It seems like it was only a few weeks ago that we were all planning our 2018, and now it’s holiday season again. And, for eCommerce clients, the holidays means three things: sales, sales, and sales.
It’s a good time to be selling online during the holidays. Unemployment is low, and people are spending: there’s a recent history of massive holiday sales. The weeks between Black Friday and Christmas are the most commercially active in America.
For eCommerce players, it can feel overwhelming. Online (and brick-and-mortar) traffic becomes nearly unbearable, and advertising costs increase considerably. Even the technology industry is quick to keep up with these rushed times: Facebook’s updating data, Google is updating on mobile and Amazon has a new ad marketplace.
You deserve to get a piece of the 2018 eCommerce holiday action, and we’re here to guide you through this exciting and challenging time.
Holiday Checklist for eCommerce Sites
1. Be Ready for Mobile
More and more, users access all kinds of websites from their phones and tablets. People are browsing more, and ultimately buying more while they’re on-the-go. Mobile sales grow faster than brick-and-mortar and even desktop sales.
You certainly want to be up for that challenge.
For years, it has been essential to optimize websites for mobile devices. However, while it was relevant before, it has now become crucial for Search Engine Optimization. Since July 2018, Google added a new item for SEO: it now takes into account how fast your site runs on mobile.
Here are a few things you can do to make your website run more smoothly:
- Run AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages. Backed by Google, this is a project that focuses on page designs that load quickly on mobile. It improves user experience, as your potential customers don’t have to wait extra time to see each page.
- Optimize images. While they’re necessary to make websites more visually appealing, high-quality photos can take up a lot of space, increasing loading time. There are many online tools to optimize images across devices, such as Akami. Thanks to this, your site will load faster and get noticed quicker by Google.
- Use digital wallets. Mobile eCommerce checkout can be cumbersome, and digital wallets make for a speedier way to purchase. They can even speed up desktop conversions!
- Make check out a fully optimized experience. As the holidays approach, revamp whatever needs revamping. If you want to add an option to give to charity or create a better experience for users, now’s the time.
- Befriend long tail search terms. For your product pages, focus less on keywords and more on long tail questions. This will also help you rank on voice search queries.
2. Tweak SEO
Of course, you’ve had an SEO strategy set up for a while, but the highly competitive holidays require a little extra. It can take weeks to get SEO results, so the best time to set up your holiday strategy is now!
As we approach significant sales dates like Black Friday, paid keywords will get more expensive, so it’s good to do some organic work ahead. We recommend:
- Look at successful keywords from last year. Optimize for the terms that worked before, by creating more content around them like blog posts and videos.
- Remember voice-related searches. Voice searches have increased in the past few years, and your website should take them into account. Incorporate your highest-value SEO questions for voice searches, including information about brick-and-mortar locations if you have them.
- Create expectations. These provide an excellent rankings boost, and they set the tone for your coming holiday-related content, like upcoming gift guides.
- Add holiday queries in advance. Because SEO takes its sweet time to work, it’s a great idea to begin working on optimized metadata and copy. You can do this by writing posts, adding some sneak peek pages, looking into your industry’s trends and even get a glimpse of what your competitors are doing. See what people are searching for on Google Trends and provide just that.
3. Increase Average Order Value
Most holiday shopping gets done between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which is when the big sales happen. However, you can increase your average by running discounts and promos throughout the season.
Here are some ad campaign activities to get you started:
- Create a calendar and share it with your team. Build an integrated marketing campaign and make sure every member of your team knows every detail, including when it goes live and what are their roles. There are great organizational tools available to help you keep everyone in the loop, like Basecamp or Asana.
- Build an excellent holiday email strategy. Make sure you have segmentized your mailings properly, and find the right frequency. It can be challenging to find the balance between spam and keeping your customers informed. Craft your emails as fun ways to engage with your customer base, written in a casual language, with fun images and even emojis. Let your customers get to know you and your team. Besides email, you can also do this through Facebook Messenger through a bot like Maisie.
- Build a disclaimer page for your holiday promos. Be transparent with your clients regarding your new promos, and keep them informed on delivery dates and return policies. It’s always a good idea to have “you have until X date to get this by Christmas” notifications, on social media and/or email. Plan your marketing as big dates draw nearer.
- Try tiered promotions. These include “buy more and get more for less,” and “free shipping with a purchase of over X.”
- Everyone loves gifts. Promotions including gifts with purchase have proven very successful.
- Upload your most significant holiday products on social media.
- Build loyalty by offering previews or even promos to your customer groups.
- Use less known sales days to your advantage. Consider partnering with a charity for Giving Tuesday. Perhaps use Small Business Saturday to engage more with your local audience. Since you have an online store, why not try Cyber Monday promos? Don’t constrain yourself to just Black Friday when the holidays are so long!
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