The holiday season is a potential goldmine for online businesses with sales booming and festive spirits at their peak. BBC reported that sales volume from 25 November to 2 December were up 7.1 percent compared with 2018, while sales value rose by 16.5 percent. Shoppers aren’t just buying more; they’re spending more too. With Black Friday complete and December now upon us, shopping is only set to increase as we all prepare for Christmas.
Busy shopping periods such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday provide valuable insight into business performance. Why not use insights from the beginning of the peak period to inform website changes in preparation for Christmas? Here’s our top quick wins to get the most of your website and help maximise revenue this Christmas.
Use promotions and discounts to encourage conversions
Using incentives to encourage conversions during the holiday season is a win-win tactic for your brand. Not only can you increase conversions ahead of Christmas, but fresh data can also be gathered to continue growing your email list for the New Year. Utilising a pop-up feature, you can implement featured promotions and discounts encouraging consumers to provide their email addresses. Free Express Delivery is a great one to capture last-minute shoppers and highlights their high purchase intent. We implemented a pop-up tactic for client Regis last year, shown below. The results speak for themselves with sign-ups increasing by 281 percent between August to November.
Set up abandoned basket emails
Did you know that nearly 78 percent of mobile users abandon their basket? Are you sending out abandoned basket emails when your visitors leave something behind? If not, you could be missing out on a huge chunk of revenue! In fact, these emails can recoup up to 10 percent of missed revenue. Creating an engaging and personalised abandon basket email can encourage people to return and convert.
This example from Hamper is great for the Christmas period. Not only do they clearly state that your products have been saved, but they also remind users of what products they were considering along with their USPs, a positive review and a clear CTA to easily complete the order.
Clearly communicate your USPs
With eCommerce growing over 16 percent YOY, it’s likely your website is going to have an influx of new visitors in the run up to Christmas. Tell them about your business and why they should buy from you! Whichever page your user lands on, ensure your Unique Selling Points (USPs) are clearly visible. Having USPs is essential to stand out in the ultra-competitive online world. Communicating your USPs clearly and quickly, like Henchman does in their USP bar, could be the difference between a conversion for you and a conversion for your competitors.
Finding a unique point of difference can be a challenge. To be effective, the selling point should be specific to your brand and relevant to your users. Considering the Christmas shopping rush where spending is extensive, consumers are likely to care most about discounts, extended returns policies, free turns and delivery in time for the big day.
Optimise your landing pages based on last year’s results
Quite often, your homepage is not your most visited landing page. Your top page may be for a particular service or product category. Using data from Google Analytics to analyse performance on Black Friday and Christmas last year, you can see which are your most popular pages and work to fully optimise them. Use tools such as Hotjar to analyse user behaviour based on clicks and scrolls across the page. Heatmaps identify ‘hot-spots’ and ‘cold-spots’, from this you can review what content is creating engagement and, more importantly, what isn’t.
Maximise your user retention
55 percent of users spend fewer than 15 seconds on your site. Ensure you keep your landing pages concise with key products, deals and clearly signposted CTAs at the top of the page. These features can help to increase page engagement and ensures users quickly find the sections of your website that are relevant. In short, you don’t have long to gain and maintain their attention so make your above the fold content engaging with signposts to convenient pages and further options.
Pick a hero product and merchandise it to the max!
Select a hero product for the Christmas shopping period and ensure you merchandise it effectively across your website. A hero product is likely to be your bestseller, it can define a brand and elevate your sales with the right marketing. You know your hero products are likely to do well, so merchandising them well will help drive sales.
Merchandising is commonly associated with product pages and category pages, but in reality, key products can be positioned and promoted across all areas of the website. Positioning them at the top of relevant category pages helps to raise further awareness around your brand’s offering. For example, Beer Hawk have chosen to promote their 2019 Advent Calendar as a hero product on the run up to Christmas. Placing this product in first position when a user adds another product to their basket maximises on cross selling opportunities.
Over recent years, personalisation has also become an important part of merchandising. Personalised product recommendations such as ‘Have you tried?’ or ‘You might also love these’ can help increase conversion rates by connecting a user to relevant products quickly and easily.
The peak shopping period presents ample opportunities for eCommerce businesses to maximise revenue. With Christmas fast approaching, it’s important to keep momentum going. Implementing our eCommerce quick wins can help optimise your online store, capitalising on increased website traffic and high purchase intent in the process. Contact team Pinpoint to talk about improving your website’s performance ahead of Christmas.
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