Generate immense profits by preparing your website for the holidays.
It is interesting to note that while most online businesses generate about 40% of their annual revenue during the last quarter, a lot of them tend to forget to prepare for the holidays. As a result, they leave a significant amount of money on the table for their competitors to feast on.
To make this year your personal best as an online retailer, you need to plan ahead and prepare your business website for the holidays. Here are some ways by which you can do it.
Develop a strategy. Since there are too many holidays during the last two months of the year, you need to choose which ones you would like to participate in. Don’t try to do a holiday promotion for each one of these days since doing so would be pure madness. Create a promotional calendar to help you organize and execute your promotional campaigns successfully. You may also want to consider revising some of your return payment policies, add payment options, and choose which ad channels you would like to use to generate the most impact. Analyze your past and current data to determine which works and which doesn’t.
Optimize for mobile. Don’t hand your customers over to the competition. According to Statista.com, an online statistics portal that aggregates the most important statistics from market researchers, organizations, specialist publications, and government sources, the mobile retail commerce revenue in the US is expected to reach $17 billion in 2014 and may go up to $31 billion by 2017. As such, you really need to have a responsive website, mobile website or mobile app to make sure you don’t lose your customers.
Check website stability. Make sure your website can handle the spike in traffic without crashing. You will be investing a lot of your time and effort in preparing your website for your holiday promotions so you need to make sure it needs to stay online despite any unusual surges in traffic.
Start early. Some marketing channels need time to produce results so concentrating on things like conversion rate optimization (CRO), SEO, social media, PR and content marketing a few weeks before the holiday season may not give you what you need this year. However, when done right, these tactics may give you the results you want in the near future so just keep on implementing them.
