How eCommerce sites should prepare for the Christmas rush

Whether you’re an online or bricks and mortar store, Christmas is the busiest time of year. Queries, purchases, and returns are coming in thicker and faster than any other time.

For the big players in the eCommerce game, dealing with this testing period is easier. However, for small businesses operating solely online, it can be harder to stay on top. If you run an online business, digital marketing should be your best friend to prepare for Christmas.

Read this strategy guide and learn how to increase brand awareness and prepare for those essential sales this Christmas.

Brand awareness

If you found a product you loved, you’d probably tell your friends and family. This small amount of people isn’t really enough though. If you’ve got great products, and need to sell them, and word of mouth alone won’t cut it. This is why social media for businesses is so important. Through the use of social media, you can tell people about your great products, where they’re coming from, and why they should buy from you! A strong social media presence promotes both your brand and your products and if done correctly, leads to increased brand awareness.

Social media is key for brand awareness, this is why you need a strong social media strategy, consisting of:

• Regular social media posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Content should be tailored to best fit each platform. Aim to post once in the morning, once at lunch and once in the evening. Always keep a consistent brand voice, and use consistent imagery – be it your own, or curated.
• Don’t overdo the promotional content. If you’re constantly posting about your products, and not providing your audience with valuable content, they will unfollow you. 1/3 of content should be original, and 2/3 should be curated. This curated content is content that has been selected by you from across the internet because it is informative, interesting or valuable. People want to see a mixture of content. Keep it varied!
• To encourage engagement and spike interest in your brand, try and host a giveaway or competition.
• Monitor all brand mentions and respond to all, whether they’re good or bad. On the ball customer service can help turn a bad review into a positive.
• Run paid adverts on Facebook or Instagram to reach a new audience. Create adverts that appeal to your target audience and use a strong call to action to provoke an action as a direct result of seeing the ad.
• Research influencers to assess if influencer marketing would work in your industry and to see who the key players are. People are more likely to take a recommendation from somebody they trust.

As your brand appears more online and in peoples’ social sphere, people will become more interested. With regular content, excellent reviews and social advertising, your brand awareness is sure to grow.

Site traffic

As the Christmas draws closer, web traffic for eCommerce sites is set to rise, you need to prepare for that. If you’ve got good products, you’ll automatically get the traffic, right? Wrong! If you’re not getting traffic to your site, it may be that you’re just not appearing on search engine results pages. If you’re not showing on here, it’s likely to be that your site is not optimised for SEO. Take our free SEO report to see where you measure up against your competition.

The more optimised your site is for SEO, the higher you should appear on SERPs. Unfortunately, just under 80% of people will not go further than the first page of results. Owing to this, it’s essential to rank as highly as possible. Implementing a successful SEO strategy targeting both on-site and off-page SEO is the most effective way to rank higher.

Primarily, you want to look out for headers (H2’s and H4’s), keywords, images with alt-tags, meta descriptions, linking, URL structure and sharability. When your site has been edited and optimised it should be resubmitted to Google. Google when then scrape and recognise every change you have made so that the newly optimised site can finally be served up to the relevant search engine queries.

Conversions

Getting traffic to your site is only half the hurdle. Getting people to make a purchase and convert into customers is perhaps the most important. With the seasonal influx of site visitors coming your way, how can you make sure they stay on your site and make a purchase?

To see where people are abandoning your site and not converting, take a look at your site analytics. Important things to look at are things like bounce rate or session duration. If your bounce rate is high and session duration is low, this could be down to fundamentally poor user experience of your website. Sites that are slow to load, or hard to use or navigate will be confusing and frustrating for site visitors, meaning they will leave and shop elsewhere.

An effective strategy

By combining a strong social media presence with effective SEO and responsive web design, your site will be prepared for the festive rush. An effective digital marketing strategy implements all these features and more. Other things you should look at include copywriting – make sure your sales copy is punchy and has a strong CTA, and email marketing – show people your best products, right in their inbox!

If you’re struggling with digital marketing and want to prepare before Christmas contact us. We can help show you where you can improve, and will give you a guiding hand along the way.