The holiday season is often the most important time of the year for ecommerce businesses. Almost all the successful eStores experience higher volume of sales and even a major chunk of their yearly revenue during this season. The increased activity during this season has been a standard for the eCommerce industry. While you plan your marketing activities to advertise your products and drive more traffic, you have to ensure that your website is ready to not only handle increased web traffic, but also has the aesthetics and other necessary elements to capture more business from the visitors.
Here is a checklist of things you have to do to make sure your eCommerce website is ready to drive more sales during the festive season:
Optimize Your Home Page
The first step in getting ready for the holiday season is optimizing your home page. Decide on a strategy as to what you are going to display on your home page and create an on – page SEO strategy to dominate the search results. Decide on the products you are going to market during the holiday season. Make sure the content on the page contains all the relevant information about the product. Optimize the content on these pages to stay in line with the keywords your customers use to search for your products.
When it comes to the website homepage, staying relevant is often important to strike a chord with your customers. While keeping the images on the homepage in line with the holiday mood, make sure your home page depicts the best deals or products you have got. Also, establish your value proposition and how you stand out from your competition.
Product Information
Update the product information on your product pages to show what exactly the customer is paying for. Make sure that the product page answers all the questions a customer might have during the shopping process. Your visitors should spend more time looking for products on your website rather than searching for additional information on the products. Be specific in your product description regarding what is being offered, what is included and not included, return policy and other such common questions a customer faces. Have a related products section in place to increase the probability cross selling.
Handling Traffic
Ecommerce stores should pay a close attention on how their website’s performance during the holiday season. While the various marketing campaigns you run drive the traffic to your website, you have to ensure your website is equipped to handle such high traffic. Estimate the potential traffic you are expecting during the holiday season and ensure that you have the required hardware infrastructure to handle the traffic.
Website down time is bad at any time but is a nightmare during the festive season. Have a discussion with your IT team and the hosting service provider if necessary to tweak the specifications to accommodate higher traffics. Check for the cross browser compatibility of the website. Also, performs load tests and performance tests to design a strategy across how to handle higher traffics.
Mobile Optimization
The inclination of customers towards using their mobile for purchases is going to play a pivotal role in ecommerce shopping during the festive season. Mobile purchases are expected to scale to new heights this year. It is important for the ecommerce businesses to cater to mobile users to capture such business. Ensure that you a have responsive website for easy mobile browsing. The website should provide cross device compatibility and should be optimized for viewing across various devices and operating systems. Ensure that it is visually appealing, showcases your special products and provides easy of navigation for the users.
Retargeting the Abandoned shopping carts
Consumers are spoiled with choices during the holiday shopping. They hop across several websites to check for the best deal on a particular product. This result is increased shopping cart abandonments during this season. Retargeting such customers is an important factor during the holiday season.
Have a retargeting strategy in place. Pay extra attention to the messaging part. You want the abandoned cart visitors to come back and complete the transaction they started. If you have an email address, run email campaigns advertising any offers related to the products or similar products they were looking for. If you don’t have their email, have a strategy in place for re – targeted ads. Also make sure that you are not running the same ad for them continuously. Design a set of different ads to serve them to capture their attention.
Website is the most critical resource for an eCommerce business. By making sure that you have the right strategy for your website to handle the holiday season traffic, you can increase the odds of your success. By optimizing your website for holiday conversions, make the most of the best time of the year for your business.
