Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Today we are going to discuss how to prepare for the Holiday eCommerce Season. November and December are exciting for every online retailer. That’s exactly when your eCommerce revenue can be 30% higher than during non-holiday months. However, to increase your sales, you first need to prepare your website for the upcoming holidays.
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Here are a few tips that may help you prepare for the holiday eCommerce season:
Mobile Optimization: Leverage Push Notifications
Push notifications are messages that pop up on your customers’ mobile screens, even if they’re not using the app actively. Their biggest advantage lies in the fact that they’re direct and personalized. Therefore, you need to focus on tailoring your push notifications to your customers’ needs. For example, you could segment your audiences by their gender, device type, location, buying habits, etc. and, based on that data, send more targeted messages.
Choose The Right Type Of Push Notifications
There are two different types of push notifications you could use during the holiday season. The first type is one-time messages used to promote new products or time-sensitive offers. The second kind of messages are automated ones that work better for ongoing offers. For example, if you’re hosting a massive giveaway in December, sending automated messages throughout this month will boost customers’ engagement.
Pick The Right Landing
Now that you’ve created a perfect push notification, it’s time to ask yourself where your customers will land once they open your message. A landing page is crucial for engaging your audiences and getting them to take the desired action.
For example, if you’re promoting products, it’s logical that you will send your customers directly to your category or product pages. On the other hand, if a customer abandoned the shopping cart in the past, you could offer them a reward for returning and finalizing the purchase.
Strengthen Your SEO Tactics
SEO is critical for your eCommerce site’s performance all year round. However, it plays an incredibly big role during the holiday season, when it’s crucial for you to rank in the organic search higher.
Optimize For Promotional Phrases
During Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Green Monday, your customers will look for the products they can get at a lower cost. During the holidays, the use of promotional, long-tail keywords, such as “sale,” “free shipping,” “coupon,” “cheap,” “discount,” grows.
Prepare Your Meta Tags For Holidays
Your title tags and meta tags are crucial for your website performance. They are the first thing customers will see in the SERPs and, as such, they impact your click-through rate. Both your title tags and meta tags should be informative, clear, and concise, telling customers what the page is about. During the holidays, pay special attention to your call-to-action, as it should entice customers to click on your link immediately.
Boost Your Internal Links
Those are links from one page on your site to another. The most significant internal links are those in your navigation menu. The idea is to create a strong internal linking strategy that will clearly show search engines what your most prominent pages are. Internal links also pass authority from popular pages to new ones and, above all, they let customers find the right pages and content faster.
Build Quality Backlinks
Popular blogs adore the holiday season and dedicate lots of resources to it. They create comprehensive shopping guides, holiday-inspired articles, gorgeous infographics, and gift-giving lists. Take advantage of this season to start building relationships with the major names in your industry. Before reaching out to a site, check the site’s rankings, domain authority, page authority, engagement rates, and the quality of content. If you’re outsourcing your off-site SEO, always choose a white label SEO company that will prioritize the quality of backlinks over their quantity.
Update Your Old Holiday-Inspired Content
If you’ve created an ultimate shopping guide 2 years ago and it’s now collecting dust on your blog, it’s time to update it. For starters, if it contains outdated information, update it. Next, pay attention to your products. If the guide links back to your old product pages that are not available anymore, it would be great to replace them with some fresher links to your popular products or categories.
Provide Delightful User Experiences
To attract wider audiences and stand out among your competitors, you first need to ask yourself what audiences you’re targeting and adapt your content to their needs. Personalized offers and content result in better user experiences and, logically, greater sales.
Personalize Customers’ Buying Experiences
Track your customers’ buying behaviors and cross-sell and up-sell products that are relevant to them. For example, recommend products similar to the one they already viewed or put to their shopping cart. Or, tell them what the most popular products in the same category are.
Refresh Your Return Policies
When purchasing gifts for their friends and families, your customers will want to know what would happen if they order the wrong size or if the product doesn’t meet their expectations. Having a flexible return policy around the winter holidays will keep your customers satisfied and boost your sales. Logically, your return policy should be available to anyone and be fully transparent.
Get The Most Out Of Email Marketing
Email marketing is still one of the most powerful ways to promote your business’ special deals and products during the holiday season. However, you need to plan your email marketing strategy on time. For starters, you could start sending segmented emails. For example, you can segment your audiences by their shopping preferences or location so you can inform them about relevant deals and offers.
Build A Loyalty Program
Customers gladly participate in loyalty programs. They may be vital for your brand during the holiday season, as they are a great opportunity to thank your returning customers for their loyalty. Always make sure your rewards program is simple, that it has membership-only perks for customers, and that it boosts customer engagement.
Engage Customers With Contests
Your customers love gifts. Above all, they love to compete. That’s where social media contests may help. Choose the right type of contest. Be it a comment-based giveaway or a photo/video contest, always make sure it engages the right audiences. Most importantly, choose rewards valuable to your customers. As your customers will be actively engaged through sharing your posts, commenting on them, using your hashtag, and creating on-brand content, this is a chance for you to maximize your reach and increase brand awareness, too.
Offer Time-Sensitive Deals
This is one of the most effective ways to grab customers’ attention and reduce their turnout rates. Namely, use time-sensitive deals, such as massive sales, free shipping, limited stock indicators, or limited bundles of items to foster urgency and evoke FOMO (fear of missing out) in your customers. That’s way, they will be more decisive and make shopping decisions faster.
Create Seamless Omnichannel Experiences
While cross-channel marketing means that you’re using more than one channel to promote your business, omnichannel marketing stands for providing consistent user experiences across every channel your customers use. No matter if it’s your blog, product page, social networks, email marketing, chatbots, you need to allow your audiences to find the right pages and take the desired action, irrespective of where they landed or what device they use.
Conclusions
The holidays are a perfect time to build stronger relationships with your customers and do something nice for them. That’s why you need to deliver personalized and seamless user experiences. Investing in SEO is your priority, as it lets you stay competitive in the overcrowded SERPs during the holiday season. Finally, you need to market to mobile customers, too. In addition to some typical UX design tips you already know, you should also enable push notifications to boost their engagement and get them to visit your site again.
We hope these tips help you prepare for the holiday eCommerce shopping season.
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