5 Tips to Improve Your Website for Holiday Sales
3. Get cozy with analytics. The great thing about an e-commerce site, or really anything online, is the ability to analyze and measure. You're able to see exactly what people are shopping for, the path they took to get to a product and what they left in their cart (if they happened to have abandoned). Set up specific goals and funnels in your analytics package to help determine more specifics about actions taking place on your website. You're going to get a ton of return visitors during the holiday season, so be prepared to cater to their needs. This means that someone within your organization should be tasked with checking analytics multiple times a day. Analytics not only allow you to take action now, they also can have an even bigger impact for next year's planning. Analytics provide you with irreplaceable intelligence into what is and what isn't resonating with your online shoppers.
4. Get more mileage out of your email list. Email lists still aren't being taken full advantage of by most retailers. While your list may be significant in size, not to mention filled with some of your most loyal customers, the same message shouldn't necessarily be sent to everyone on the list. If you have the ability to segment your list and messages, take advantage of that feature. If not, make sure you're sending out unique newsletters and promotions on a consistent basis during the holiday season — and don't be shy if you're sending more emails per week than you normally do. Consumers tend to be a little more forgiving as long as you're providing them new and exciting deals with each new email that comes through.
5. Ask your vendors for help. There are a lot of moving parts in running a successful online store, and each one generally includes a lot of vendor partners as part of the process. So with that in mind, make sure to contact each of your vendor partners to see what kind of tips, upgrades or resources they can offer, or, more importantly, what kind of deals they may be able to provide you with. It's not uncommon for shipping or credit card partners to make adjustments to your current rates. With shipping costs being such a big part of the decision-making process for consumers, any deal you can pass on to them is going to have a significant impact on your conversion rate.
