The holiday shopping season is officially upon us. It’s the spendiest time of year by far and it’s either a very good or very bad time for retailers, whether you’re a brick and mortar or an ecommerce store.
If you don’t nail your marketing and get customers to buy it’s going to be a very long year ahead of you. It can even mean certain death to some companies.
On the other hand, if you do nail it this holiday season you’re setting yourself for major success and a great Christmas for yourself and your employees.
Update Images
Now is a great time to refresh the look of your site. This doesn’t mean you have to redesign your entire site or give it a complete overhaul but you can update your images to give it a facelift. Images and design are a huge part of enticing customers to purchase.
If you have the time and the resources now would be a great chance to update your product pictures if they’re not the greatest quality. When it comes to starting an ecommerce company we all know that you do what you can with what you have, but maybe you have better equipment and resources since you last updated your product images.
You should also consider updating your homepage images to ones with a bit more holiday cheer. If you don’t update your homepage images often customers that frequent your site might start to wonder if there’s anyone updating or managing the site at all. You don’t want customers thinking that you’re too small to meet their needs.
Freshen Your Most Visited Pages
Besides updating your product and homepage images you should consider freshening your most visited pages as well. This doesn’t mean overhauling these pages but you should make sure that everything is up to date and that all the links are pointing the right place.
You don’t want to waste good ad spend sending customers to your site only to see them bouncing off or exiting without taking action because there were broken links or outdated info.
I can’t tell you how many times I was excited to sign up for some lead magnet ebook only to find that the link to the sign up page was broken. Or if I was ready to buy after reading a blog only to have the link send me to the wrong place. It’s super disappointing.
So a quick review of your most traveled paths will allow you to make sure that this won’t happen. You can also freshen up the images and videos if you’d like as well but make sure you don’t make it too seasonal if it’s on an evergreen page or make sure you keep track so that you can go back and update it in the future.
Create a Deals Page
Every business has deals going on during the holiday season, sometimes all season long. You don’t want to make your deals difficult to find or understand. Creating a deals page is a great way to display all of your current deals all in one place.
This way customers who come to your site looking for a deal know exactly where to go and know exactly what’s going on. Confusion is one of the worst things there is for converting customers and reducing cart abandonment.
The time investment in creating and maintaining a deals page is so small too. Creating your own deals page can take as little as a few hours and it takes only minutes to update when your deals change.
Remove Distractions
This is a great thing to do holidays or not. When you send traffic to a certain page you should have a very specific path in mind that you want that person to take. You don’t want to distract that visitor from the goal at hand with other paths. Make it clear where they’re supposed to go.
You can take a page from the video game design playbook here. Within videos games, designers set up certain cues so that players know where to go next.
Audio and visual hints direct the player on which path they’re supposed to take. Too many options and not enough direction leaves a player confused and frustrated. But just because the distractions have been cut down doesn’t mean the player can’t go exploring if they choose to.
So the lesson is make the path clear, remove distractions but make your site easy to navigate in case they choose to explore. If your goal is to have customers sign up for your email list then make that your primary call to action. If it’s to purchase then make the main call to action to purchase. Don’t provide multiple calls to action: one to sign up for the email list, one to purchase, one to read a blog post etc. Make the path clear.
Run Retargeting Ads and Cart Abandonment Emails
Lastly make sure that you set up retargeting ads and cart abandonment emails. This is a must during the holiday season. There’s a lot of companies competing for every customers attention and money and you won’t win business if you’re not reminding your customers/potential customers why they should buy from you.
If you’re retargeting customers on social media video ads are a must. They grab a viewers attention and can provide a lot of content without asking the customer to click. If you include audio on your video make sure to have subtitles so that viewers don’t have to turn on their sound if they don’t want to.
As for cart abandonment emails they make a great time investment because they can last well past the holiday season. Holidays or not cart abandonment emails are a great tool to increase conversion. They’re really a must so set them up now when they’ll bring a ton of value and have them for the future as well.
The Takeaway
Holiday shopping is in full swing but it’s never too late to make meaningful updates to your website. There are still many weeks of shopping left and so any improvements you make now can help you net even more customers.