Top 7 Ways To Prepare Your Website For Online Selling During The Festive Season

Seasonal celebrations are known to induce a sense of enthusiasm, a joyous time filled with greetings, glitter, and happiness. When festive retail sales are round the corner, there is a tremendous increase in website visitors, along with their eagerness to buy gifts for their loved ones and themselves. This year's festive shopping season will be no exception with a transformation in buyers’ shopping habits and spending behaviors in the past several months

There’s nothing more confusing to them than mixed marketing messages. You need to make sure your marketing efforts are unified in messaging and the website is all set to deliver in accordance with their demands. To help your brand thrive this holiday season and navigate these uncharted waters, here are a few things you should do to make sure your website is festive-ready and can cater to the rising demands for your products rightly.

1. Creating Eye-Catching Graphics

Spruce up your eCommerce website with eye-catching content to grab the attention of a potential customer visiting your website. To do so, it is essential to get the customers in a festive mood, motivating them to buy from your website. You can use a creative call to action to move your visitors to the places you would like them to head. Adding a festive element to your logo would also make it extra festive. 

There are endless options for graphic elements, icons, and vectors. The following points might help drive traffic to your website:

• Playing around the festive schemes and font styles 
• Creating icons depicting the festive season
• Designing banners displaying festive cheers

Whatever you choose, always ensure you are communicating your brand message the same way across all of your web presence channels.

2. Making a Mobile-Friendly Website

When a website is mobile-friendly, it has the ability to adapt to various sizes of screens depending on the device it is being accessed from. A website must provide its customers with an effortless shopping experience. Customers might abandon a website that doesn't provide a smooth user experience. 

Creating a user-friendly experience for the customer is a very crucial part that should be considered while prepping up your website for the festive rush. Online shopping is heavily reliant on mobile devices - more than half of Google searches are mobile searches, so you must optimize your site for mobile users. Unless you have already invested in mobile-friendly solutions, now is the perfect time to work with your developer to ensure easy navigation on mobile devices.

3. Optimizing the Festive Specific Keywords

How you approach SEO during the holidays has a significant impact on the success of your online store. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential when preparing your website for the 2021 festive season. If you do not use SEO wisely, you might end up losing a large portion of potential revenue in just a few weeks. 

• Choosing the right keywords is not an easy task

There is no way of knowing what type of products will be in demand this year or the category of products you will see on holiday shopping lists. For this reason, it can help to think about the types of search terms you'd use when you're shopping for the holidays.

• Spending time and effort on keyword research

The keywords you use for your SEO strategy should be festive specific and your product and service descriptions should address festive needs. Spending time and effort on keyword research and optimizing your content will help you achieve better results. 

4. Putting speed as a priority

Testing the speed of your website is very important to make it a customer-friendly experience for website visitors. As per a survey, a consumer’s decision to buy from a website depends 70% on the speed of the page. 

During load testing, you put pressure on a system and see how it responds. The purpose of this is to make sure that your website will function correctly at different levels of traffic and to prevent it from crashing under high workloads. A website crash is the last thing you want when you have a lot of users because they won't return, resulting in a loss.

5. Enhancing the user experience

UX & Checkout Flow plays an essential role in the overall visibility of a website. Your entire website design should be geared towards optimizing the user experience. Make it easy for your customers to navigate from the product page to the shopping cart to checkout. You can do so by rewriting the content for SEO, fixing bugs, etc. You may also choose to take the feedback from the visitors to improve their experience.

6. Creating festive promotions

Promos and discounts during the festive season are an excellent way to turn casual visitors into buyers. You may want to tailor your special offer according to the type of service or product you sell, the prices you charge, the buying behavior of your customers, and demographics. The following are among the most popular holiday promotions:

• Buy one, get one free, or pay half the price
• Coupons and discount codes for future purchases

Purchases above a certain threshold are eligible for free shipping

7. Securing the website

The security of eCommerce sites has always been a major concern. In the aftermath of several high-profile data breaches, consumers have become more concerned about website security. With a safe, secure website that protects its customers' private information, you can give your customers the confidence they need to shop at your site.

Getting ready for a post-COVID world

The festivities are a traditionally heavy online shopping season. Last year, 78% of shoppers used two or more channels to do their festive shopping, and 58% of purchases were made online. This year, we expect those numbers will grow. For retailers to maintain a competitive edge, their websites need to be robust and offer a good customer experience, otherwise, their customers may go elsewhere and cease to shop with them

In the event of a crisis, all companies should have a crisis strategy laying out what should be done. 

Not just this, it is always advisable to have a contingency plan in place. It should include:

• You can prepare for the next disruption by setting up a crisis response team, designing and implementing a crisis response plan that reflects your strategy, goals, and purpose, and building a resilience program. 
• Rethink and redefine your crisis management process and response strategy to build organizational resilience, and foster a culture of resilience.
• Integration of resilience competencies and teams is necessary for the coordination of the methods, strategies, and technologies for effective crisis response.

Conclusion:

We have all learned to expect the unexpected in business. Problems are not usually caused by the things one sees progressing; they are usually caused by the ones that one does not see. 

Regardless of how well-established and customer-friendly an online store is, the holiday season is never easy. The reason is that customers now have greater expectations, and there is more competition than ever.

As a result, having a successful holiday season is possible with the right preparation. With these tips, you can start converting holiday shoppers almost immediately.