Ways to Prep Your Store for Christmas

Christmas is just around the corner and many people are already starting to look for Christmas presents. Christmas is the biggest shopping event of the year and soon everyone will be ready to spend money on presents for loved ones, friends, and themselves.

This will mean increased traffic to your ecommerce site before and during the Christmas period. Plus, this trend will not suddenly stop just after Christmas as the new year will follow shortly after, with site visitors looking for new year sales and offers.

This increase in visitor traffic can cause a lot of stress for ecommerce site owners and digital marketeers.

To make the most of the boost in potential customers, alleviate stress and smoothly navigate through this busy time, you need to prepare your store in time.

To help you do this, we at Squashed Pixel have created a list of things to consider helping prepare your online store and marketing strategy to boost profits during the Christmas Holiday season.



1. Research & Analysis

Look at your Google analytics data from previous years and begin analysing trend patterns, site visits and what the percentage of sales are during peak gift buying seasons.

Here is a list of some questions you should ask yourself when analysing the data.

  • What has been your most popular product?

  • What was your most successful campaign?

  • Which Keywords worked the best?

  • What was the average order value?

  • Which days had the most traffic?

  • What did your closest competitors do?




2. Showcase your Christmas offers on your homepage

The homepage is the best place to highlight your Christmas offers, it is usually the first page visitors will see, so make sure your content above the fold, such as banners, scrolling hero images and notifications banners are on message and if possible themed for Christmas. If you have the resources, you may want to dress your website with Christmas themed imagery and graphics.

By adding Christmas themed photography, imagery, and typography to your site you can show that holiday feeling and increase the willingness to keep shopping, as well as keep your visitors in the holiday spirit.


3. Create Holiday Focused Category pages

By creating Christmas focused category pages, you will enhance the user experience and make it easier to find all your holiday discounts, deals and gifts packages and bundles. If you can, add a link on your main navigation, and footer taking the visitors directly to these pages. If you do not have space for this link, add it to your mega nav, if you can.

Another option is to add tags and keywords to products that you want to push for Christmas to help facilitate an easy site search.

Here are a few examples you could add.

  • Christmas offers

  • Gifts for men

  • Gifts for women

  • Gifts for Mom (or Dad)



4. Fill up your category pages with In-Stock Products.

To effectively use your category pages do not waste any space on the web page, space on web pages is limited so use it wisely. This is even more important for mobile devices.

We recommend that you do not display ‘out of stock’ products or at the very least move them to the bottom of the page, this will enhance the user experience and give the visitor confidence that you have a good supply of products. Imagine your visitor only seeing out of stock products on page load, they might get the wrong impression and leave your site!


5. Use the power of social media…

Before and during the Christmas season it is important that you increase your social media presence and be as active as possible to promote your business and products. Publish holiday focused blogs, posts, tweets, Tik Toks and so forth. Christmas is the perfect time to run a competition on Facebook or Instagram. You can offer exclusive gifts for your most loyal customers and encourage more business and returning customers. If you want, you could consider including a voucher code to entice visitors to your site on certain products.

Plan and budget for your advertising well ahead of time, have your copy and ads ready to go. You want your visitors and loyal customers to see that you are in control, otherwise your approach will seem like its rushed and re-active and not pro-active. You may need to increase your budget for the Christmas season as bid prices can go up for certain keywords on Google ads.


6. …and email

The same active approach should apply to your email campaigns, especially if you have a big mail list filled with previous buyers. Start your communications with them now with gentle reminders that they can buy their Christmas presents without having to wait in long lines at the shops or having to find a parking space when Christmas is just around the corner, and you are a last-minute shopper (That means you Dads and husbands).

Do not forget to include deadlines in the promotion emails to create a sense of urgency and highlight the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).

Use all your different types of emails, transactional emails are just as important as promotional ones. Consider using confirmation and shipping emails to upsell your products and Christmas offers.


7. Shipping and Returns

Some things are vital for your customers to know while browsing your store during the Christmas period, one of them is the last date to order and receive their products before Christmas. (Santa is never late).

Make sure your visitors do not miss their last chance to order from your store. You can add this message as a site pop up as well as include it on your announcement bar which is usually located above the header. Use your pop ups to also communicate any shipping delays or create a banner to get the message across to keep your visitors informed of any delays.


8. Highlight Return Conditions

When people are buying gifts for others, it can often happen that the size is wrong, the recipient does not like the colour of the product or already has one, so they need to return it.

Make sure that customers can return products easily. Highlighting your return conditions in detail increases the trust and confidence of your visitors.


Conclusion.

It is important to start preparing your online store in time for the Holiday season. I hope the eight points we have compiled will help you be successful.

Do not forget, you can automate your marketing campaigns now, so during the Holiday season, all you need to do is focus on your customers!


Here is a useful link to Shopify with Case studies and additional tips to help you prepare for Christmas and other seasonal dates.

https://www.shopify.co.uk/retail/holiday-marketing

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