Christmas marketing – How to prepare your eCommerce for Xmas shopping

Just like with brick-and-mortar businesses, eCommerce stores have to do the necessary preparations for Christmas shopping. The holiday season is the most profitable time of the year for many businesses, so it’s vital that you take steps to take advantage of increased spending while you can. Prepare your Seasonal Marketing Strategy Now!

Before you read on, download our free marketing calendar and don’t get distracted by the special dates of the year.

Want to drive up visitor engagement, draw in new visitors, and boost the income of your eCommerce platform? Here’s how.

Phase one – Plan

Any real business success, whether it’s in the brick-and-mortar retail industry or the eCommerce sphere, only occurs after you have a solid plan. Those online businesses that can devise and execute holiday-focused sales goals and tactics will have serious advantages over their competitors and will be able to better take advantage of holiday shopping sprees.

Make a sales plan

You won’t see success without a plan. Specifically, you should create a key holiday sales plan. First, focus on your goals and figure out what targets you need to set for a successful holiday season. Remember, holidays are great times to make extra profits both from existing customers and by attracting new ones to your site.

You should also pick out any high selling items, figure out if you need to make changes to your platform and its design, and more. This sales plan is the base from which all your other success will be derived.

Use an eCommerce SEO service

Making a sales plan without adequate information is a recipe for disaster, however. For the best results, consider using eCommerce SEO services. In a nutshell, eCommerce SEO services can help you:

• Understand your competitors.
• Build winning strategies for your future sales and marketing efforts.
• Research and analyze thousands of important keywords and topics.

Additionally, top eCommerce SEO services often include in-house copywriting and marketing, these are excellent benefits if you only have a small staff or you’re still growing. Either way, be sure to use eCommerce SEO services to gather the information necessary to make a killer sales plan.

Come up with promotions

The holiday season is the time for promotions, so don’t be stingy with them. It’s always a great idea to double down on your best-selling items or services. Offer big discounts for bulk orders or come up with themed promotions that suit the times and the holiday spirit.

Use the SEO and keyword information from an eCommerce SEO service to make sure that your promotions are on target and that they hit customer pain points or interests perfectly. It’ll all be worth it in the end – after all, online spending increased by over 13% last year. This year might be even better.

Phase two – Adjust your site

After coming up with your plan in full, it’s time to implement changes to your site to make things more festive and navigable for new visitors. This can be as encompassing or moderate as you like. However, the important thing to remember is that your site must still work perfectly when your adjustments are done.

Decorate!

People love festive and themed sites, especially during the holiday season. Of course, how exactly you should decorate your eCommerce depends on your niche and industry. But even adding a holiday theme or wintery icons to your site can help make your online store a more welcoming place to be.

Bonus points for creativity, people notice when online businesses put in extra effort. You can also use the opportunity to decorate to tie your new site look in with your promotions or special offers. One easy example is adding a timer or countdown clock to a special event or promotional opportunity on the side, complete with snowflakes or Santa graphics.

Create themed pages

If you’re tying your Christmas Ads to your best selling items (which you should be), it also doesn’t hurt to create themed pages for those products or services. This may be a good way to maximize your holiday promotional budget.

If you don’t have a lot of cash to redesign your entire site, consider focusing on just a few major pages, such as your landing page and the pages for high selling stuff. This way, every dollar you spend on your website’s redesign will go further.

Optimize for mobile users

You’ll also want to optimize your website for mobile users as much as possible. That’s because the majority of Internet traffic comes from mobile devices these days, which also means that most of your new visitors will be on their phones and tablets.

eCommerce websites optimized for mobile users will be more popular and more likely to get repeat customers. Don’t make your new customers sit through mismatched image sizes or clunky interfaces.

In addition, it doesn’t hurt to go through your site and streamline the navigation process even for your desktop visitors. Anything that makes your eCommerce platform a more enjoyable place to shop is a win.

Phase 3 – Market

Once your plan is in place and your website redesigns or upgrades are underway, it’s time for the last piece of the puzzle – marketing. Without great holiday marketing, no one will even know that your site is ready and waiting for their business. It’s no stretch to say that top-tier marketing is just as important as the other two parts of site preparation in and of itself!

Boost your social media efforts

You should seriously boost your social media activity around the holiday season. During Christmastime, all of your competitors will be posting holiday focused posts and ads like crazy, and it’s vital to try to match them as much as possible.

People have short attention spans before Christmas, what with being preoccupied with buying presents and making holiday plans, so spamming your social media with offers and awareness posts could go a long way toward diverting traffic to your eCommerce site. 

Launch a dedicated holiday email marketing campaign

Email marketing should also be a big concern during the holidays. Make any email marketing campaigns you have more active and themed to the Christmas season. If you don’t already have an email marketing campaign, start one.

What if you don’t have enough visitors to justify an email marketing campaign or service? Then there’s one more thing you can do: invest on PPC campaigns.

• Clever tip: invest in Google Ads and make seasonal marketing campaigns for Christmas. If you don’t have time or resources, we recommend you to use our Clever Ads Google Ads Creator.

Onsite marketing

This type of marketing is a great tool for new eCommerce stores or beginner businesses that don’t have the traffic to justify a full email list, or maybe they don’t have enough emails from their visitors.

Onsite marketing, such as using integrated pop-ups for special offers or chat boxes, can both drive visitor engagement on your site and potentially help you to get visitor contact information, like their email addresses. Then you can tie your on-site marketing into your email marketing or social media campaigns.

It all comes together for a focused, successful engagement strategy.

Conclusion

Ultimately, preparing your eCommerce store for the Christmas season is time-consuming and hectic. But if you follow the advice above, your eCommerce store will have a successful season and you’ll reap the rewards of the most profitable time of the year. Good luck!