Get Your Website Ready for the Holidays in 2022

Holidays! Those magical moments of the year when we are in celebration mode! And while we’re enjoying ourselves, we should also make our business website’s smile.

People excitedly buy holiday essentials and presents during the holiday season, so spending increases. As a result, holiday sales provide the opportunity to hit your revenue targets.

You can cash in on online holiday sales if you prepare your eCommerce site to meet holiday sales demands and provide a smooth shopping experience.

In this article, we will discuss how you can prep your website for the holidays.

Steps to prep your website for holiday sales

To prepare your online store for busy holiday shopping, you need to do the following:

1. Prepare your eCommerce holiday schedule

The first step to prepping your eCommerce store for holiday sales is to have a holiday schedule. Determine the dates of all the holidays, plan to acknowledge all or most of them, and plan to build active marketing campaigns around a few.

You cannot plan for an event if you don’t know its date. So, before anything else, you should identify the dates of all the holidays celebrated in the U.S. and worldwide.

Over a dozen holidays are packed into the holiday months of November and December. These are:

• World Kindness Day – November 13th
• Thanksgiving – November 24th
• Black Friday – November 25th
• Small Business Saturday – November 26th
• Cyber Monday – November 28th
• Giving Tuesday – November 29th
• Green Monday – December 12th
• Free Shipping Day – December 14th
• Hanukkah – December 18th – 26th
• Christmas Eve – December 24th
• Christmas Day – December 25th
• Boxing Day – December 26th
• Kwanzaa – December 26th – January 1st
• New Year’s Eve – December 31st
• New Year’s Day – January 1st

Know that every holiday matters to many people out there and that your potential customers may be among those people. So, it is important to acknowledge most or all the holidays.

Acknowledging the holidays promotes a sense of inclusiveness and helps you reach more people. Acknowledging a holiday can be as simple as making a related post on your social media channels.

Choose a few holidays to engage with and build marketing campaigns around.

It is a good idea to build campaigns for the popular holidays that everyone else will have campaigns for. So, plan to have promotional deals for Black Friday, Christmas, etc.

You should also plan campaigns for niche holidays that may not be very popular but are relevant to your business. For example, November 23rd (National Espresso day) should feature big on your marketing calendar if you sell espresso machines.

2. Discounts and promotions over the holiday season

Promotions are essential to driving holiday shopping traffic to your eCommerce store. So, after choosing the holidays to target, the next step is to plan the promotional strategies you will deploy.

Say you’ve decided to offer Christmas holiday deals. What deals will you offer? Discounts? Buy “X” get one free?

There are different promotional strategies that eCommerce stores employ. The most popular for online holiday sales include:

Discounts 

Allow customers to get products for lower than they would normally get them. Discounts are the most popular holidays promotional strategy, and they work because customers love to get a bargain.

Buy more, save more

Give customers a discount if they reach a minimum purchase amount (e.g., 15% off orders over $200). It works because it takes away the guilt of spending more money.

Free shipping

Eliminate shipping costs for customers to receive a purchase. Free shipping works because customers would rather not pay anything more over the article’s price.

Product giveaways 

Allow customers to get a product for free if they take specific actions (e.g., buy “2” get “1” free, buy “x” product get “y” product free). If you cannot give away products, create useful branded gifts to offer with each purchase. Product giveaways work because everyone loves freebies.

3. Sitewide testing and the customer experience

The increased shopping traffic during the holiday season can slow a site down or even crash it. Sadly, a crashed site means zero sales, while a slow site means reduced sales because 70% of online shoppers say a slow-loading eCommerce site is a turn-off.

The most attractive promotional deals will mean nothing if your eCommerce site crashes or is slow when people visit. So, to prep your online store for holiday sales, fix all bugs and get your site ready for increased holiday shopping traffic.

Know that three out of every four dollars spent on online purchases is done through a mobile device. While prepping your eCommerce site for holiday sales, you should ensure that it is mobile-friendly.

Late October/ early November is the best time to get your site ready. Bookmark offers all the solutions you need to create mobile-friendly eCommerce sites and boost website speed.

4. Create eye-catching holiday pop-ups

Even the most attractive promotional deals will fail to bring in business if customers do not know they exist.

Pop-ups are excellent website features to highlight deals and display them to your visitors. So, to prep your site for holiday sales, create eye-catching pop-ups that intelligently display your deals to customers and persuade them to buy.

You can set up pop-ups to:

• Display deals to visitors who intend to leave without making a purchase.
• Highlight deals on products relating to those that visitors add to their cart to nudge them to make more purchases.
• Highlight the savings (deals) on the total order in a cart to deter customers from abandoning their carts.

5. Make website design adjustments to embrace the festive look

Operators of physical retail stores will tell you that holiday decorations matter. Decorations create positive feelings that put customers at ease, increasing the likelihood of spending.

To prep your eCommerce store for holiday sales, you should embrace the festive look by making website adjustments to add decorations relevant to the holiday you are targeting.

Dressing up an online store to reflect the holiday season can easily be accomplished by clicking a few buttons. It will involve adding festive colors and fonts, banners, countdowns, slideshows, music, etc.

With Bookmark’s drag-and-drop site editing tools, you can easily add elements and customize your eCommerce website to embrace the festive look.

Key Takeaways

The increased shopping traffic during the holiday season is an opportunity to grow your sales online. To prepare your site for the holiday sales:

• Prepare your eCommerce holiday schedule for 2022. Know all the holiday dates, acknowledge most of the holidays, and target a few for active marketing campaigns.
• Plan discounts and promotions to offer over the holiday season. Discounts, free shipping, and product giveaways are some of the most popular.
• Do sitewide testing and fix bugs early. Ensure that increased holiday shopping traffic will not crash or slow the site and that it is optimized for mobile devices.
• Create eye-catching holiday pop-ups. These features display your deals to site visitors, encouraging them to complete their purchases or buy more.
• Make website design adjustments to add holiday decorations and embrace the festive look. Decorations create positive feelings that put customers at ease and make them more likely to shop. 

As a bonus point, plan to fight shopping cart abandonment. Some customers may add an item to their cart and then leave without completing the purchase.

Bookmark’s “abandoned cart saver” is an excellent feature to fight cart abandonment. It allows you to automatically send a reminder email to customers who do not complete the checkout process.

Conclusion

If you’re thinking of how to meet revenue goals for the year, the upcoming holiday season is your opportunity. Use the tips mentioned above to prepare your eCommerce store for online holiday sales.

Bookmark has all the solutions and tools you need to get your site ready. Contact Bookmark to get started.

Stay tuned for other guides that help you start, build, and grow your online presence.