How to Prepare Your Online Store for the Holidays
Preparing your online business for the holidays is essential since the holidays are the best time of the year for an online store to generate income. The major holidays at the end of the year are especially important. Here are some tips for preparing your business for holiday traffic.
1. Choose the Best Holidays for Your Business
There are many holidays throughout the year so focus on the ones that are most relevant to your business and customers. For example, if you sell heart necklaces, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day would be important holidays for your business in addition to a major holiday like Christmas. For the biggest holidays, which are in the last quarter of the year, searches for gift ideas start as early as August, so it important to prepare early for these holidays.
2. Set Up a Plan
For the holidays, consider providing shoppers with additional payment and return policy options. To plan for the holiday rush, you can use an online calendar such as Google Calendars or a spreadsheet to lay out a plan with dates for your campaigns. Indicate starting and ending dates for email promotions, ads, and the times when you will do site and image updates.
3. Choose Your Advertising Channels
Choose some good advertising channels for your promotions. Some popular methods include Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, social media posts, blog posts, and email marketing.
If you decide to do email campaigns, you can increase conversions by segmenting your database by customer preferences and by items previously bought. Prepare several emails for each promotion. Make sure to write blogs in advance to give Google time to index your pages.
If you decide to run ads, keep in mind that you may need to bid higher during the holidays due to increased competition during those times. Don’t forget to retarget potential customers that have visited your site by showing them ads on Facebook or Google.
4. Make Your Call to Action Eye-Catching
During the holidays, it is especially important to create strong calls to action that will grab the attention of your potential customers right away. Some examples of calls to action for the holidays include “Free Shipping”, “Holiday Sale”, “Black Friday”, “Percent Off”, and “Cyber Monday”. You can even find online tools that will estimate the effectiveness of your call to action.
5. Track Your Conversions
Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking your conversions. You should have overall tracking set up for your online store and also track individual campaigns by creating tracking for them. You can do this by creating a track-able link (UTM- Urchin Tracking Module) for your ad channels and campaigns.