With a few easy tricks you can make your site more festive and increase sales and traffic for the coming year.
1. Holiday Graphical Themes: Show some holiday spirit and redesign some of the artwork on your site with a holiday theme. Hopefully, this will get visitors in a buying mood. This can be as simple to changing the background colors.
2. Think about how much traffic your site will receive during the holidays. How can you harness that traffic to create year long business? Consider offering a good discount incentive for customers to come back and shop in January. You can automatically email them a coupon after each order, or send one along with the package. Make sure that this coupon is not valid until after the holidays.
3. Have a detail oriented person visit each of your product pages to ensure accuracy. Check for typos, broken images, and bad hyperlinks. With the increased traffic this your time to shine.
4. Visitors searching habits change around the holidays, so your marketing strategy should as well. Change keywords and featured products and info on your home page.
5. Also, checkout what your competition was doing last year as well as this year. It may give you some tips on what or what not to do this year.
6. If your site doesn't offer online gift certificates, and your visitors don't find that perfect gift, they will just leave. Gift certificates make great last minute gifts. In addition, they're a great way to drive sales at the beginning of next year.
7. Organize and suggest gifts by price range or for different people groups such as kids, teens, parents, grandparents, etc.
8. Be sure to highlight low cost products that would make good stocking stuffers. These can be a great way to increase your average order total.
9. Let your customers know it's not safe to wait until the last minute. To prevent shipping issues or product stock outs, encourage your customers to shop early. Maybe include a till Christmas ticker or shipping time calculator.
10. Gift selection is much easier when related items are grouped together in some sort of gift basket or bundle. Including all the necessary cables will make a more attractive offer and raise your profit margin.