The holidays are meant to be a time of happiness, joy, and excitement — for shoppers as well as for businesses. People are treated to lots of new things by their friends and families and your conversion rates go up. It’s literally a win/win. ’Tis the season to be jolly!
Well, ’tis the season unless you don’t know how to make the most of holiday season so that your conversion rates are above average. In that case, there’ll be no Santa for you.
Not making the most of the holidays is a rookie mistake by businesses. Another rookie mistake is to focus all your efforts on trying to drive more traffic to your website. As it turns out, you need to get a bit creative.
Let’s take a look at 6 creative ways to boost your conversion rates during the holiday season.
1. Focus On Your Mobile Customers
A lot of your sales this holiday are likely to come from mobile customers, with stats showing that 4 out of 5 of us use our smartphones to shop. That’s quite a lot, and we use our mobile devices to research and buy.
And we also use our mobile devices on the go.
This means that you should be targeting your customers with geo-targeted push notifications. This way they’re up-to-date with all the local deals that are relevant to them. If they’re in the vicinity of your physical store, a push notification can convince them to pop in and take advantage of a fantastic deal.
If you do own a physical store, you should also take advantage of beacons, which are an easy way to engage with your customers when they’re in your store. A beacon push notification makes people aware of your latest offers and cross-selling initiatives.
Additionally, remember that mobile users are more impatient than desktop users. To this end, you need to make the mobile shopping experience as easy and as seamless as possible. If you want your conversions to soar, it should be super easy for customers to search for products and buy them. If you over-complicate matters, you’ll lose a lot of customers this holiday.
2. Make Sure That Your Shipping, Delivery, and Returns Information Is Clear
What do we worry about the most when we buy a gift for someone at Christmas? We worry that they might not like it, but we really worry that it won’t get here in time!
It’s solid practice to give an estimated time of arrival for each product. If a customer isn’t sure if a product is even going to arrive in time, they might abandon their cart, and you’ll lose a conversion.
Display your shipping and delivery information as clearly as possible.
Displaying your returns policy is good practice, too. Each year, a whopping $90 billion worth of gifts are returned during the holidays in America alone. While this statistic itself is bad news for businesses, what’s bad news for your conversions is a failure to display your returns policy.
Customers know that sometimes their gifts don’t hit the spot. Sometimes, their friends or family won’t like their gift, and they’ll want to return it.
And if your business doesn’t have a return policy — or doesn’t display it — it might cause a customer to think twice before buying from you.
3. Experiment With a Holiday-Themed Website
A holiday-themed website might work, and it might not. To find out, experiment with a holiday-themed website and split test it against your regular website.
Unless you split test different themes and landing pages, you won’t know if a holiday-themed site could potentially boost your conversion rates during the holidays.
4. Introduce a Live Chat Feature To Your Website
Customers will have questions to ask you during the holiday season — questions that, if they’re not resolved, could lead to a slump in conversions.
Before any of us buy anything, we need to be absolutely sure about it. And if this means asking questions from the merchant, so be it.
The problem is that you might not be the quickest at replying to customer queries. After all, you have a lot on your plate. And while customers are prepared to wait up to an hour for a response, they’re not likely to wait much longer than that. If you leave them waiting, they’ll look elsewhere.
Worse still, it’s highly likely that customers during the hectic holiday season aren’t even prepared to wait an hour.
You can expect more queries during the holiday season, so it’s a good idea to install a live chat and 24/7 support feature on your website. A chatbot can do things that you can’t — it’s available 24/7 to provide satisfactory answers to customers in a super fast time, thus boosting your conversions.
Moreover, because a chatbot is essentially a blank canvas, you can infuse it with your brand’s values — the same values that your customers share, which can help to boost customer loyalty and secure more conversions in the future.
5. Create a “Gifts” Section
This is a bit of a neat hack that’s always guaranteed to work.
During the holiday season, people are on the hunt for gifts. So it makes sense that you’d create a “gift” section on the front page of your store. Straight away, this tells shoppers where to go, and it lets them know that they won’t need to waste their time trawling around lots of unsuitable products.
Make sure that your gift section is broken down into further sub-categories, such as “Baby” and “For Him”.
6. Recommend Stocking Fillers
Who doesn’t love stocking fillers? During the holidays, shoppers are on the lookout for big gifts to buy their friends and family, but they’re also looking for smaller, cheaper gifts that are known as “stocking fillers”.
This means that you need to be cross- and up-selling during the holiday season, and you can do this at the checkout.
When a customer adds a product to a basket and goes to pay, you should display related, more affordable items as a recommendation. Don’t just stop there, but try to add personalized product recommendations, too. To do this, you can use a recommendation engine like Nosto.
These are 6 creative ways to boost your conversion rates during the holiday season. The great thing about the holiday season is that it allows you to get creative in the first place — who won’t enjoy recommending stocking fillers, make their website prettier and more festive, and creating a cute gifts section?! Have fun!
