Get Your Website Ready for the Holidays

Why It’s Necessary to Prepare Your Website for the Holidays

The holiday season is a great chance to bolster your numbers before the end of the year. One superb advantage of offering a sale is that it helps to clear out any products that are not selling as well as you’d like and generates more enthusiasm for your brand, making it a great way to build a loyal customer base.

The eCommerce sector showed high growth in the holiday retail sales during the previous years, accounting for more than 17.5% of the United States’ total sales. It was predicted that digital sales would go up by 19% in 2021, and sure enough, they exceeded expectations and totaled $29.41 billion.

It appears that there will only be a minor boost in eCommerce sales of 6.1% this year according to the most up-to-date evaluation. It isn’t sensible to think that everybody will merely purchase things on the internet now, even if 6% is superior to nothing. It is anticipated that e-commerce businesses will struggle to achieve higher end-of-the-year sales figures compared to last year because of inflation and the present economic downturn.

This doesn’t indicate that individuals who purchase items online will be purchasing fewer presents. They will probably be more selective regarding the shops they buy from, researching and examining various online stores to determine to find the store with the lowest cost or largest savings.

This is why preparing your website for the holidays is so essential. If you don’t take steps to satisfy your online customers right now, particularly during the present economic climate, you won’t make the profits that you are expecting. Your rivals that are getting ready will definitely observe the proceeds.

What steps do you take to get your website ready for the holiday season?

How to Prepare Your Website for the Holidays

We won’t mislead you – it requires effort to get your site ready for the holiday season. You must begin now to work out any issues and refrain from making any major errors.

Consider the following tips for your website holiday prep checklist:

1. Make Sure Your Website Looks Holiday-Ready

Spreading holiday cheer is important, especially during tough times. People who are shopping are looking for great presents as well as bargains. They’re also looking for some holiday cheer.

Ordinary, dull (no disrespect intended) homepages and landing pages will not be adequate. You should spruce up your website to get people in the holiday spirit, stimulating both current and potential customers to partake in the celebration.

A few things you can do include:

Use festive colors and holiday-like font styles
Incorporate holiday-themed imagery or wintery imagery where appropriate
Banners that display holiday cheers and sayings
Add a music widget that plays holiday-themed music

Make sure to consider the arrangement and movement of your website. You want to enhance the user experience, not diminish it. Don’t go overboard by transforming your cursor from a pointer to something like a candy cane.

2. Focus on Holiday-Related Content

As a website proprietor, you are aware of the usefulness of your blog articles for drawing visitors and boosting your sales conversion rates. At the time of the holidays, blogging is particularly beneficial since it facilitates extending one’s reach to those who are purchasing gifts for others rather than personal purchases, increasing the available options for readers.

You should also definitely direct retargeting campaigns to your existing fans, those who are always eager to read your newest content.

The way to get more visitors to your online shop is not just about creating content that is linked to a holiday and is likely to be seen high up in the search engine list for those looking for presents. During this period it is essential to declare that you have a more powerful value proposition that offers solutions to the most significant worries of your audience.

People shopping for the holidays are attempting to find the best possible presents they can give to their dear ones. You must persuade them that your offerings are the ideal presents for those individuals. In order to accomplish that goal, you must post blogs with top-notch material containing useful advice, data, and so forth.

Holiday-oriented content can look like this:

Holiday gift guides
Budget ideas
Holiday recipes
Entertaining

This material is great for people who don’t know where to begin when it comes to purchasing gifts for the holidays, while at the same time promoting your products or services.

3. Refresh Your SEO Efforts to the Tune of Holiday Keywords

In addition to publishing Christmas-related material, you should apply a festive attitude to your SEO strategy. It is essential to include applicable keywords to your content during the festive period. It is essential to guarantee that the keywords utilized are additionally related to your items or administrations. The key to improving the search engine ranking of your product or service pages and content is to give them a lift.

One way to make these keywords even more relevant is to use specific modifiers, including:

The current year
Holiday + the current year
Holiday + shopping, recipes, travel, etc
Store gift cards or shop gift cards
Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Small Business Saturday/Christmas sales
Christmas + the current year

4. Offer Special Holiday Promotions and Discounts

People searching for presents this festive period will be aiming to get the lowest prices they can. Online shopping not only provides convenience, but also allows individuals to compare prices and goods from their own properties, without a salesperson emotionally pressuring them.

Hence, you should plan your eCommerce store’s promotion tactics for the holidays thoughtfully. It is vital to create a well-thought-out plan and begin publicizing your markdowns and promotions as soon as feasibly possible.

Here are a few promotional ideas to get you started:

Implement flash sales that offer deep discounts for a limited time.
Incorporate a “spin to win” feature that will engage the users on your page and encourage them to join your email subscriber list simultaneously.
Try an advent calendar where a new product will go on sale each day leading up to Christmas.
Or, try out a 12-days-of-Christmas promotional theme where certain products will incur certain discount percentages for 12 days throughout the month.
Leverage a reward points program for existing customers to encourage them to only shop with you. You can even double the points for a certain amount of time.
Offer free samples or trials with online orders that amount to a certain amount.

5. Create Strategic Holiday Marketing and Promotions

Merchants have had to adjust their shops to meet plenty of unexpected alterations in the past year to be able to market their items in the most successful fashion, whether that be new innovations or marketing plans.

It is vital to ensure that your shop is operational and you have all of your campaigns and discounts in place prior to large expenditure days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Here are a few essential suggestions for ensuring your store is prepared for the rush of holiday shopping.

Start early and plan ahead.

It is imperative to begin preparing for the holiday season well before your customers are considering making purchases, because marketing usually involves a prolonged strategy.

It is important to begin setting up plans sooner rather than later, as Jason Young, the founder of Ballistic Agency, explains, “It’s all systems go once Halloween has passed.” Be ready to launch on November 1. Provide the influncers with all the necessary information in advance so that they are prepared by the due date.

When devising a marketing plan for the long-term, you must remember to allocate time to thoroughly plan out your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy. Mike Esposito, the SEO Content Producer employed by 1Digital Agency, strongly advises any companies aiming to elevate their website’s domain authority and acquire organic traffic should get started with their holiday SEO plans without any further delay. It may require more than half a year to reap the benefits of a Search Engine Optimization campaign, while the most profound outcomes may take over twelve months to show up.

Adopt promotional strategies to engage customers.

Various methods exist for tailoring your advertising approach for the festive period. You might want to think about giving out gift cards to draw more customers at checkout, offer seasonal services like gift-packaging and cargo free of charge, and generate time-restricted offers to make the deal more appealing.

Connie Wong, who is the Marketing Manager at Silk Software, emphasizes that Cyber 5 is a significant event for both buyers and sellers. Free delivery and seasonal offers continue to be powerful motivations that lead to increased buying.

Integrate your marketing efforts.

Sustaining a regular output of content is a critical facet of designing an advertising plan for the festive season.

Using various social media, blog pieces, and video production can drive individuals to search and locate your business. Every digital search that points to your company is considered beneficial. If you present original, timely and applicable material related to the holiday season, you are more likely to draw customers to your business and subsequently boost your holiday sales.

For instance, if you make a blog entry about the accurate way to adorn for the festivities and demonstrate a selection of your wares, you are more likely to get a sale from visitors scanning through your blog. This concept can be used for various companies if the information relates not only to their company, but also to the holiday or period of the year being advertised.

Leverage paid advertising.

Organic visits are advantageous, however, using paid promotions can augment your company’s image in a crowded marketplace. To get started quickly, one can opt for Facebook or Instagram Ads as they enable users to promote organic material. You should set aside some extra time for search engine optimization and enhancing your overall conversion rate. Investing in paid advertising when using an omnichannel approach can also bring people to your different channels.

Steph Gillies, the Head of Marketing and Communications for Trustpilot , recommends getting to know Google Merchant Ratings to help businesses boost clicks on their advertisements by around 10%. This can lead to better search performance during seasonal peaks.

6. Ramp Up Your Customer Service and Support

As the festive period draws near, it’s imperative that your business and customers are provided with adequate assistance in order to ensure a prosperous outcome.

Make sure your ecommerce platform is available when you need it.

The holiday nightmare: a crashed website on Cyber Week. After a prolonged period of effort, your patrons are dissatisfied and unable to buy goods. The significance of having adequate support for your venture is usually not taken into consideration, yet it is critical to achieving success.

It is crucial to ensure your ecommerce platform has around-the-clock global backing, superior security qualities, and superior uptime performance compared to others in the sector.

BigCommerce comes with all of this and more. Our support staff can assist you with any situations that may arise when attempting to sell goods on the internet and advancing your company, such as increasing sales, optimizing your shopping experience, handling product catalog migrations, and proposing answers for taxation, payments, postage, and software accords.

Develop a robust customer service plan.

You’ve got a dedicated support team behind your store. Now, you must take care of your customers. The holidays are certainly a period of activity and can be quite tense. Be ready to tackle any queries or worries, and keep data easy to access.

Have dedicated support and respond to inquiries quickly. Even when a problem arises, providing customers with a pleasant customer service experience can create a customer with strong loyalty. Ensure that you have someone to assist with enquiries made by phone, email, and social media and make sure you answer to all of them within one to two days.

Make your contact information prominent and easy to find.

By including the latest contact details on your website and all orders confirmations, it can increase a customer’s confidence in your store. Making a FAQ page that provides rapid and easy solutions can help construct confidence with fresh clients. Making answers to frequent questions available can reduce the workload on your customer service staff.

Ask for feedback from customers.

Steph Gillies, who is the Head of Marketing and Communications for Trustpilot, prophesied in 2020 that reviews were going to be especially important during the 2021 holiday season. Providing reviews and social proof has been highlighted as essential for achieving success. Brands and retailers should provide customers with anything that can provide knowledge, motivate engagement, and improve the chances of a successful sale.