Online retail is booming, and according to Google, the 2018 holiday shopping season saw 18.4% growth in online sales compared to the previous year. Furthermore, shopper-reported online sales surpassed in-store sales for the first time ever, reaching 53%.
Clearly, online shopping is here to stay. To leverage the potential of increased traffic at this time of year, it’s important to get creative with unique offers and promotions that will make you stand out from the competition.
Follow our tips to optimise your website for what is set to be the biggest online shopping year yet!
As a business, you should already know who your target market is, so make sure your customisations are appropriate before updating your website design. For example, if Christmas is not celebrated by your customers, you may want to consider referring to “the holidays” or “festive season”, rather than “Christmas”.
It’s also a good idea to run seasonal freebies and promotions that are different to the ones on offer year-round, as customers are always looking for something special at Christmas. You can update an existing offer with a festive design, or create a completely new one.
Don’t be afraid to get creative and add features that customers don’t see the rest of the year, such as an advent calendar with gifts or prizes behind each window, a Christmas countdown clock, or competitions. You can also customise your calls to action, for example adding an “Add to Santa’s Sleigh” button, instead of plain old “Add to Cart”.
Creating scarcity and urgency incentivises your customers to buy there and then, thus improving conversion rates. A great way to do this is to set up a Christmas landing page with time-sensitive offers and unique incentives that they will lose when they navigate away from the page.
Mobile searches for online shopping have grown 180% in the last two years, but a one-second delay in mobile load times can affect sales conversions by up to 20%, so it’s more important than ever to make sure that your website is optimised for mobile browsers.
You can also utilise the holiday shopping season as an opportunity to grow your mailing list. Getting new subscribers to your newsletter by offering Christmas-related gifts, discounts, or one-time promotions is the gift that keeps on giving when they become repeat customers.
Email marketing increases drastically over the holiday season, so to get noticed in your customers’ flooded inboxes a strong design and message are essential. Avoiding generic subject lines and playing with titles that create intrigue and/or include wordplay or puns is more likely to get your emails opened.
Google is the number one driver of both traffic and transactions volume for e-commerce, so you’ll need to make sure your website is SEO-optimised in order to appear in your target market’s search results and drive traffic to your website.
Video content is one of the best ways to get your business noticed, so you may want to consider creating a festive promotional video. This could take the form of an advert or informational video, or simply entertain your customers to keep them on your site for longer.
For website design and graphic design services in Inverness, contact us today!