Getting your Online Store ready for Festive Season!

/ / Digital Marketing, Marketing & Brand Management




As the year comes to an end, the festive enthusiasm has started to catch up among people all over. As an entrepreneur, the festive months are an opportunity to double your sales and boost profits as the internet traffic shoots up by 40% during this time period, which means you have to get a strategy ready to divert a portion of the increased traffic on to your website. Here are some tips on how you can optimize your website for the festive season, in order to boost your profits.

Set Your Goals:

Like any good marketing strategy, it is advisable to set some goals for yourself. These could vary based on your website, however general idea is:

  • The number of product sales you want to achieve?
  • Any particular products you intend to focus on?
  • Do you wish to introduce any special schemes?
  • Do you aim to generate new leads, through newsletters and sign ups?

Once the goals are set, it’s time to get the game in action by subsequently building a custom marketing strategy.

Setup the festive vibe!

You must redesign the website to give your customers a festive vibe. This can be done by adding festive header and footer or by adding festive templates. This particularly informs your customers that you are festive ready and yes it also makes your website attractive.

  • Double check your website and the content flow, the website needs to ease out purchases and ensure the error hampers the buying cycle are removed.
  • Have an easy check in process, before the users explores your site, your aim is to convert the browser into a buyer so simplify the purchasing as much as possible.
  • Transform the newsletter sign ups, ensure it is festive centric. Such as “Sign Up For The Best Christmas Deals.
  • Stock Up for the season with products and offers, try give that extra incentive to your customers, Offer free gifts, price discounts, free shipping.
  • Keep a solution for late shoppers- come up with something, how could they purchase stuff, in case if the sale is in its final stages.
  • Most importantly, create an exclusive- Gifts Section.
  • Gifting Ideas – A fabulous way to sell in the festive season is, to make a gift through your every product, so that people can purchase anything and everything as a gift intended for others. This classification will seem helpful and attractive and hence increases your chances generating more sales. You further have FAQ’s and suggestions for customers. Ensure you categories these products by:
    • Relationships
    • Gender & Age
    • Type
    • Price.
  • Try to have Combo offers which are attractive and useful.
  • Offer discounts on gift vouchers, it has been seen that gift vouchers have been a popular way of hold onto to shoppers who are just browsing and also is a popular gifting option which people have been using. Gift vouchers acquire a lot of takers, who are into last minute shopping, if you offer to send them as email vouchers.
  • Ensure the package is packed to give a festive feel to the customer, this plays quite a role in increasing your returning customers and browsers.
  • Start up your mail marketing early and schedule the reminders on a regular basis
  • Create Email specific landing pages- this is certainly a very important step, as if you have a special email offer, the link should land on that offer page only- this will give it maximum impact.
  • Send out Festive Greeting Too- remember you have to establish that personal touch with your customers, festivals wishes are the best way to reach out to them.

Internet Marketing and SEO:

You have a part of your SEO team to work on festival season well in advance say about at least four months prior to the festival so that you can maximum your reach.

  • Prepare Festive Keywords and optimize them, for festival seasons you will have research on the keywords suitable to the festival and your products. Remember to glance through your analytics from the previous festive season to judge what worked for you
  • Consider including local words too, for example “Christmas cakes Bangalore”.
  • Create content for your keywords, try to have interesting festive write ups about gifting traditions are a good option. Remember NO KEYWORD STUFFING!
  • A good piece of content would be- “Brighten up your Diwali this year, with our custom made Diwali gifts. Available for shipping within 24 hours!”
  • Write new and festive centric blogs, try to go in for value added marketing with articles on helping people prepare for the festivals- some festive delicacy recipe maybe, try think of what people would like to know during the festive season and write distinct, informative and quality content articles.
  • Keep a track of your competitors, learn and pick up from them.

Go Social

Social media one of the best ways to promote your website, but remember don’t overdo it !

  • Update Facebook page with latest offers and discounts, have good status and happy pictures!
  • Apart from Tweeting offers, tweet interesting festive tips and articles. Engage others in conversation frequently and occasionally push your products. Invite your followers to retweet your offers.
  • Press Releases- Do a press release outlining your offers. Link the release to your site.
  • Optimizing the video and photo sites too!

Additional Tips:

  • Keep a track of your Analytics to know where people are coming from- what keywords driving them-what are they looking for. This way you can add the product they are looking for.
  • Keep an eye on Google Trends- this will give you an idea what people are searching for and then use this information to optimize your site.

This festive season, outline a marketing and advertising strategy using the pointers above. Give your design and development team time to develop creative plans and their implementations. Begin in advance and see a rise in business in the last quarter of 2015 and new business in 2016.

Shiv Mamadapur
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