Christmas is around the corner, with it’s bliss and surprises. And why should your custom eCommerce website lag behind, when it comes to spreading happiness and popping out few surprises for your online shoppers, during this holiday season?
So just take a look at these tips, which can help you to boost your business and make more sales…by enhancing your website using some effective website marketing strategy ideas, during this holiday season.
- Load Testing & Security: Now, you wouldn’t want your holiday sales go drenched, due to an unexpected server crash or security breach, would you? So better be prepared. Take enough precautions to ensure that your custom eCommerce website can handle the traffic it’s about to receive. If required, manipulate and size down your campaigns to help the server handle the load. Data breaches are the worst nightmares of any shopping website owner…especially when a treasure-trove of sales lie ahead, thanks to the holiday season! Get more PCI compliant systems, tokenization technology etc to fight off this menace of security breach.
- Emergency communication plan: …just in case! Keep a splash page directing your customers to a place, where they can get in touch with customer service, as well as get real time updates.
- Avoid the wrath of customers: Testing all coupons you are about to promote will help you to keep a check on conditional coupons, which are prone to breaking. Also keep your Christmas online shopping customers informed regarding projected arrival dates, last possible shipping dates etc. And yes, make sure that you have good return policies.
- Advertising: Develop highly creative ad campaigns, which reflect the best offers you have around. Also concentrate on using holiday relevant terms for keywords…in all your contents.
- SEO: Let link building be your key to success during this holiday season. When we say link building, we mean that you must concentrate on connecting with efficient PRs, who are putting out too many contents about your industry…and make use of their services. Also don’t ignore On-site optimization. Make sure that all your title tags include the best offers you are giving. If you play it right, just understand that you are going to make it big among your Christmas online shopping customers!
- The layout and design: Visual aesthetics play an important role in grabbing the attention of the shoppers and make them to loiter around your Christmas online shopping website and finally buy something. The general mood of your website…be it the background colour or the contents or the designs…prepare them is such a way that, they are stuffed with Christmas themes and are in tune with the festive mood. This will help you connect with the mindset of the shoppers. Perhaps you could use red and white colours for the background decorations for Christmas season…and few Christmas star designs sprinkled here and there. You could even try giving a Christmas carol as the background tune for your Christmas interactive websites.
- Keep an eye on your competitors: Give more importance to Christmas marketing ideas, website marketing strategy and promotion aspects…and before you begin, do a thorough research on the strategies adopted by your competitors. And the end game is…do your best to stay a step ahead of them (be it in terms of the offers and discounts, or any other holiday specific marketing activity)! Offers and discounts are the best ways to catch hold of customer loyalty…especially when it’s a festive season. So try to give customized offers and discounts which are relevant to the ongoing festival. You can also consider going for gift card promotions and Xmas presents.
- Supply vs. demand: As an eCommerce website owner, always expect a rush of frenzied customers during the holiday seasons. And to keep up with the mood of the crowd, all you will have to do is to ensure that you never go out of stock. Stash in products which are relevant to the ongoing festival. For example, if yours is an eCommerce website which sells dresses, get in a reasonably good stock of costumes based on Christmas themes during the season. If candles are your forte, then try getting a stock of customized candles…candles which are in the shape of crosses etc. Basically, the choice of products depends on the nature of your business and the nature of the ongoing festival.
- Prepare the good ol’ email list: And sending across completely dynamic and personalized emails are a sure shot way to boost the relevancy of your website. For this, first reduce the frequency of emails you send, way before the holiday season…and when the big day arrives, just shoot it up like anything. Psssttt….listen! A good way to prepare customer specific emails is to keep track of the shopping behavior (recent products or categories viewed, past item purchases, demographic info etc) of your customers. And to prepare the email list, you could depend upon ‘recent site visits’. Now, those customers should be the hot targets of your email marketing campaign.
- Relevant games and activities: Enhance your website with festival related games and activities, so that you will be able to increase the customers’ engagement towards your Christmas interactive websites. PS: The contests and activities should be relevant to Christmas themes, as well as to the target customer base.
- Timely delivery and high quality services: Make sure that the services you offer match up to the expectations of your target customers. And timely delivery is one of the important factors you must take care of, when it comes to high quality services. Also it should be noted that your customer service operations doesn’t crack under too much of customer requirements…which is a sure possibility during the holiday season. Hire temporary staff if necessary.
- Free goodies: You can consider coupling your holiday specific products with free goodies (which are relevant to the holiday). This is a great way to increase customer loyalty towards your eCommerce site. Try to make the Xmas presents as innovative as possible…and yes, remember to market your website through those goodies. For example, you can give away free 3D Santa claus masks during Christmas, with your website’s logo and details etched on it.
Apart from the above mentioned factors, give due importance to aspects such as omni-channel marketing, showrooming, responsive design, mobile and tablet optimization etc.
Now, let’s give those Christmas marketing ideas and tips a try, shall we?