10 tips to get your online store ready for Christmas
As the Christmas season fast approaches, it’s time to start preparing your online eCommerce store. If you’re uncertain about where to begin, here are 10 valuable tips to help you get started:
- Planning ahead
- Landing pages
- SEO
- Gift cards
- Personalisation
- Graphics
- Gift wrap
- Returns policy
- Marketing
- Testing
1. Planning ahead
Thinking ahead is key particularly when organising events like Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Black Friday, or Halloween. To plan a successful event, deciding the promotions you’ll be running is important.
To do this, start by analysing your sales data to identify the products that have consistently performed well as these are the items that your customers are already drawn to, so offering them at a discounted price or in a bundle could be a great way to encourage more purchases. In addition to this, you can also include products that you want to clear from your inventory.
2. Landing pages
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Category pages
Once you’ve sorted out your Christmas stock and decided what promotions you intend to implement, the next step is to create a landing page. In addition to this, it is also important to consider the layout of the navigation, you want to make it easy for your users to find the page.
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Gift guide page
Gift guides are handy for those who need a little inspiration when it comes to choosing a gift. This page is a great way of showcasing your popular products.
3. SEO
Content is key and therefore optimising the content on your festive landing pages is essential for attracting organic traffic to your website. When adding content to your pages try to incorporate relevant Christmas keywords being careful not to keyword stuff. Make sure your meta titles, descriptions and headings also have these keywords. In addition to this, it is important to optimise your product pages.
When optimising your product pages pay attention to the product names. These names should ideally encompass the ‘Brand name (if applicable) / Model no. or Collection name, etc. / Product Type / Colour or Material if relevant.’ Aim to keep them concise and clear.
To help improve the product page ranking in search results and to encourage more sales, it is worth adding unique, high-quality product descriptions. Include key information and details that will help customers get a good understanding of the product and aid them in making a buying decision. It is also a good idea to include the product title again in the description, perhaps in the first sentence of the description to reinforce what the page is about. Search engines generally like paragraphs of information, but bullet points can be useful in some cases for listing key features or details.
You can also include additional product images and YouTube videos to help give users more visual information, and together with the quality description, this could help to improve the conversion rate.
Setting up the linked items/related products feature is also another good addition as it allows you to showcase similar items or other matching accessories.
4. The gift that keeps on giving
Maximise the potential of your gift cards as they are a convenient and flexible choice for last-minute shoppers or indecisive gift-givers. If you are an existing Intelligent Retail customer, contact us about our gift card design service.
5. Let’s get personal
By offering personalisation on products during Christmas or in general you can make it easier for customers to find a gift that is more meaningful and heartfelt. Get in touch to find out how you can use our personalisation feature.
6. Getting creative
Your homepage is similar to your shop window, so you want to keep it updated. To make it inviting, you could display your most appealing and popular Christmas sellers as featured products and add a Christmas-themed banner image that links to your festive landing page. In addition, if you have Christmas-themed social media posts on Instagram, you can integrate your profile to show on your homepage to make it more visually appealing. Get in touch to find out how you can integrate your Instagram account on our eCommerce website.
Do you already have an eCommerce website with us? We can help design your website banners. Find out more about our website banner design service.
7. Wrap it up
The festive season can be hectic, and by providing a gift wrap service you can make the lives of your customers a little easier. Contact us to find out how you can set this up on your website if you haven’t already.
8. Extend your returns policy
Christmas gifts are often purchased in advance, and by extending your returns policy, you are providing customers peace of mind; knowing that they have the flexibility to return or exchange them without any pressure or rush.
9. Let’s get social
Adding Christmas posts to social media and sending out newsletters is a great way of inspiring and informing customers about upcoming promotions, new arrivals and gift ideas. Social media posts offer a visual representation of your festive products and are great for enticing shoppers and driving engagement. Newsletters, on the other hand, provide a direct line of communication, ensuring that your most valued customers are the first to know about special offers, exclusive discounts, and holiday updates.
10. Testing
In preparation for the festive period, it is important to test your landing pages ensuring they offer a seamless and user-friendly experience and with so many shoppers browsing and purchasing via smartphones it is important to make sure that the layout, navigation and checkout work flawlessly on mobile. Additionally, if you are running any promotions that require customers to use a code it is best to test the codes to make sure they are working correctly before you print or promote them.
Do you need help with marketing & SEO? Contact us to find out about our Managed Online Marketing programmes.