4 Tips to Boost Your Small Business Website in The Holiday Season

The holiday season provides an excellent opportunity for people to make sales and increase revenue. Customers are in the shopping mood and the average spending during this season is around $794 on gifts alone. The US retail industry generates around $3 trillion around this time.

If you want a piece of this pie, you need to make sure your website is optimized for it. Most of the holiday shoppers shop online or at least research online before they make a purchase in-store.

It is important to provide a great website experience to customers if you want to make sales. This article provides some tips on how to boost your small business website during the holiday season:

1. Amp up Website Performance

It isn’t uncommon for websites to become overwhelmed by the holiday rush. Many small business websites crash or experience similar problems during the holiday sale season. That’s why it is important to optimize your website as much as you can.

Don’t hesitate to splurge a little on this optimization as it can benefit you over a long time. Here are some factors you should look into:

Website Speed – Most visitors to your website will expect it to load in 3 to 4 seconds. According to Google, around 53% of your visitors will leave your website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Make sure your website is fast and every page loads quickly.

Mobile-Friendliness – More than half of the traffic comes from a mobile platform so it is important to make sure your website delivers a good mobile performance. Invest in a responsive website because it looks great on all devices, especially mobile. Mobile-friendliness is also a ranking factor.

Hosting Service – Low speeds and frequent website crashes are often caused by poor hosting service. Consider switching to a better hosting service and use a VPS instead of shared hosting for your website. That will ensure its performance remains smooth.

Website Structure – Make sure your website has great structure and is easy to navigate. Poor website structure doesn’t just affect user experience, but also your ranking.

Product Pages – All product pages should be optimized before sales or holiday season. Make sure you provide the most up-to-date content to your audiences. Add good-quality product images and rewrite product descriptions if you need to.

Checkout Process – Optimize the checkout process as much as you can. Remove any distraction that might disrupt the process to improve the conversion rates. 

The idea is to provide the smoothest user experience to your audience. A good website will help boost your reputation and will also help you rank higher on the search engine results pages.

Also Read: 5 Ways Your Small Business can Impress First Time Customer

2. Add a Holiday Theme to the Décor

When you post-holiday content, declare holiday sales, and provide related discounts, you create expectations. When your prospective customers some to a plain, regular website after following a Christmas ad, you defy that expectation and disrupt the shopping experience.

It is important to incorporate a holiday theme to your website during this season. It has an impact on your customer’s behavior and helps create a unique atmosphere. This is similar to decorating your brick and mortar store during the holidays.

Fortunately, the process isn’t difficult or expensive. You can just add a few holiday banners and festive décor to bring the spirit to your site. You can also include some holiday-related pictures to add the festive cheer to your site. In addition to optimizing your website, you can also add a holiday theme to your logo or add a snow-effect animation to the page.

You can easily find free templates, banners, animated banners, graphics, and other such decorative additions online.

3. Plan Holiday Content Well in Advance

Image Source - phillipllewellyn.com

Holiday content will help you become more visible on search engines. You can incorporate holiday-specific keywords into the content and start crawling up the ranks. It is a good idea to plan holiday content in advance because it takes some time to become visible on the first page of SERPs.

Content planning and execution don't require too much time and effort. You can make the content in advance and schedule it to become available to everyone during the holiday season. Here are some tips that can help:

~ Create some articles and blog posts that will help your prospective customers with their holiday shopping.

~ Research holiday keywords carefully to make sure you include the most effective ones in your content.

~ Utilize the power of User Generated Content by creating contests or reposting content by users that feature your brand.

~ Invest in different types of formats like infographics, videos, podcasts, etc. A great content strategy should always include different formats. They offer much better returns than regular content. For example, the video provides 66% more leads to marketers who use it.

When you have a good content marketing strategy in place, you can focus on other aspects of your business and let the existing campaign work its magic.

4. Start a Retargeting Campaign

The best way to run a successful ad campaign is to target people who already know you. Retargeting provides much better results compared to regular paid ads. These ads are shown to people who have already visited your website or have bought things from you in the past.

A good retargeting campaign will remind prospective customers or your presence. It will encourage them to visit your website again. Such campaigns benefit from special discount offers and sale announcements.

Customers will be tempted if a familiar brand offers a great discount. It is easy to set up this advertising strategy as all you need to do is add a retargeting pixel to your website. That will track visitors and help with the targeting process.

These tips can help you improve customer experience and become more visible. It is a good idea to implement some of these changes a few months before the holiday season is set to begin.

For example, you can optimize your website during the summer and plan for content before winter sets in. Advance planning will give you an edge over your competitors.

Author Bio: Derek Luise is working as a Jr. content writer and blogger with Ethane Technologies. He can be seen blogging about digital marketing, web design, SEO, SMO, PPC, etc.

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E-Commerce Landing Page Hacks that should be Implemented Now

Online advertisers are about transformations. It is the thing that keeps them in their employment, in this manner, any approach to build transformations is imperative. There is no better route for an online business to build permeability and change than utilizing the highlights of a web-based business presentation page format.

What is a Landing Page?

It is a site page that remains solitary far from the primary site and whose reason for existing is to promote or advertise some item or administration. It is utilized to get subtle elements of guests, for example, their email address in return of something that they may need or like. The presentation page may likewise elevate prompt deals to the guests relying upon what you offer them.

At the point when a searcher taps on an online advert or query output, they are conveyed to the landing page where they can leave their subtle elements and access the offer made to them. The points of interest gathered are leads for potential customers. You can utilize the data to showcase items later on and perhaps get deals.

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5 Ways Your Small Business Can Impress First-Time Customers

Impressing the first-time customers is perhaps the most challenging task for a business. While satisfying the retainer customers is absolutely important, engaging with first-time customers is crucial for the success of any business. These customers can bring in new customers as they share the positive experience with you. 

In the competitive market today, nothing works well like a verified feedback. Customers are deeply influenced by what fellow customers have to say. Hence, every customer is important for your business and first-time customers should be treated the best. Helping customers to solve their issues is pivotal for your growth because these customers will either be satisfied with your customer support or will move on to your competitor.

Be Prepared to Answer the Queries: 

Research shows that 70% of customer tend to switch brands primarily because of their dissatisfaction with the helpdesk. The volume of your business doesn’t matter to those who are willing to do business with you. What matters to them is your preparedness to answer all the questions. 

Perhaps you are well aware of the fact that flawless communication is the key to the success of your business. But you need to make sure that there are enough channels to get in touch with you in case of urgency. Most of the unsolved queries make their way to the social media where customers tend to share the negative experience. 

Just like prevention is better than cure, your ability to answer questions on time is better than having queries unaddressed. In order to answer questions, you will require to have information on your product, the USP, the brand promise, return policy, refund policy and so on.

Understand your Customers: 

Most of the small businesses fail because they don’t have a clear image of who is their target audience. In order to understand your customer, you should create a profile of your ideal customer. With a comprehensive understanding of your customers, you can start developing fruitful marketing methods. 

While developing the marketing methods, you need to define what is the reason because of which your customers will believe in your product or service. Once you have all of these sorted, you will have more clarification on your strategy. 

Perhaps the first step of attracting new customer is to develop a website that actually informs and educates the buyer instead of trying hard to sell them. In this era of new media, a sophisticated website helps you to establish your credibility which in turn makes the customer more confident about doing business with you.

Also Read: Business Growth Hacks: Utilizing the Power of Surveys

Take Care of the Expectations: 

You can only expect your customers to buy from you when you meet their expectations. Every customer has his or her own expectation when they purchase a product or service from a brand. That expectation may be in terms of the quality of the product, experience with the customer service, ease of user interface and so on. 

Once you personalize your communication to meet the needs of your customers, you will be on the path to develop a long-term relationship. While large corporations might not be able to show their care for the customers very effectively, you can and this will differentiate you from others once you do. 

While purchasing the product, every customer is keen to be treated as valued. Therefore, your approach can make a difference. A simple discount or a coupon to be used in future can do the trick. But you should be able to portray that this is not a no-strings-attached relationship.

Staying in Touch with Customers: 

Staying in touch with customers is another important thing that you need to excel at. Your relationship begins when a customer enters into your shop or online website. Irrespective of whether the customer makes a transaction or not, you should never leave them. Get in touch with them after they make a purchase and be keen to know their feedback. 

Multinational companies usually send a birthday notification or email a newsletter every month. But you can personalize it by offering a discount, especially on his or her birthday. You can also ask them politely to review the service they availed or the product they purchased. 

This unravels the rejuvenating path for you to know the level of satisfaction of the customer as well as to invite other customers. You can also invite your customers for a sale or a conference that you are speaking at.

Thank Them: 

Many businesses forget to express their gratitude to the customers once they are done doing business with them. This is not the way you should adopt. While you can be creative in your way of saying ‘thank you’, you can take a simple route as well. 

However, a customary thanks don’t do much good. So it is wise to mean what you say. By resolving an existing issue that your customer is suffering from, you become a valuable resource for them. 

Thus you stay in their top of mind. All of these can help you to grow your business as you ensure customer satisfaction and hence get referred to other potential customers in the neighborhood. 

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