In 2023, US holiday sales reached $1.309 trillion, with Holiday eCommerce sales increasing 8.8% to $248.02 billion.
It’s clear from the above stats that there is a need for eCommerce Holiday Readiness.
During the holiday season, merchants get the golden opportunity to achieve or exceed their annual revenue targets. As this is the busiest shopping season, markets mess up quite a lot 😯. So, there is a huge opportunity for eCommerce holiday readiness.
This year’s shopping bonanza will be enormous as holiday eCommerce sales have been soaring high. If your online storefront needs to be fixed, Now is the time as the holiday shopping season is nigh.
The approaching months will be filled with events, from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve. So, the earlier you start your eCommerce holiday planning the better your holiday discounts and promotions will be and the more likely to boost conversion rates.
You’ll have a better holiday season and new year’s start if you FOLLOW these 13 eCommerce holiday readiness tips.
eCommerce Holiday Readiness! What Is It Exactly?
Holiday preparation is nothing more than preparing to advertise your company and product well before the holiday season of 2024.
The 2024 holiday season is just around the corner. By preparing for the holidays and deploying them at the right time, you can build conversion funnels and exclusive WooCommerce deals and coupons.
If you’re seeking email marketing advice for the full holiday season, don’t forget to take a look at our Email Marketing Guide.
Table Of Contents
- Offer Catchy And Time-Saving Gift Cards
- Optimize Mobile Experience
- Capture Attention With Eye-Catching Banners
- Engaging Holiday Pop-Ups
- Embrace the Festive Look
- Craft Exclusive Discounts And Countdown Offers
- Rely On Product Listings And Social Media
- Perform A Conversion Audit Before The Holiday Season
- Bundle Offers Never Go Wrong
- Create A Holiday Content Calendar
- Establish Holiday Marketing Campaigns
- Stay Calm: Check Speed, Update, Fix Issues, Stock Up
- Take Advantage Of CRM – Salesforce Integration
eCommerce Holiday Readiness Tips: Get Ready For This Holiday Season
Prepare your eCommerce store for the holiday season with 13 essential readiness tips.
Optimize website performance, enhance user experience, and utilize effective marketing strategies, each tip describes how to maximize your engagement and drive more sales during this critical holiday period.
Let’s Get Started.
1. Offer Catchy and Time-Saving Gift Cards
The surest eCommerce holiday readiness tip is having giftable products. Now, these can include anything that’s in popular demand during the holiday season.
However, offering gift cards is the best decision for both retail and online stores.
Gift cards are no-brainer gifts, anyone can give to avoid the stress of gifting. Selecting a gift for someone becomes a tedious job Thinking, buying, packing, and sending requires consideration.
Digital gift cards are easy and can be sent to users around the world. You can personalize to add more value and make the recipient feel special.
Selling gift certificates will boost your holiday online shopping without fail. The recipients will come to your store to redeem their cards and become a part of your customer base.
Gift Cards For Woocommerce Plugin – A Complete Gifting Solution
2. Optimize Mobile Experience
“56% of all online sales come from mobile devices ~ OuterboxDesigns”
With mobile commerce on the rise, ensuring your website is fully optimized for mobile devices is crucial during the holiday season.
A simple and user-friendly mobile shopping experience, with fast load times, easy navigation, and mobile-friendly checkout, can reduce cart abandonment.
Pay special attention to mobile-responsive product pages, easy-to-read fonts, and touch-friendly buttons.Offering mobile payment options such as Google Pay or Apple Pay also simplifies the purchasing process with secure online payments.
3. Capture Attention With Eye-Catching Banners
A banner is a fantastic tool for showcasing your most popular deals and promotions. Using a holiday banner, you can quickly dazzle your readers with the best festive bargains and specials.
Make a stunning banner that can capture the attention of potential buyers. Include the finest deals you have for the eCommerce holidays.
Ensure you use the same banner, which links to your landing page, to advertise your deals on other social media networks. The goal is to spread the word about your offer to as many individuals as you can.
If you show great offers with eye-catching banners, you can become the top consideration of potential customers’ holiday online shopping, Plus, they’ll look for more deals in your shop and spend more time browsing to find things that suit them.
Just like the example above. On our landing page, we always feature discount offers during the holiday season along with discount coupon
4. Engaging Holiday Pop-Ups
These days, pop-ups are a popular tip for eCommerce holiday readiness. They can be quite helpful for highlighting deals, lowering cart abandonment rates, or displaying discount codes and coupons. Thereby, assisting your customers in choosing the best purchasing route.
Before we begin telling you the ins and outs of incorporating pop-ups into your website, we also must inform you about the possible pros and cons of pop-ups –
You can use pop-ups for:
- Setting up a pop-up to display your finest Christmas deal to someone who is briefly perusing your store to leave without making a purchase. (Commonly referred to as exit intent pop-ups)
- You can also upsell or down-sell using pop-up funnels tailored specifically towards the holiday season 2024. Show deals and offers when customers purchase certain products or categories.
- You might put a cart abandon pop-up with promotional codes or holiday discounts on the total to deter customers from abandoning their cart.
Remember to embellish your pop-ups with lovely holiday patterns that convey the spirit of the season. Pop-ups are unavoidable, they always grab viewers’ attention and have a higher chance of converting them.
However, pop-ups can also be annoying and turn away clients if there are too many or don’t close easily. So, don’t overuse them.
Upgrade Festive Orders With WooCommerce Bump Offers
5. Embrace The Festive Look
An online company needs to dress up for the eCommerce holidays just like a physical store does to draw customers. However, this may be accomplished rather quickly with the push of a button.
So, you can appropriate your online store to communicate your brand’s readiness and festive zeal. WooCommerce makes it simple to add decorations to your website, such as changing the background colors and fonts, adding banners, creating slideshows, and even coming up with original ideas that you won’t find on any other eCommerce platform, like adding music or a countdown. For practically anything, there is a plugin available!
You can utilize any number of holiday-based WordPress themes (free or premium) and return to your standard one after the season is finished. Or, if necessary, you can work with developers to modify your pages and layout.
You may always receive assistance from WordPress plugins, such as WP Christmas Class, that can aid you with unique decorative elements for your store. This visual enhancement is the most effective way to show your eCommerce holiday readiness to users.
6. Craft Exclusive Discounts And Countdown Offers
Discount pop-ups on your website are amongst the most common ways to advertise bargains.
Include pop-ups in your holiday eCommerce strategy, if you want to attract customers and announce your festive promotions.
A pop-up on the first page of your website is a terrific method to advertise any holiday discount and request an email address.
Afterward, you can send additional discounts or nurture the buyer through the holiday season. Even if the customers don’t convert initially, they will become a part of your email list to receive further discounts and deals and eventually convert.
Exit pop-ups are a fantastic technique to ensure the deal is completed and to lessen the effects of “cart abandonment.”A festive exit intent pop-up that offers them an additional discount or promotion to influence the sale can be made to stop this from happening. To further influence those sales, keep these pop-ups lighthearted and festive.
Make sure to maximize the savings on well-known holiday sale days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and after-Christmas bargains.
Prepare Your Store For Black Friday And Cyber Monday
7. Rely on Product Listings and Social Media
Content is king but promotion is queen — both are incomplete with each other.
The first step on the agenda for the Christmas season is to inform your target audience that you have the in-demand products in stock. Create quippy, crisp, and engaging content for social media promotion.
Use short videos, memes, infographics, banners, tips & tricks, and more to spread the word about your offers. Put relevant festive hashtags like
#festiveseasonsale, #christmassale, #blackfriday, #cybermonday, #holidaysale, #holidayseason #christmas #holidays #holiday #happyholidays #merrychristmas #christmasdecor #christmastime #christmastree #holidayshopping #winter #giftideas #shoplocal #holidaydecor #tistheseason #shopsmall #smallbusiness #love #thanksgiving #holidaygifts #xmas #christmasgift
If you feel why is social media so important! Check this out –
On top of that, you can search for product listicles and approach those sites to list your products. It may be done for free or paid. Link building will also help boost your site’s ranking and domain authority. It’s one of the best SEO practices for the holiday season.
8. Perform A Conversion Audit Before The Holiday Season
Improving elements of your website that encourage visitors to become customers is conversion optimization.
Consider testing these factors to judge your eCommerce holiday readiness:
- Simplify your checkout process by removing any unneeded fields from the checkout form and navigation menus.
- Offer a variety of shipping options, catering to customers who prefer quicker or cheaper shipping.
- Add trust seals to your cart and checkout, and offer free shipping for orders over a certain amount.
- Provide multiple payment options, such as Amazon Payments, PayPal, and Stripe, to give customers flexibility.
- Add a gift-wrapping option to increase conversions and average order value, with the choice to charge for it.
- Implement a live chat tool to mimic in-store customer care.
- Ensure your contact information is prominent and easily accessible on your website.
- Display expected arrival dates, especially important during eCommerce holidays when shipping delays are common.
- Create abandoned cart deals to recover lost sales, as 69% of online visitors abandon their carts.
Don’t forget to add new features to your website far enough in advance so that you have time to thoroughly test them and fix any problems.
9. Bundle Offers Never Go Wrong
Making engaging Bundle products is another approach to eCommerce holiday readiness to increase your sales during the busy holiday season. Products that are offered in bundles are groups of products that are sold as a single item for a single price, typically at a discount.
This helps increase sales and motivates clients to purchase more goods in the belief that they are getting a better value.
Bundles are especially useful during the eCommerce holiday season since they let you make gift baskets that can be sold as bundles to clients who wish to buy presents for friends and family.
Using this eCommerce holiday readiness strategy, you can also incorporate items that complement one another or go well together to create a gift set that is ideal for the eCommerce holiday season and will encourage customers to spend more money.
10. Create A Holiday Content Calendar
eCommerce holiday strategy requires impeccable content planning. To fulfill the Huge surges in content demand, you have to make a meticulous schedule for creating and publishing your content pieces.
The eCommerce calendar for holiday sales is an efficient way to structure your content strategy for different marketing campaigns and align deliverables to your team.
It establishes accountability and works as a reminder to keep everyone on track. Without a solid plan, randomness will derail your eCommerce holiday efforts.
11. Establish Holiday Marketing Campaigns
Here’s a solid eCommerce holiday tip – you should incorporate email marketing using an automation tool.
You’re prepared to move forward once you’ve established your goals. Email marketing efforts are advantageous since they give you a way to stay in touch with your customers. Giving them extra attention will keep them as devoted customers of your items and enable them to receive any new information on products or exclusive deals.
They most likely signed up for emails because they enjoyed the product. Additionally, it will enable you to get consumer feedback in the form of testimonials or success stories!
Email marketing is a terrific approach to have a more affordable kind of advertising because it’s free and lowers the number of times you have to pay for advertisements.
You can also take the help of a WordPress PDF Generator to generate and download PDF files from WordPress sites.
12. Stay Calm: Check Speed, Update, Fix Issues, Stock Up
If you have recently installed something, such as a guide for buying Christmas gifts or a feature that has become commonplace for your website, such as shopping carts, test it out before the holiday rush. While the eCommerce holidays are in full swing, you may not have enough time to deal with broken links or resolve a problem with your payment method.
Some of the key duties you should focus on:
- Checkout process
- Payment gateways
- Shipping calculators
- Coupon codes, referrals, discount offers
- Site navigation
- Sites that link to landing pages as well as buying guides
- CTA buttons are everywhere on your website
Plan and include necessary extensions to boost productivity, draw in clients, and make sure you fulfill your commitments.
13. Take Advantage Of CRM- Salesforce Integration
It’s always a great investment to spend money on plugins that can assist with data integration because doing so can help you save a ton of time and money! Also, Salesforce CRM integration can be a better go.
The holiday season is usually the busiest time of year and having to manually input all your orders into Salesforce to reconcile your sales will take loads of hours!
This year, save that precious time and enjoy your holiday by using various integrations like Salesforce for WooCommerce
Salesforce Integration? Not A Tough Task To Do Any More!
Follow What Suits You The Best!
Use even a handful of these thirteen eCommerce holiday readiness tips in your online store, and over time, watch your customer retention rates rise, a huge boost in income, and your reviews and recommendations grow.
Drop a comment and let us know the area most important for you during the eCommerce holidays.