Top tips for optimising your Shopify before Christmas
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It’s the most wonderful time of the year, but only if you optimise your Shopify website. Otherwise, you’ll be missing out on traffic, clicks and conversions.
Retail spending in the UK (both online and in stores) is expected to increase in 2024, reaching a combined spend of over £88 billion over the festive period (mid November until the end of December). Over £32 billion is expected to be spent online, so it’s important your Shopify website is prepared for the increase in shopping.
In this blog, we’ve broken down various ways you can ensure you and your website are prepared for the busy festive period. If after reading, you want to know more about ways to improve your website performance, then get in touch. Our award-winning team of experts can carry out an audit and identify opportunities to improve your conversions.
Optimising your Shopify website
When it comes to optimising your website, there are a series of things you can do. As you can expect some are easier and quicker than others, so make sure you dedicate enough time and if you’re unsure our team would be happy to help.
Technical SEO
First things first, you need to ensure your website is in the best health to cope with an increase in traffic. To do this we recommend carrying out an SEO audit to understand how your website currently performs and the areas you need to focus on to improve speed and performance.
As part of this, you should ensure your website is optimised for mobile, as 57% of online retail sales happen on mobile devices. So if your website isn’t mobile friendly, you’re losing out on sales and revenue.
Keyword research
It’s important to understand how your audience are searching during the festive period to make sure your brand is showing up at the right time. To do this, we recommend carrying out keyword research to identify relevant Christmas-related keywords and then using these in product titles, descriptions and meta tags.
Content marketing
Producing relevant content will help boost your organic strategy during the festive period. Creating blogs and product categories on things like gift guides, holiday trends and topical things such as ‘Christmas party outfits’ or ‘festive food guides’ can help optimise your content and ensure you’re shown in the search results.
Don’t forget, whilst you should be focusing on optimising your website you also be focusing on optimising the operations of your business, to ensure smooth processes ‘behind the scenes’.
Optimising your operations
In order to manage and fulfil a high number of orders you need to ensure you have all the basics covered. After all, what good is having a well-optimised website and a high volume of customers if you don’t have enough products to sell?
Manage your inventory
Use past sales data to identify popular products and ensure you have stocked up on high-demand products. You could also identify products which aren’t as popular and include them as ‘add-on’ products in special offers with your more popular products, this can help ensure you’re not left with large volumes of unwanted stock at the end of the season.
Have a shipping strategy
As a customer, there is nothing worse than purchasing that product as a gift to then find out it’s not going to arrive in time. More orders, means more time required to process, package and ship orders. If you don’t have the capacity or ability to offer features like next-day delivery, then let your customers know. This is also a key reason why retailers hire temp staff over the busy period to keep up with demand.
To ensure your shipping is a smooth process for the period we recommend partnering with a reliable shipping provider. To choose this we recommend looking at online reviews and creating a strong relationship with a delivery provider.
Most purchases during this period are likely to be gifts and therefore could result in exchanges or returns. To help manage these, ensure your policies for these are up to date and if possible for extended periods of time, to allow buffer time between customers receiving the present and being able to return or exchange the products.
Extend customer support hours
As you expect an increase in traffic and conversions, you should also expect an increase in customer inquiries. To manage this you should ensure that your team are trained to handle these inquiries efficiently and that they can provide timely responses. Poor customer service can lead to negative reviews, damage brand reputation and a loss of sales.
Now you have your Shopify website and operations optimised and ready, it’s time to engage in festive marketing campaigns.
A festive marketing strategy
Once your website and business are prepared for the increased demand and customers it’s important to run Christmas marketing campaigns that will help you achieve your objectives and targets. Here are a few ways to optimise your marketing:
- Email marketing campaigns: Including personalised holiday messaging, exclusive offers and countdown timers to create urgency, are all ways to communicate with your audience and drive customer engagement.
- Social media marketing: sharing festive content, running competitions, providing real-time updates on stock and using relevant hashtags is another great way to keep your customers informed and engaged over the festive season.
- Paid advertising: Target holiday shoppers with Google Ads as they search for the perfect gifts. Or use social platforms like Meta to retarget users who might have not completed a purchase.
Think about post-Christmas
With the festive season being so fast-paced and important for retailers it can be easy to get swept up focusing on ensuring it’s a success. However, you should also be thinking about what happens next.
Boxing Day and January sales are a prime way to offer discounts on any remaining stock. You should also use this period to gather feedback and analyse data to identify trends and opportunities to improve future holiday campaigns.
Conclusion
So, there you have a range of optimisations that you can do to get your Shopify site ready for the Christmas period. Some may take longer than others, therefore we recommend you start sooner rather than later. By following these suggestions you can optimise your Shopify website and ensure it drives significant sales.
For more top tips on optimising your digital marketing performance, take a look at these resources:
