Tag: holidays

Categories
Digital Marketing

Holiday E-Commerce Tips: How to Prepare Your Site for Shopping Season

There are several holiday e-commerce tips to consider this year. Successful holiday e-commerce strategies involve optimizing a website for mobile users, creating holiday-themed content, and offering special promotions. Implementing a robust email marketing campaign to highlight deals and gift ideas is crucial. Enhancing customer service with chat support and clear shipping policies can improve the shopping experience. Additionally, utilizing social media for holiday campaigns increases engagement and drives traffic.

Getting your website ready for the holidays takes a lot of preparation. The servers that support your site, the onsite search technology you are using, and the keywords you’re using to target new people during the holidays all have to be in the best shape to make sure you get the most out of the shopping.

Here are a few holiday e-commerce tips to help you increase the chances of getting conversions during the holiday season.

Make Sure Your Site is Secure

As the holiday season approaches, there is an increased risk of falling victim to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These site outages are always bad, but they are highly damaging when you’re dealing with high volumes of traffic and transactions.

Make sure your site can tell the difference between the influx of new visitors and malicious calls made to your site. Use a service like Cloudflare to help you block the bad calls while still allowing legitimate visitors to come through.

At this point, you should have invested in converting your site to https, but if you haven’t, you should create a plan to do that because of the redirects involved. If you don’t, you’ll lose a lot of organic traffic in the process.

Visitors may receive warnings about your site if you haven’t converted to https, which can cause your conversions to suffer.

Review Your Keywords

Take a look at last year’s organic search terms, and improve their experience on the landing page for the most transaction-oriented terms. This way, the terms people use the most during the holidays will lead them to pages that you’ve carefully designed to convert them into customers.

Related: 11 Essential SEO Tips for Ecommerce Sites

Check Your On-Site Search

When you have new visitors to your site, you’ll have more people who need a bit of help finding what they need. It helps yo have a solid navigation system to make finding things easier. Even still, there will be people who rely on your on-site search to find what they need. As such, you need to make sure your internal search engine serves relevant results to everyone.

Setup on-site search tracking if you haven’t already done so. After your tracking establishes what the top searched terms are, you can use them to improve the on-site search experience.

Check for Errors

If you use Google Analytics, create a report that focuses on 404 error URLs so you can fix them before you start seeing an increase in traffic.

If you’re also using Google Search Console, export a report of errors GSC detects and then look for the sources of the errors so you can fix them.

If you have a number of top URLs people try to reach but don’t exist, you can create redirects to get them to the right place.

Optimize Site Campaigns

Holiday traffic boosts are short-lived, so you need to optimize site campaigns to create a sense of urgency so people act. Consider adding deals that expire, timed offers on holiday bundles, and advertising limited stock.

Using the scarcity principle can do wonders to convert that holiday traffic.

Get Your Promotions Calendar Ready

The content that promotes your product bundles, your Google Ads search terms, and landing pages, the email promotions you send to your list – these are all things that need to be timed and executed perfectly to make the most of your sales opportunities.

As such, you’ll need a project management tool like Trello, or something like Google Sheets and Google Calendar to keep your teams working together. This way, it’s easy for everyone to find out what is launching next, how to escalate when there’s an issue, and whom to contact when something needs to be pushed backed or canceled.

Someone needs to be in charge of your marketing automation efforts, and they need to be in contact with the web team that anticipates the traffic from that effort.

Your PPC specialists need to work with the people managing the website to make sure the messaging is aligned.

You can’t afford for both your website’s pages and shopping cart to be down so the team that deploys any code for enhancement on the site also needs to be in contact with the people who are managing the campaigns. This way, you ensure nothing is affected by upgrades or maintenance projects that may be running on the site.

When the stakes are high it is a good idea to have a master calendar to run everything.

Up Your Shipping Game

For certain shoppers, it won’t matter how much they like your deals if they don’t understand how your shipping works.

A 2018 retail holiday survey found that free shipping is one of the most appealing promotions to customers, second only to discount prices.

If you offer free shipping for certain deals, make sure that it is clear two visitors. Don’t hide it in areas where it will look like an ad.

Be clear about your shipping thresholds because it’s better to have messaging like free shipping on orders above $150 rather than hiding those details and saying free shipping and handling click here for more details.

Free shipping will generally win over fast shipping even for Holiday Shoppers. However, if you can follow through on your promise to ship fast, messaging on how quickly you can deliver the customer’s order needs to be featured prominently to help differentiate you from your competitors.

Improve Your Site Speed

Your site speed is always important. During the holidays, however, it is even more crucial. You’ll have an influx of new visitors who are more likely to spend their money now than at any other point during the year. If you have back burner projects geared toward improving your page load time, now is the time to implement those plans.

Your holiday site preparations can take a toll on your overall page size if you’re not careful. You must use well design and optimize images that look good even on the largest laptop screens. This can impact the total size of all the elements your page needs to load which can slow down the load time.

Pairing this with higher than usual visitor counts can overload your servers which brings your site to a crawl.

Use these tips to help you:

  • Make sure you’re using a Content Delivery Network.
  • Use Scrset to deliver the correct optimize images for different devices so your images are responsive.
  • Minify your JavaScript to avoid any unnecessary site slowdowns.
  • Determine whether your site uses asynchronous scripts so the important elements are loaded first

Have a Retargeting Budget

While you want to ensure that your checkout experience is as Stellar as it can possibly be, no matter how great it is, a portion of your audience will leave items in their cart and not push all the way through to purchase. Cart abandonment is just as much a part of online marketing as conversions.

Save a portion of your holiday ad spending for retargeting rather than just spending it on PPC or other avenues that bring additional visitors in. Plan how you’ll remind visitors to come back to their car when they see your ad and then sure they can go back to where they left off rather than having them start over.

Categories
Social Media

Social Media and the Holidays: Mistakes to Avoid

The holiday season is incredibly festive and fun. It also just happens to be a great time of year to be creative with your social media content. Occasionally, though, we see someone take the fun a little too far – they get a little too pushy with their marketing or they try to use humor where it becomes downright offensive.

This holiday season – avoid being that business. You don’t need that kind of attention! Instead, use these strategies to nail down your campaigns, celebrate, and excel, all without risking a PR disaster in the process.

Don’t Plan Too Late

Bad news: you’re already a little behind schedule if you’re just starting to think about holiday marketing now. Good news: it’s not too late to catch up.

It’s “game on” the second the Halloween costumes come off, and people will be bombarded with ads starting at the beginning of November. If you wait too long, your potential customers will have already made their holiday purchasing decisions. That means you need to start planning now, and hopefully, have something firmly in place by Halloween.

Create a schedule that starts on November first and make sure it carries you through the entire holiday season, but don’t extend the “season” too far. Make sure it ends at the New Year and move on to your next set of advertising goals.

Don’t Ignore the Holidays

Maybe the holidays don’t really mean much to your service-based business. It may be hard to get festive about MOSFET transistors, steel manufacturing, or pest control, for example, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore the holidays altogether. And there’s almost always a way to tie the holidays in, no matter how strange it feels.

Here’s the thing: your customers still want to feel a bit of holiday cheer when they visit your social media profile. Specials and deals may not be appropriate, and that’s fine; it’s not the only option. Find ways to use your social platforms to show your involvement in the community, sharing photos of seasonal events, holiday drives, or special charity work.

Don’t Disregard Smaller Celebrations

Everyone always focuses on the big marketing opportunities: Black Friday is a no-brainer, and Hanukkah and Christmas get promoted every year. But what about the lesser-known but potentially high-ticket days in between? Are you running promotions for Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, or Free Shipping Day?

You may even want to think even further outside the box and put together something for the 12 Days of Christmas or for those celebrating Kwanzaa. Not everyone celebrates the same holidays, but everyone likes to feel included. A little creativity might just put your work in front of a market you hadn’t previously considered.

If all else fails, there’s always Festivus for the Rest of Us!

Don’t Try to Work in Real-time

There is too much to be done during the holiday season. Attempting to launch campaigns manually on the day they’re set to go live will cause you to pull your hair out, and possibly throw it at your colleagues. That’s just not very festive! You may also end up forgetting to implement critical parts of your campaign when other emergency situations or meetings pop up.

Use your favorite scheduling tools to make sure all your content is planned and scheduled in advance – months in advance where possible, but at least several weeks if nothing else. Everything will go up at the right time of day and your team will be able to monitor as-neededfrom a customer service perspective.

Don’t Be A Self-Serving Billboard

Yes, it’s the holiday season. Yes, you need to promote yourself. Yet you still need to make sure you are offering quality, informative content in between your deals and steals, or it may come across as overselling. Funny memes, holiday tips and tricks, and shared posts about charities and the good work other people are doing in the world should be incorporated into a solid social media calendar all year round.

Everything you do needs to relate back to the people you are serving. Don’t make it all about you. Make it about them. What/How are the products and/or services you offer going to do to help them get through the holiday season with less stress?

(Hint: this approach doesn’t only work during the holidays! Use it throughout the year and improve audience loyalty.)

Don’t Neglect Your Email List

Use your social media platform to highlight your subscriber-only specials. Entice people to sign up for your email newsletter for exclusive access to your upcoming holiday deals, which promise to be amazing! Start early, especially if you are setting up your email series to tease the specials and then launch for a specific day.

Don’t Forget to Check Out the Competition

What is your competition doing on social media for the holiday season? Are they updating their cover banners and thumbnail images? Are they running extra special holiday promotions? Are their specials a better bang for the buck than yours? Make the adjustments necessary to compete.

Don’t Leave Out the Shared Testimonials

The holiday season is fast-paced, so you must give potential buyers everything they need to make a quick decision. This includes sharing testimonial photos and quotes from last year’s happy customers. People are more likely to make a purchase when they can read about a product’s positive attributes from someone they feel they can relate to or understand.

Don’t Refuse to Pay for Ads

The reality of modern holiday marketing is that you need to run some paid ads, even if you don’t have a huge budget. Your competitors will most likely be running targeted Facebook campaigns, and ignoring them on your end means that your potential audience will be overwhelmed by everyone’s ads except yours.

The holiday season results in heightened competition with a lot of other online noise; it’s up to you to beat ‘em or join ‘em. Paid campaigns help you work around that.

Don’t Skimp on Social Media

This should be a given, considering we’re talking about social media mistakes, but it’s important enough to mention again. Don’t spend so much time focusing on email campaigns, website updates, coupons, and banner ads that you forget to place emphasis on your social media profiles.

As a side note, the festive season is a great time of year to make your brand’s presence known. Work on strengthening your identity; this will cement who you are and what you have to offer to your target audience.

Don’t Overlook Tracking Your Statistics

Go into the analytics section of your social media accounts and see how you’ve done year over year. Were your holiday campaigns more successful one year than the others? What did you do differently? Can you apply some of those same concepts to this year’s campaigns? Make it happen – the earlier the better.

Track week-to-week throughout this year’s campaigns, too. You may see areas that need improvement going forward to ensure you maintain your upward momentum.

The holiday season is huge, no matter what type of business you’re running. Make sure your social media platforms are a major focus in your marketing strategy. Your mobile followers will be watching, and so will we! Can’t wait to see you succeed!

It’s a little too early for us to wish you all Happy Holidays, but here at Sachs, we’re always happy to give you a hand with campaigns when you need it most. Connect with us here and get a solid start on this year’s festive season.

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