As the cold weather and darker days begin to draw in, it’s time to start thinking about optimising your eCommerce site for the festive season! It’s one of the most lucrative selling periods for all eCommerce businesses, especially with Christmas 2016 being witness to a 25% spike in online sales.
With there being so much that goes into creating a killer Christmas campaign, from optimised content to seasonal landing pages, we’re here to help you capture and convert all that extra online footfall.
As everyone migrates online to do their Christmas shopping, it’s inevitable that your site is going to incur some heavy traffic and it’s down to you to deal with it! Here are a few tips to get you through the seasonal mad-dash that’ll help when optimising your eCommerce site for the festive season:
When it comes to customer convenience and creating opportunities for conversion, it’s important to filter the focus of your audience on to relevant, topical content. You can do this by creating specific seasonal landing pages and homepage banners, so here are a few features that’ll help when you’re optimising your eCommerce site for the festive season:
Well thought out, optimised content can make all the difference between prospect purchasing with you and real engagement with one of your competitors. It’s a really vital aspect of optimising your eCommerce site for the festive season, it’s what gets you noticed and helps get you ranking on Google for all the right reasons.
It’s good practice to start with your keywords so you can give your content a sense of direction. Do keyword research using tools like the Moz keyword explorer where it gives you keyword suggestions, SERP analysis and monthly search volume. While we’re telling you to pick ‘keywords’, really you’re looking at selecting phrases, phrases that don’t offer too much competition or too much work to achieve high rankings from.
Once you’ve picked your key phrase then you need to insert it into your seasonal landing page copy. However, a rule of thumb is to use keywords between 2 and 5 times per page dependent upon copy length. Additionally, you should also stick to one ‘theme’ per page. Don’t want to try and cheat the search engines because it won’t work! Google knows when you’re keyword stuffing and you’ll be penalised. Content should be naturally written with a focus on quality.
TopTip: It’s best to write your copy first and then edit it after, inserting your keywords and phrases.
Avoid copying and pasting large chunks of content from other parts of your website or other people’s websites, because it’s not good practice. Historically search engines penalise websites that feature duplicated content. The key is to keep each page unique and your customers will enjoy engaging with well-written content!
New landing pages mean more metadata. However, Meta descriptions are often overlooked as insignificant. However, they should always be informative, descriptive and representative of what is on the page.
TopTip: keep Meta description inside 150 characters and make sure that these are filled in for every page of your website
We all want to create some killer Christmas campaigns to help increase traffic to our site, however, it can seem like a daunting prospect, especially if you’re new to the whole thing. Here’s a little step-by-step cheatsheet to help you generate some great ads.
Each ad group within your campaign should focus on a single product or service so that your ads appear more relevant to customers. Your festive-loving customer is more likely to click an ad about Christmas gifts than a generic ad about gifts. Being specific is one way to become more relevant!
Include your keywords in your ad text (especially in your ad’s headline) to show people that your ad is directly relevant to their search. When people see their search terms in your ad text, it shows them that your ad is probably relevant to what they’re searching for.
What makes your product or service stand out from the competition? Highlight these important differences in your ad. Do you offer free shipping? Do you have certain items on sale? Be sure to describe any unique features or promotions that you offer.
Your ad text should have a strong call-to-action. A call-to-action encourages users to click on your ad and helps them understand what they can do once they reach your landing page. Here are some sample call-to-action words: Buy, Sell, Order, Browse, Find, Sign up, Try, Get a Quote.
Experiment with different offers and call-to-action phrases to see what’s most effective for your advertising goals. The Google Adwords system automatically rotates ads within an ad group and shows the better-performing ad more often. Over time, you might see that certain ads will perform better than others, showing you which ad text is more effective.
Test and tweak your campaigns to get the results you want. Review your ad performance to help figure out the best ways to achieve your goals. As you watch your ads over time, you might notice changes to your clickthrough rate or conversion rate. For example, if you find that customers aren’t responding to a particular call-to-action in your ad text, remove that ad and try something else. It’s all about experimenting!
If you’re thinking more high-budget, you could even consider creating a Christmas advert for TV, your social channels or even for on your website. Judging by the sales conversion rates from views, it definitely seems like a good investment for a retailer to produce a Christmas marketing campaign to spread a little joy and positivity. Get your buyers inspired!
This Christmas, make sure your customer service is cutting it! There’s nothing worse than having a question or query and feeling like no one is listening, so, here’s a checklist of what you’re going to need when it comes to optimising your eCommerce site for the festive season:
63% of suburban shoppers said that shipping costs are their least favourite part of online shopping, that’s a lot! So this festive season it’s time to make shipping the best thing about online shopping for your eCommerce store. Give them the gift they really want!
The key to making it a more streamlined experience for your customer is through personalisation and so many sites offer different types of delivery method. Offering different ways to pick up parcels, whether it’s free or a discounted home delivery, in-store click and collect or a collect+ business premise, offering more ways for your customer to checkout reduces basket abandonment rates!
Using reliable couriers services is vitally important to creating a good customer relationship. A staggering 53% of consumers now expect the estimated delivery time of eCommerce goods to be precise within three hours or less. Some parcel distributors offer an excellent delivery service where you can accurately track your parcel and rearrange delivery to a neighbour or delivery at another time if you’re not going to be in. Today it’s all about bespoke service.
However, It’s all well and good offering every delivery method under the sun, but if your customers don’t know about it, then it’s useless. Shout from the rooftops about your shipping USP’s, have them all over your site, as well as in the footer space of all your newsletter and email correspondences.
You need time to plan, execute and automate an email campaign strategy because it’s another way to start optimising your eCommerce site for the festive season. If you wait too late, you’ll miss your chance to really move buyers with your words, after all, 75% of those cart deserters do actually plan to buy; they may just need a little nudge.
To give you an idea of where you should start with this year’s campaigns, go back to emails you sent last year and see how they performed. What tactics yielded the best open and click-through rates? Which products or services were most popular with your subscribers?
We all need a little reminder in the online world and none more so than that at Christmas. This can be the difference between a consumer checking out or completely forgetting they went shopping in the first place. Creating a unique cart recovery remarketing strategy is crucial, so here’s how you can be optimising your eCommerce site for the festive season:
So you’ve got your subscribers’ attention with your subject line, now what? Make sure that when they open your email it looks all festive and fantastic. There are loads of ways to create festive email templates with email automation provers MailChimp and Dotmailer, get looking and get creating.
If your business does not have a Facebook page or a Twitter account then it is missing out on some serious public exposure. Utilising social networking is becoming more and more vital in this age of digital marketing and you don’t want to miss out! Through the Sign-Up.to system, your campaign can be tweeted automatically alongside your email campaign send and the ability to also share it on Facebook is coming soon.
This is an all-year-round eCommerce essential but during the festive season, it’s even more important. In today’s world and during the festive chaos, it’s commonplace for consumers to be waiting in line at the supermarket or at the bank and checking out Christmas gifts on their phones.
It’s all about being able to multi-task during the mad-rush. If you’re not offering a seamless shopping experience online, then you can bet your competitors. Here’s how you can keep up:
Remember: when Christmas comes, brand loyalty is often forfeit for convenience!
With all these killer tips at your fingertips, it’ll be no time before you’re optimising your eCommerce site for the festive season. Being organised and ahead of the competition when it comes to Christmas is an essential.
While many suggest the 23 December as the busiest shopping day of the season, in reality, people start planning their gifts weeks and months in advance.
Posted in Digital Marketing, eCommerce
Tagged christmas, Customer Service, Optimisation
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