Is your eCommerce website ready for the influx of holiday shoppers? Retail eCommerce holiday sales continue to grow year over year. Online shoppers are scouring the Internet for holiday deals earlier each year, so it's important to work on your website as early as possible so you can get the most out of your store.
Plus, it's likely you will be barraged with customer questions and support requests, not to mention selling and shipping your products-- working on your website ahead of time will certainly save you a few headaches.
Want to improve your eCommerce website's ability to draw in new customers and delight old customers? Take a peak at 5 holiday marketing tips designed to turn your site into a lead generation machine!
Is Your eCommerce Site Mobile Friendly?
Mobile sales account for a majority of total online sales. Take time to make sure your site is designed to be compatible with small screen sizes. Shoppers often complain about having to scroll horizontally through a site, being forced to read through huge blocks of text, images not rendering correctly, and content not loading quickly enough. Mobile device users also find the "look and feel" of a site to be an increasingly important factor for their purchasing decision. So, if you have an ecommerce site, which is not optimized for mobile shoppers, you are missing out on a lot of potential sales. On top of that, Google penalizes websites that are not friendly. A mobile friendly eCommerce website will intrigue shoppers and satiate Google.
Holiday Marketing Emails For Lead Nurturing
Nurture your website visitors that have yet to commit to a purchase and reward your existing customers with exclusive offers to entice them to come back to your store. Existing customers have already bought from you in the past and have demonstrated an interest in your products, so why not reward and entice them to buy more for their friends and family. Construct a brief email reminding your existing customers that the holidays are on the horizon, and that you're offering them a limited time offer.
Make sure that these emails include links that drive the user back to either your blog posts or your most popular seasonal items. The key here is to segment your lead nurturing emails properly. For example, if a visitor comes to your website and is interested in getting a special holiday deal on mittens, make sure that you send them emails designed to sell mittens and not some other item.
Update Products With High-Quality Product Photos
Paying extra attention to your product pages during the holiday sales season is only natural. Visuals drive ecommerce lead conversion, so it's crucial that you have high-quality product photos to entice users who are interested in your products. Whenever possible, use large images that look good on a wide variety of different devices; after all, you want older shoppers to be able to easily see your products and mobile sales continue to grow as consumers increasingly use mobile devices to shop.
Your website's product photos should offer potential shoppers a clear picture of what they are about to purchase. For this reason, it's useful to have photos displaying a product from multiple angles. Or, if you have a product that comes in varying colors or materials, make sure to include images of those variations as well.
You don't want a shopper to have to imagine what the product will look like when it arrives on their doorstep. The holiday season is no time for surprises (unless you're opening a present, of course). Finally, ensure that you compress your product photo images to keep your page load times low and reduce bandwidth use.
Analyze Data From Past Year's Sales
This is obvious, but it's important to keep this tip top-of-mind as you work on your site. Analytics are essential for measuring success and anticipating trends for digital marketing campaigns. As you work on your site, keep some of these essential metrics in mind to determine how successful you've been throughout the year:- organic keyword growth
- user flow
- mobile usage
- search engine optimization
- site content updates
- general traffic overview
If you've noticed that certain products are drawing more interest than others, it may be prudent to feature the top 3-5 products on your home page, so that users have an easy path to find what they need.
Update Site SEO 3-4 Weeks Before Holiday Rush
It's always best to update SEO for the holiday season far ahead of time. If you have a relatively new site, or haven't taken the time to optimize your website, then it's likely you'll be far behind the curve of holiday shoppers. Remember, it takes time for SEO updates to take effect.
If you've previously optimized your site, take a few hours to navigate through the backend of your website and make sure things like meta descriptions, title tags, image ALT tags, and headers are all up to date with relevant keywords.
