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10 Ways to Prepare Your Shopify Store for the Holidays 2020
With December rolling around the corner, the holiday season puts people into a spirit of gifting and shopping. It’s a time to prepare gifts for family and friends which means it’s the perfect time for you to promote your products.
As consumers get ready to do some serious shopping, you’ll want to set up your Shopify store to get them to do three things: visit, stay on your website for a long time, and purchase.
If you haven’t started preparing for the holiday season yet, we’ll list some tips below that you can use to boost and optimize your Shopify store to attract more customers and get more sales.
Sit down with your team and ask yourselves what you want to achieve this holiday season. Do you want to beat a previous record? Is there a product that needs to be pushed? Make sure that your goals are S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-based). This will help you focus and aid in your decision making.
Make sure that you and your team are aligned on what’s going to happen. Assign important roles and follow through by doing check-ins. If you are going all-in and investing a lot in this, you can opt to outsource your team especially if you are understaffed. Freelancers can do specialized jobs so they can get the job done if you need them to.
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Improve the customer experience with a custom holiday theme! Decorating your store with holiday banners and images can draw their attention and even make an emotional connection.
Give them a festive theme to make them want to stay on your website longer. You can do this by changing your hero banner to promote holiday discounts with fun, attractive and colorful graphics to match the season. Even just making your banners red and green could help give off that Christmas vibe.
Let customers know that your store is doing something! Your efforts will go to waste if customers don’t even know you have anything going on. Whether it’s discounts, freebies, or other promos, let your audience know ahead of time so they can prepare and go over your products beforehand. This makes them more involved in the process.
Here’s an example from Axe Bat for their Black Friday campaign.
Keep nudging customers by promoting your holiday efforts consistently. You can start with teasers then move to different types of content that show your promotions or discounts. This way, they keep coming back and get reminded of what you have in store.
If you have voucher codes, you can get creative and input one that is both related to your brand as well as the holidays. This can help for better brand recall and can make it easy for customers to share it amongst colleagues and friends.
Coupon code name ideas for Christmas sales:
- JOLLY15
- REDHATWHITEBEARD
- FESTIVE10
- RUDOLFSDEAL
- MERRYDRINKMAS
- HOHOHO20
Try to foresee how many stocks you’ll be needing in line with your goal to really capitalize on the holiday season. There are a lot of last-minute shoppers as well that you have to consider so running out of stock may ruin the customer experience. Having no stocks right when a prospective buyer is looking to make a purchase will make that buyer check other websites.
It’s also important that you make sure that your items are at their best. Nothing ruins Christmas like a broken gift! In line with the holiday spirit, customers want to feel like their hard-earned money was well spent more than anything. And since they are buying presents for loved ones, they will be checking your product’s quality now more than ever.
The customers on your Shopify store are already interested in your brand and products. Give them a little nudge to further boost sales by showing relevant upgrades or add-ons at the right time and place. Maybe your customer would like to add an extra little gift for one person or get another item for a different person. If you do it right, this can really increase your revenue. It can even help them out as their doing their holiday shopping.
Run through your whole website and inspect every detail Make sure that the voucher codes you’ve sent out and promoted are working. Codes that don’t work will disappoint customers and we don’t want that. Check the whole customer journey to spot any friction. Go over the following to see if they are working:
- Promotional/discount voucher codes
- Shopping cart
- Bundles (for example, buy one take one)
- Free gifts (if they are automatically added or if they appear on the shopping cart)
- Images are working and load properly
- Payment methods go through
If you are making content on social media, keep everything on-brand but in the theme of the holidays. It should also stay consistent with what’s on your website and make it easy for customers to purchase.
Say you are promoting a skincare gift set, perhaps you’ll want to dress up the bundle or create a really good visual that can also be seen on the website. Any posts should also link to that specific item so customers take fewer steps from your ad to the shopping cart.
One important thing in sales is to delight your customer. Add a little something to make their purchases extra special. It can be anything such as a custom holiday packaging, a holiday greeting card, a discount on their next purchase, or a small gift! Be it big or small, it helps to give them a smile when they receive their item.
You can even go for reusable packaging that shows off your brand for additional marketing or adding in social media-worthy gifts that will make them want to post and share.
There are a lot of things you can do to improve your website’s performance from speeding it up to improving SEO and even making check out as painless as it can be for customers. Here are some ways to optimize your Shopify store:
- Check and boost store speed (Read our tips on Easy Ways to Boost Shopify Store Speed)
- Invest in your SEO or if there is not enough time, create content based on holidays (gift guides, shopping tips, etc)
- Put all important information at the top (free shipping, announcements, discounts, countdowns, etc)
- Backup your store. In the event that your site crashes due to the high volume of orders, it will help you to have a functioning backup of your website
- Accelerate the check out process. Customers may be in a rush so shorten the process by allowing them to checkout without leaving the product page (Checkout Shopify’s dynamic checkout buttons)
- Let customers wishlist items
- Add automatic discounts at checkout. So customers don’t have to calculate
- Double-check website security
- Ensure that your search feature works properly
In the middle of the holiday rush, customers may get angsty, confused, or a bit frazzled. Your customer support is someone who should be able to ease their pain even for just a while. Even if your customers may sound angry or impatient, good customer support can turn that conversation into a sale.
We hope you learned something from this article, and if you are looking for help in marketing, designing, or building your Shopify website, contact your Shopify experts at Webinopoly here.
Our team can help you optimize your website, update your design, and boost your SEO. It’s not too late to get ready for the holidays so let’s start today!
Who is Webinopoly and what can we do for you?
- Webinopoly houses a team of Shopify experts in web design and development and can customize a design for you to match your vision and brand;
- Webinopoly's developers are experts in providing the most efficient solutions to your customer’s problems
- We specialize in e-commerce marketing and advanced eCommerce Analytics for eCommerce and Conversion Rate Optimization services
Contact your Shopify experts at Webinopoly here.