We only have a few weeks left before the biggest sales days of the year. With online sales projected to be greater this holiday season, make sure you prepare your online store for holiday sales.
Holiday time can be stressful for most people, so don’t let yourself or your business be caught short!
Optimonk website offers some excellent tips to help you prepare.
Prepare Your Online Store for Holiday Sales
1. Analyze and learn
Your number one task is to analyze last year’s statistics and learn from them.
Understanding the success or failure of your campaigns can help you create better campaigns this year. Analyzing data can also show you more ways to meet your customers’ needs.
Here are some examples of questions you should ask when reviewing last year’s data:
- What were your most successful campaigns?
- What was your most popular product?
- Which days had the best traffic?
- Which traffic source was the most popular, and most profitable?
- How much total revenue did you earn during this time period?
- What was the average order value?
- Which keywords worked well?
- What did your competitors do?
2. Make sure your website can handle that traffic
You don’t want your website to crash during the peak Holiday Season.
Unfortunately, too many visits at the same time, especially on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, can make this happen. If you haven’t experienced traffic spikes before, you should check with your website host directly and make sure your site can handle that traffic.
3. Fit the look of your store to the holiday sales
I’m not suggesting you need to do a full website redesign. You can tailor your website for the Holiday Season with just a few small changes.
Adding a countdown timer to the header is a great way to increase urgency. Changing your banners in the headers that promote your Black Friday or Christmas sales is also a good practice and easy to implement. If you have more resources, you might want to dress your whole website in a Holiday theme.
Changing some elements on your website to reflect that “it’s the Holidays!” can really increase the willingness of your visitors to keep shopping and stay in the “Holiday spirit”.
4. Optimize your site for mobile
During the Holiday season, more people browse online stores from their mobile or tablet than usual. You shouldn’t lose these visitors just because your website is not optimized for mobile.
Make sure it’s easy to browse your products and make a purchase from your store on phones and tablets.
5. Create better navigation
Poorly crafted and unclear navigation will make people turn around and leave your website as fast as they can. This is especially important during the Holiday Season because visitors are often constrained by time.
You can also improve the navigation of your site by taking a moment to make sure your search function is well configured. Here are a few tips to help you optimize searching on your site:
- Put the search field in a highlighted place.
- Use the option for auto-complete.
- It should be available and work well from mobile as well.
- Add a filtering option to your search results page.
- Add a sort by price option to your search results page.
Check out Amazon’s search field that is highly visible also suggests products automatically.
6. Create Holiday-focused category pages …