4 Ways to Enjoy Your Best Ever Holiday Shopping Season

If you have an ecommerce website, this time of year will probably represent your busiest few months and, if you get your marketing right, your best sales period. Once you have a stylish, modern business website design in place, you can begin to leverage the shopping season to drive more traffic to your store. Read on for four tips on how to do just that and make 2018 your best festive period yet.

1. Start early Research shows that many consumers begin to research their Christmas purchases as early as October so, as a retailer, you need to match that preparedness by rolling out your festive adverts, promotions and offers as early as you can.It’s also worth noting that continuing to work hard to attract shoppers should last right up to the last minute, especially if your business website complements a physical store. Google’s search data shows that searches for things like ‘where to buy x near me’ peak on 23rd December, as last minute panic sets in. That means if you still have our ads running and your promotions visible, you can use your new website design to drive people into your store for last minute present purchases. 2. Get organised It’s not enough to simply put your ads live and add a santa’s hat or sleigh to your website. You also need to get organised and know when to run certain adverts or change up wording to capitalise on search trends. Google says that certain products and needs spike at different times, with indigestion tablets a popular search early on in December. In contrast a search for batteries commonly happens from Christmas Eve for around a week. If you’re organised enough, do you research and think like a shopper, you can use this insight to adjust the products you’re promoting, change advert and website text and focus on different product lines to suit consumer demand. 3. Try remarketing Not all traffic arriving on your website will check out on the first visit, especially if those visitors are accessing your site from a mobile device. You can circumvent this problem and drive shoppers back to your website by setting up a remarketing campaign. This will show previous visitors to your website your ads, keeping you front of mind and encouraging shoppers to go back and place an order. 4. Don’t forget your local customers If you do have a physical presence, such as a shop, then keeping local customers in mind can help you to enjoy your busiest festive season ever. While it can be tempting to set up a national campaign to drive traffic to your site (and you definitely should) and focus on marketing via social media or content to a wide audience, having a local focus can also help to maximise local purchase opportunities. Around three quarters of people who perform a local search on Google go on to visit a nearby shop within 24 hours so make sure that you factor this in too.