Is Your eCommerce Website Ready For the Holiday Season?
The recent pandemic and worldwide lockdown did dent the sales of various eCommerce websites. However, they are up and running again and geared up for more sales. The holiday season is approaching, and with people still reluctant to go out shopping, this may be a chance for your eCommerce website to achieve sales like never before. The success of your business website during the holiday season largely depends on its design, experience, content, and SEO. You may have a fantastic campaign, but if you don’t know how to execute it, all the efforts will go in vain. Here are a few tips on making your eCommerce website ready for this festive season and crack huge sales.
Design A Theme-Based Homepage
Your homepage is the face of your business. Just as people must dress according to the occasion, eCommerce websites should also modify themselves based on the holiday theme. There’s no need to change the UI of your entire website; that would be a tedious and time-consuming activity. You can only focus on some of the most important pages, especially the home page. That’s one place where most of your visitors will land. Use festive fonts, design themes color palette, photographs, and illustrations. These are easily available on the web for free.
Use Festive CTA Buttons
Even if you don’t want to be too fancy with your webpages, you can still get into the festive vibe. For the holiday season, you can decorate your call-to-action buttons to follow the being minimal trend. You can replace the usual corporate style with something that is more inviting to customers and also suggests what they’re about. You could adorn it with gift icons, cornucopia or snowflakes just to give hints of celebration or simply animate them with CSS and SVG filters.
As much as words are important to attract visitors to click, you need to decorate the clickable buttons with a festive color scheme or design element.
Content Layout On Your Website
Very often we come across a website that is filled with ads and product pop-ups. It is extremely difficult to navigate around that site. Therefore, it is advisable to refrain from spammy marketing tricks and restructure promotions in a way that they don’t look ‘in your face’.
The last thing you want to do as an eCommerce business is to drift away from your visitors from your website with excessive advertising. Sure you want to jump on the bandwagon of ‘holiday marketing’ but dumping things over your customers is a no-no and similar to traditional outbound techniques. Use visual hierarchy tricks to structure your content. Categorize your content and divide it into grids into your web pages.
Design For Mobile
More than 177 million buyers, in the US alone, purchase products and services online via their mobiles. Therefore, you should finally invest in responsive web design this holiday season. You should not miss out on this opportunity. If you decide to adapt your website design to mobile-first now, you’ll get access to an increased number of mobile shoppers. A responsive website meets the requirement of the ever-changing web-scape.
Be Prepared For Extra Site Load
According to Kissmetrics stats, on any given day 47% of online customers expect web pages to load within 2 seconds. Now since it is the holiday season, expect more traffic. On peak days, customers are literally swamping websites to find good deals. While you prep your design for the holiday, make sure you don’t increase the loading time of your site.
A good website loading speed can increase visitor retention, engagement, and enhance their overall user-experience. Fast page loads also help direct customers across landing pages and this may influence conversion rates.
Explore Virtual Reality Prospects
Virtual reality isn’t a new thing but the way businesses have started to use is a good case study for startups and small businesses. Alibaba’s GnomeMagic Lab is an example of virtual reality worth exploring. A team member, Zhao Haiping envisioned that virtual reality could enable online customers to shop on New York’s Fifth Avenue virtually from their homes. An excellent idea for those who detest the rush of physical stores during the holiday season.
Write Theme Based Blog Content
There are more than one reasons that you should have a blog for your eCommerce website. You may already have one, but if not, start one soon. It strengthens your brand messages and is a great way to promote your products while solving customers’ problems. It can drive targeted and valuable traffic onto your landing pages. Plus, it’s a cost-effective strategy that has high returns if done properly. If you have a blog then make sure you streamline your content according to the holiday season. Writers and marketers can work together to generate ideas that’ll attract your target market.
Use Holiday-Specific Keywords
During the holidays, you must use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or any other free keyword tool to know exactly which words trigger the shopping hormones of customers. Set the holiday ambiance with ‘trigger words’ that generate an action. For an eCommerce website, the ideal action is to buy a product.
So what are you waiting for? Use these tips to get your website ready for the festive season. For more information, talk to our experts.
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