Santa Claus is close to coming to town again, and we must prepare for it as soon as possible. The Holiday Season is one of the biggest events all around the globe with millions of committed buyers.
Preparation not only means to implement the old but gold marketing strategies, since many of your competitors will also use the same ideas. This year, save the customers from their tears and give them something special. Adventurous ideas, unique perceptions, and dress up your site in Christmas clothes!
“What a bright time, it’s the right time to buy a good for me” – that’s what your customers need to feel in order to increase your selling rate numbers and your profit in the Christmas season.
To reach this, you need to optimize your site a little. But, optimization can be done in all the five stages of the customer journey. Since it is crucial for you to determine at which stage you have the most users, and implement those strategies first.
That’s why, In this article, I am not just giving you some out-of-box Christmas-themed ideas for your website, but also separating them into the customer journey elements.
But before I start to share my ideas with you, there’s one thing you need to be aware of, in order to achieve your dream numbers. Santa Claus is watching you, so be good for goodness sake! Miss the old tricks and do not want to take advantage of your potential buyers.
If you optimize everything right, believe me, you will have a Holly Jolly Christmas.
Table of Contents
How to prepare your E-commerce store for the Holiday season?
In this part of the article, I’ll share some important numbers about Christmas and the growing trend of online shopping between October and December.
🎄 For online shoppers, Christmas planning doesn’t start in December. To get the most out of your online store during the holiday season, you need to act early.
It’s a powerful way to prepare your online store for Christmas and it starts in August, which might seem a little early, but it’s crucial.
August is research time. Since this is usually the least busy month of the summer, you can focus on getting ready for Christmas.
This involves two main things:
- Looking at last year’s data to find the best keywords and best-selling products.
- Improve website and visibility, especially in search engines.
After this preparation time, the plan must be made in September.
This month is dedicated to such important things as:
- Deciding which products to sell in winter, where to get them, and how much you need.
- Creating a marketing plan, including the types of ads and content you’ll publish.
- Estimating the number of potential buyers.
- Figuring out how many staff you’ll need to meet your buyers’ needs.
After you have done all that, there is one more thing to do – change your website vibe from summer to Christmas-themed winter. Take care, not every Christmas-themed web design will win you publicity and success.
Come October, the excitement begins. If you have followed the last two months’ plans you don’t need superpowers to make your ideas come true.
🎄 Start using your marketing plan, post some winter ads, and inform your loyal buyers via email. You’ve already calculated your storage needs; now is the time to buy the products. If you need more staff to create a happy atmosphere, this month is the time without much risk.
By November, you should be ready. This month there are important dates to test and optimize your Christmas-themed site. Don’t miss Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which used to last two days but now rule the entire month. Luckily, we have already made content about E-commerce tips for Black Friday.
We’re finally getting to one of our favorite months – December. This is the busiest month, and if you’ve done everything right, it’s all about fulfilling orders.
But do customers really spend more on December, than any other month? That’s what we need to figure out in the next chapter.
How much money is spent on Christmas?
According to the Bank of England survey in 2020, the average British household spent $3,150 per month during this period. Although this figure may be slightly higher now due to inflation and Brexit, we are rather focusing on a specific trend.
The study found that people in the UK typically spend 29% more in December compared to the average monthly spending. This indicates a change in spending habits before Christmas. But that’s just one thing.
The National Retail Federation found that American consumer spending increased significantly during the holiday season between 2003 and 2022. In 2003, they spent $437.6 billion, but in 2022, it rose to $929.5 billion, a more than doubling number.
However, a different approach was taken by Deloitte’s 2022 research. They asked customers whether they plan to spend more or less during the 2022 holiday season compared to previous years.
🎄 Only 22% said they wanted to spend more, while 26% wanted to spend less.
Their latest study, based on a survey of 4,000 to 5,000 respondents, found that people spent the most during the 2019 holiday season before the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, the average holiday spending was $1496, but in 2022, it decreased to $1455.
This can mean two things:
- Households may not have achieved the same level of financial stability as before the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Households have become more conscious of their purchases due to the impact of global inflation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and war conflicts.
In short, it can be stated that although the total consumer spending during Christmas has slightly decreased or increased, it is clear that customers still allocate a significant part of their savings to Christmas gifts.
Customer journey stages
No surprise, many companies want to be on the top of the lists where customers choose from. Of course, you can grab a busy place if you spend an enormous amount of money to get there. But in this article, I will try to demonstrate to you a more creative way. A way that requires more hard work, but you may end up saving a lot of money in the end.
There are 5 different customer journey stages, each one has its own role and marketing strategies. But one thing is similar: you can optimize your E-commerce website in each and every stage.
These stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Purchase
- Retention
- Advocacy
In this article, I will drive you through these stages, while I also introduce some tips to you on how you should optimize an E-commerce shop.
Let’s move on to the tips!
7 tips for Christmas website optimization
I have 7 tips related to the different stages of the shopping journey. No matter where your site is now, you will definitely find custom tricks here, to get you up and running.
Awareness stage
At this point, potential customers are far from your site and aware of the problem or opportunity. They start looking for the exact problem’s name and seeking advice. You can target them with ads that say, “I have the best solution for you”, convincing them to try your product or service.
1. Create festive display ads
This stage is about showcasing your best to potential customers. The best way to do this is by creating festive display ads.
First, define your target groups who need to respond positively to your ads. Then, work on visuals; that means, you must create an effective one-liner and then a convincing graphic element connected to your company’s values, symbols, or the products you sell.
Even though it takes time to find the perfect combination, it’s worth it!
2. Make a DIY gift inspiration
The implementation of this tip also starts with a long and exhausting brainstorming.
Start by pairing one of your products with a simple DIY gift idea. For example, if you sell flowers, attach them to a DIY plant holder. But, that’s just one idea, I am pretty sure you can mix cooler things from your products on sale.
Once you’ve found the perfect combination, create a short and intense video that shows the DIY process from start to finish. Use it not only on your webshop but also publish it on your brand’s TikTok and Instagram pages.
Consideration stage
In this stage of the customer’s journey, the prospect has already checked its problem and committed to looking after all the possible solutions that can help ease its pain.
3. Create an interactive advent calendar
This stage is about highlighting yourself in the deep sea of E-commerce websites. Luckily, it isn’t that hard at Christmas. In this period of the year, customers want excitement. And you will get them what they want!
Creating an interactive calendar starts with a thinking process. What discounts and surprises do you want to hide behind the days, what would be the biggest gift, or what should the whole calendar look like? And one million other questions.
To engage the users more, you should make a countdown before the starting date. It may also magnetize others to your site.
Purchase stage
This is when the battle begins for the customers. At this stage, the potential buyer has already found the solution to its problem and is ready to buy the product that fits its needs. But here is the issue. Hundreds of brands sell the same (or almost the same) products.
How can you be so sure that the potential buyer will choose your brand? This is when you, as a vendor, really attract the prospect’s attention. Creative games, bargain discounts, or highlighting an extra element will all help your E-commerce site to grab some customers.
4. Make sure your website is running smoothly
To ensure your customers have an easy time shopping on your site you should look into how well your website is running. This means checking if everything is in place in your JavaScript code. Broken codes can result in non-functioning buttons, not correctly loaded pages, or even missing content. You can easily find and fix these codes with a JavaScript tracking tool.
5. Create gamified discounts
Many of us love races and competitions, and many of us love participating in these events. If we mention that some of the winners may grab some spectacular prices, every customer will be in the perfect mood to buy one of your Christmas sales.
You just need to create an enjoyable game, maybe a holiday-crime investigation, or just a point-and-click storytelling game, and draw prizes amongst the winners, or give smaller discounts to all of the players.
Believe me, the whole internet will be envious of your sales.
6. Establish real-time customer support
Christmas is a busy time for everyone. We all want to make our loved ones happy with surprises, because that feeling is special. However, waiting for orders during this time can be frustrating.
Maybe the product was ordered a little late or the transport company moved it between inventories. In these difficult times, it is very important to have someone who can provide information on the likely causes of delivery delays.
Another occasional problem is receiving faulty products. In such cases, the buyer needs a quick solution to the problem, and the only way to achieve this is through real-time customer support.
Retention
The buyer has chosen you! Hooray! Everything is completed, we must focus on the other possible customers. – That’s a very wrong mindset. A lot of research has shown in the past years that it is way more simple to convince one of your customers to make a repeat purchase than to find new ones.
🎄 According to Constant Contact, you have 13% to persuade a new customer to buy a product from you. On the contrary, if you motivate one of your customers to repurchase, you have 70-80% that the customer buys something from you again.
In this stage, you need to transform a one-time customer into a loyal one!
7. Let your community write your content
This time of the year is all about giving gifts, instead of getting them. Now, this is your chance to activate your customers a little bit more to awaken the spirit of Christmas in their souls.
This time your community will determine your Christmas-themed content, furthermore, they will write them instead of you. Seems a good deal? It is if you work it out in the right manner.
🎄 First, you need to determine crystal clear requirements. What contents do you want to get, in which format, and what will be the prizes for those who pass your requirements? You heard right! Your customers, even though they are loyal to you, won’t write you blog articles without something in exchange from you.
I try to illustrate this whole method with a quick example: imagine that you are selling books. After one of your customers buys a book from you, you send a very engaging email to its email address. In this specific email, you thank the purchase and introduce her to an offer.
🎄 The offer is the following: the buyer needs to write a book recommendation within two months after the customer buys the book from your shop. If this recommendation is uploaded before the end of this deadline and the writing passes your requirements, the buyer will get a 50% discount on the next book’s price.
In this case, this whole idea is dressed into Christmas clothes. Now, you can determine which Christmas-themed books will be participating in this event, and what’s the deadline until you are waiting for the new recommendations.
Of course, if you are not selling books, you still have opportunities to form this idea for your own benefit.
Advocacy
In this stage your buyers are delighted. They used your site for buying purposes more than once, and they will use yours shortly as well. Moreover, they start to spread their satisfaction out to many of their friends, family members, or colleagues.
In this step, it is very important to welcome their kindness. Enhance their loyalty by giving them bonus items, and discounts, or invite them into a loyalty program.
8. Provide a festive packaging option to the most loyal ones
What else do your loyal customers would be more happy about to get access for free, than a festive packaging option for their gifts? That’s right!
You just need to buy, or create (depending on the time you have) a few different packaging patterns, from which your loyal customers can pick from. Because you offer more than one option they will feel more exclusivity, and they will be proud to be one of your loyal buyers.
Last-minute tips to optimize your website for the Holiday Season
Optimizing your E-commerce website for the holiday season seems a very hard task, for several reasons:
- long preparation time
- lack of creative ideas
- time and money-consuming
But, it is not a surprise that in contrast to this many E-commerce businesses try to appear with some very unique ideas for Christmas. Why is this contrast?
🎄 The key is the increased willingness to buy products in this period of the year. People spend more in the November to December time period than in any other month. And it’s all because of Christmas and its gift-giving tradition.
I know you are running out of time, you need some life-saving ideas as soon as possible. You are lucky because there are some. Although these all solve your technical issues to create a more optimized site, if you haven’t done these methods, you must give them a try.
These are:
- Maintain a mobile-friendly site
- Speed-up your site
- Improve website CTAs
- Optimize the checkout process
These will all help you to reach a more optimized site unless you have already tried all of them. In this case, you need to come up with something mind-blowing and creative.
Conclusion
In this article, I presented to you 7 different creative Christmas-themed ideas that all lead you to a better-optimized site, better and more healthy conversion rates, with more customers, and more revenue.
But how can you check that everything works as you planned? Who can you earn some feedback from?
Take a breath, here you don’t have to spend half of your budget. Of course, you can by creating several questionnaires and advertise them for an expensive price. However, analytics software will save you money by just reaching the same conclusion.
🎄 Capturly for example, can provide you with a heatmap, a session recording, and a conversion funnel service, which all tell you more about your visitor’s attitude and feelings, than a simple questionnaire.
Either of Capturly’s plans will help you to analyze how your visitors react to your new, adventurous ideas, to understand where they click, and what are the busiest spots, or to just simply detect bugs.