identical keyword groups on each page.
- Use keywords in your header tags as these help you communicate to Google what your page is about.
- Don’t lose sight of your target audience. Make sure to remove outdated and irrelevant keywords that might attract the wrong kind of attention.
Leverage Chat Automation Features
Customer experience is a major priority during this time and a thoughtfully implemented customer support strategy can boost your Chinese New Year sales and bring you greater customer loyalty. An easy way to do this is through your chat automation AKA chatbots.
Beyond providing your customers with information about the products and services on your website, chat automation is a great way to increase your average order value (AOV) during the festive shopping period.
By nature, customers are more incentivised to increase their basket size during this time. Ride this wave by using your automated customer support tools and implement these techniques to improve your AOV.
- Encourage customers to purchase a related or complementary product to the items they already have in their cart. Your chatbot can message your customers to let them know about other customers who were interested in the same product and also purchased products B, C, or D.
- Once a customer has, for example, RM50 worth of items in their shopping cart, let them know that they are only X amount away from receiving free shipping or a discount on their purchase.
- If a customer abandons their cart mid-way through the shopping process, use your chatbot to send a personal pop-up with a link to the shopping cart along with a discount or deal.
Incorporate Social Media Trends
In the weeks leading up to CNY 2022, customers will be seeing a lot of content as businesses capitalise on the festive season. For your content to stand-out, it has to be more valuable than ever. These popular strategies can be easily applied to your social media marketing mix and are a great way to call attention to your CNY offerings.
Browse and Checkout In-app
Make it easy for your customers to browse your products and make purchases directly on the channels they’re using. Instagram’s shoppable posts feature lets customers browse products on your feed and checkout directly by tapping on a product sticker. This not only creates a seamless shopping experience, it also lets you promote your products and services without being overly sales-y.
Build Trust with User Generated Content
79% of people say that user generated content (UGC) is highly influential in their purchasing decisions. From product review videos to written testimonials, UGC is based on the principle that customers are more likely to trust the opinions of their friends and family over brand advertising. Re-sharing and promoting UGC on your own channels lets you leverage the unsolicited opinions and feedback of genuine customers. This allows you to provide potential customers with social proof of your authenticity.
Feed and Engage Customers with “Snackable” Content
This refers to easily digestible, short-form content, hence easily consumed and shared on social media (GIFs, memes etc.).
With the objective to entertain and educate (while prompting social sharing and lead generation), the growing popularity of Instagram Stories, Reels, and TikTok are proof of snackable content’s effectiveness in social media and their role in engaging with customers.
Optimise Your CNY 2022 Strategy with Dropee
CNY 2022 is a great opportunity for online businesses of all sizes to experiment with new content and marketing trends. While there are a multitude of ways to boost your sales, our suggestion is to pay attention to your customer insights and tailor your marketing mix according to the channels and touchpoints to connect with your customers.
Dropee’s solutions help SMEs across Malaysia foray into the world of digitisation and e-commerce. From inventory management to customer insights and analytics, request a demo to learn more about how we can support you!
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