For many online retailers, Christmas is the busiest time of the year. Given the increasing dominance of online shopping, it’s expected that more people than ever before will head online to do their Christmas shopping in 2017. For ecommerce businesses, it’s important to make the most of this growing trend, but where’s the best place to start?
If you’re gearing your ecommerce store up for the festive season, we’d love to help. Here are some of our top conversion tips to help you maximise sales this Christmas.
1. Learn from last year
Before you start planning for this year, it’s a great idea to reflect on the results you had last year and consider ways you could improve upon your performance. Did you have delivery issues? Did you run out of certain items? Did your site struggle to cope with the increased traffic? Take the time now to carefully consider how you can conquer last year’s challenges.
2. Keep contact details up to date
The Christmas period can get hectic. Make life easier for both your customer support team and your customers by ensuring that all contact details are up to date and communications are actively monitored, both on your website and across your social media channels.
3. Seasonal promotions
What kind of seasonal promotions will you offer this year? From daily offers that will encourage repeat visitors to broader month-long promotions, November is a great time to set out a festive promotions schedule.
4. Encourage repeat visits
By giving customers who purchase from you in the month of November a discount on purchases made throughout December, you’re encouraging them to keep your business in mind when it comes time for their Christmas shopping. This strategy can be introduced as early as November.
5. Address site issues
Your stockroom may be full, your team ready and raring to go, but what about your website? Are there any issues that could slow down (or even stop) sales? Are you prepared for a sudden surge in traffic over the festive period?
The last thing any ecommerce site needs during December is a server crash or bug sending sales grinding to a halt. November is the perfect time to carry out a thorough site audit and carry out routine maintenance.
6. Check descriptions
Ensure that every product on your site is accompanied by a clear and accurate description. Not having up to date product information at one of the busiest times of the year is a major ecommerce crime.
7. Check for typos
Spelling mistakes are a huge no-no in ecommerce. Why? Not only can they ruin your credibility, they can also deter people from buying from you. Trust is a hugely important factor in ecommerce. Anything that makes people question your site’s credibility is guaranteed to affect sales.
8. Speed
One of the major attractions of online shopping is speed. If your site is slow to load or sluggish, you can bet you’ll be losing customers to your competitors. There are a number of tools you can use to check out your website’s download speed across devices.
9. Optimise images
Sluggish site? Look at the images on your website. Have they been optimised? If they haven’t been sized accordingly they could be slowing your site’s load time right down. Ensuring they are appropriately sized is a quick fix and will have a hugely positive impact on your site.
10. Check copy
It may be a little late for a complete site redesign, but there is still time to do something about chunky copy.
Is your copy clear, concise and easy to scan? If every page on your website is crammed full of keywords and copy, your customers may struggle to find the information they need. Try to make sure that copy is broken down into easy-to-read sections and use bullet points and lists wherever possible to get across important points.
11. Post-Christmas planning
A lot of businesses spend so much time planning for the period leading up to Christmas that they forget about what comes after. The period after Christmas can often be just as busy, as people rush to spend gift vouchers and snap up bargains in the sales.
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