How to Prepare Your Online Store for Next Holiday Season

The holiday season is a number of months away but it’ll come up sooner than you think. Many people are preparing to shop for gifts ahead of time. This is why you should prepare your eCommerce business to thrive before and during the holiday season with an effective strategy.

Keep in mind that people are shopping for the holidays earlier than ever. One of the main reasons for this is to avoid inflation. This factor is also changing buyer behaviors in other ways. For instance, many shoppers are planning on focusing on high-value brands and cutting back on their spending. If you want your online store to do well this holiday season, you’ll want to adapt accordingly to anticipate these behaviors.

To overcome the challenges of preparing for the holidays, the following are some tips to help you succeed before, during, and after the heavy shopping season.

Develop a Sales Plan

Start by thinking about the goals you want to set for the holidays. What kind of income do you want to make and how can you get there this holiday season?

In an effort to achieve your goals, you’ll need to figure out which promotions and packages to offer your customers. You’ll also need to consider how you’ll market for the holidays and how you’ll want to change your website’s design to get into the holiday spirit.

Learn from Past Campaigns

If you’ve already run a holiday campaign in previous years, it’s important to learn from your successes and mistakes. Think about your most and least successful campaigns, your most and least popular products, the days when you got the most and least traffic, and other elements.

Based on these and other factors, you can optimize your campaigns early on before the holidays. You’ll find more effective ways to satisfy your customers and boost sales.

Brace for More Traffic

If you offer compelling holiday deals and products that are in high demand over the holidays, you must ensure your website can handle the surge of traffic. Otherwise, having too much traffic could slow your website down to a crawl and turn people away from your store. In some cases, too much traffic could also lead to a crash that puts your site entirely out of commission.

According to Portent, the best loading speed for a web page is zero to four seconds, with conversion rates significantly dropping after the first five seconds of loading times. You can minimize loading times by testing your website across all platforms and devices.

Also, keep in mind that Google takes page loading speeds into account when ranking websites, making optimized web pages critical for good search engine optimization.

Prepare Your Website for Mobile Devices

Many people are likely to browse your website and shop online using their mobile devices leading up to the holidays. Make sure your website supports these users with a mobile-responsive design. People should be able to easily browse your website and products and complete the checkout process using a smartphone or tablet of any kind.

Optimizing for mobile is also critical for SEO. Google tends to scrutinize the mobile version of websites when indexing and ranking them, so you need a mobile-responsive website if you want to maximize visibility in search engines.

Redesign Your Website to Reflect the Holidays

While you may not need to complete a comprehensive redesign of your website for every holiday, you should take the time to make some changes to connect with audiences during certain times of the year.

For example, you can include a few site-wide color changes to associate your website with the holidays or use some holiday-themed graphics. You can also add countdown clocks for Black Friday and other deals to create a fear of missing out (FOMO) among audiences.

If you can, you may want to consider making more extensive changes to get deeper into the holiday spirit, but just a few key changes in the right places can make a difference.

Connect with Audiences on Social Media

To build some hype around your holiday deals and your brand in general, start using social media more frequently.

Use the platforms your audience is on most often to promote your business and offerings. You can post about special sales and packages, offer unique holiday-themed gifts to followers, conduct surveys asking people what they would like to see from you during the holiday season, and more. You can also use holiday social media ads to connect with new and existing audiences.

Consider Different Types of Promotions for the Holidays

When thinking of promotion ideas before the holidays begin, there are many types of promotions that can succeed. Some examples include:

Gift Cards

If you can, offer gift cards to customers that make for great gifts if people aren’t sure what to get someone.

Deals on Your Most Popular Products

Find out which products you sell the most of, particularly around the holidays. You can then use this data to determine which items you want to put on sale for a limited time. The next step would be to start promoting these deals and featuring them front and center on your website.

Put Together Gift Packages

You can also offer holiday-themed packages and bundles of multiple products. These items could include products that go well together and match a specific theme.

Streamline the Checkout Process

One final piece of advice is to keep the checkout process smooth and painless. Give your customers plenty of payment methods for optimum convenience and minimize the number of steps the process involves.

You should also clearly indicate that all purchases are secure to eliminate security concerns.

Get Your Online Store Ready for the Holidays with the Right Strategy

With the right approach, you’ll be able to sufficiently prepare your eCommerce business for the holidays. Start preparing early on and take the right steps to prepare your onsite and offsite marketing efforts.

For more help with your online store through expert consulting services, turn to the experts at Gray Growth Logistics.