How to Triage your Website issues during Holiday Sales
Tis the season to make jolly good sales. Holiday sales can not only bring you more sales, but they can also increase your loyal customer base. Successful eCommerce store owners understand that it is important to start preparing your website for holiday sales early. It can be devastating to discover a major weakness in your site at the last minute.
Imagine gathering your customers outside your nine-to-five retail store and stopping the checkout process. Hence, not letting your customers pay for the things they have added to their shopping cart. The result will be your customers abandoning the cart and leaving your store, maybe forever. While online, this is what happens when your website is too slow and unprepared to handle holiday sales. Customers only take seconds to switch to another eCommerce store to make their purchases.
Prepare your Website for Holiday Sales
Holiday Season Support
No matter how cliche this seems, planning before taking any action is necessary. Planning involves determining what your business needs are and how you are going to fulfill them. You have to bridge the gap between your website and how you want it to be. This process involves outlining your logical and physical application architecture, identifying weak areas, redesigning your webpages to be more browser friendly, repeated testing and tuning your website to ensure it performs fine during the peak season. If you think your website requires a lot of work, it is better to hire a dedicated developer early on so they can start working on your website and provide it with holiday season support.
24/7 Developer support
It is also common for eCommerce businesses to take advantage of IT staff augmentation services at this time of the year. Due to more IT-related work during holiday seasons and as preventive measures in the case of any inevitable event, you will have extra IT staff to respond quickly to IT-related alerts and emergencies.
Here are some tips to help you make sure your website is prepared for the holiday season:
- Reduce Load Times
According to Hubspot, the website pages with 0-2 seconds of load times have the highest eCommerce conversion rates. The website conversion rate reduces as each second of the load time increases from this range. A managed hosting platform makes a lot of difference in your website’s load times. For example, Magento 2.0 can reduce your website’s load times and handle many more visitors than Magento 1. You can hire a Magento developer to prepare your Magento store for the holiday sales.
- Make your website design festive.
Let your visitors know it is not just another day at your website. Show them that your website is also in the festive mode and is sharing the holiday spirit. Design your website for the holiday season. You can change into a colorful theme, add festive colors and fonts, and include holiday images and banners wishing everyone who visits happy holidays.
- Improve the website’s performance
Make sure your website is in the best shape. Your payment processor should be able to deal with more transactions than normal; your website should be easy for users to navigate and optimized for SEO. As consumers increasingly shift towards buying via their mobile phones, ensure that your website is mobile-ready.
- Reduce your eCommerce store’s checkout time and process.
Today’s consumers are mostly in a rush. A long checkout procedure or an inconvenient payment method may drive them away.. You can hire a dedicated developer to reduce your checkout process and make your website mobile-friendly.
Creating an Irresistible Advertising Strategy
Get your Holiday Season Offer ready
Make sure you have arranged for the inventory and that all your holiday season offers/promos are ready. Try not to focus on any one big sale. For example, you may only be focusing on the Black Friday sale. It would be best if you focused on offering different discounts in different ways to entice consumers throughout the holiday season rather than only on one day.
Deals and Sales
Holiday season offers are all about deals and sales. Offer amazing deals to consumers, unlike what you offer the rest of the year. Offer several related products in a bundle, perhaps. Or offer a discount on buying multiple items of the same product. Consumers in 2022 are tightening their belts a little bit due to inflation and rising costs. So they are more likely to search for deals, coupons, and thrift during the holiday season. Hence, you should ensure that you include all of that (deals, coupons) in your advertising campaigns.
Sustainability Matters
Consumers, as always, are focused on a quality product and a brand that builds trust. Sustainability is another hot trend this year. If you think your product/service has an element of sustainability, make sure you let your consumers know about it because it matters to them.
HTML Ads Support
HTML ad support is a highly cost-effective technology that allows businesses to create advertisements easily. These ads can be shared via social media, blogs or websites and embedded into other websites. HTML ad support allows businesses to create their own ads in a short amount of time and at no cost. Hence, it’s a no-brainer to use HTML ads for your holiday season ads. You can click here to learn more about HTML ads and their benefits.
How Should eCommerce Stores Approach Cyber Monday
As stated earlier, it is best for eCommerce marketers to focus on the entire season rather than on a single day. That being said, store owners still want to know how they can make one-day sales such as Cyber Monday, Super Saturday, Christmas Eve, or Black Friday more valuable for their consumers. There are many ways that eCommerce stores can approach Cyber Monday and increase their sales. One way is by offering a discount on the item that is already on sale. Another way is by offering a deep discount on a limited number of items with a large selection.
Wrapping Up
The holidays are a time of giving, spending, and celebrating. It is the time of year when people come together with their loved ones to celebrate the season. The holiday marketing trends for 2022 are evolving as marketers try to create a more personalized experience for their consumers and offer them more deals and savings on their purchases.
This year, marketers focus on ensuring consumers feel connected to brands during the holidays by creating campaigns that cater to specific interests or emotions. We will also see more companies focus on ensuring that they are not just selling products but delivering a great experience for their customers. One part of giving your customers an enhanced user experience is via a user-friendly website. As more consumers are shifting to purchase online rather than via a retail store, it’s vital that eCommerce websites are in the best health- responsive and look welcoming to the visitors. Tekglide, a top web development company, provides expert developers to triage your website issues during holiday sales. Book us a call now, and let us help you prepare your website for the holiday season!
