The holiday season is a make or break sales period for many retail businesses. For toy sellers, they may sell up to 80% of their yearly volume during the holiday period. For many other retailers, the holiday season is a third to more than half of their annual revenue. This means you need to get your website ready to help sell your products, whether you have a retail store or sell items online. Here are tips on how to get your website ready for the holiday season.
Consider Your Website versus Your Goals
If you’re planning on drumming up more online sales by targeting the Christmas shopping season, first consider your website’s capabilities. Can you handle triple the sales volume? Will your payment processor let you run four times as many transactions through their site? Make sure that your IT infrastructure is in place to support a spike in demand before you start trying to drum up that extra business. Otherwise, the website timeouts will drive people to your competitors.
Don’t forget to check your inventory system so you don’t promote items that you cannot deliver unless you need to update your website to state that there is limited inventory. In this case, you’ll want to set up the product listings to recommend similar products when your “hot” item is sold out and ensure that no one tries to buy something you no longer have in stock.
Holiday Search Engine Optimization
You can rank well for holiday gift search results by creating holiday-themed search engine optimized content. Target content to those who want to buy gifts for your ideal customer. Then share this seasonally tailored content via social media channels to get it in front of the most likely buyers.
Plan Your Promotions for Christmas Shopping
You can make little changes to your site to rank well for Christmas shopping searches by having Christmas specials identified as such, instead of “10% discount this month only” or “free shipping until the end of the year”. An excellent way to promote your business to customers looking for Christmas gifts and end of the year shopping deals is with seasonal coupon codes and discounts. Discount codes and coupons are eminently shareable on social media and will be posted on forums by deal-seekers who otherwise wouldn’t care about your business. Coupon codes in the format like “brand name Christmas 2017” or “xmas2017companyname” will increase brand recognition while indicating their limited time frame. You’ll earn extra credit on social media if you integrate your hashtag into the coupon code or share the coupon code via Twitter.
Update Your Graphic Design
Just as many homes are putting up Christmas and other holiday decorations, your website should get ready for the Christmas holiday season by updating its graphics. You don’t have to replace every image of your products with a holiday-themed one. However, updating a few images with Christmas images will put visitors in the holiday shopping mood.
The holiday season is a crucial period of the year and many online retailers might feel overwhelmed during this time. While some of the methods outlined in this article can be done on your own, you’d be better of working with professionals for things like branding and graphic design.
If you feel you need help with your holiday marketing efforts or if you simply need help branding your site for the holiday season, contact us today.
