Are you ready for the holidays? With so many people shopping from home this year, it’s sure to be a record breaking year for online sales. We have 6 tips to help ensure your website is ready.
1. Add social proof
Social proof helps website visitors to gain your trust and recognize your authority. People are more likely to buy from you if they feel like you are honest and offer a quality product or service. This may include adding or updating testimonials and reviews or adding a buyer pop-up plugin that shows that other people are buying from you.
2. Check your site speed
Make sure your site is loading fast to decrease your bounce rate. Using a caching plugin like WPRocket can help with this. A good website to help you check your current site speed is Web Page Test. The average site speed for a retail site is 6 seconds so if you are below that, you’re ready to go. Site speed can also improve things like your rank on Google, so there are many important reasons to check this.
3. Create a sense of urgency
Using a countdown timer for discounts during the holiday shopping season will increase urgency. This will create a pressure for the visitor to buy immediately rather than have time to shop around at other stores or even risk losing the item in their cart. If you have a limited supply, you can also do an inventory countdown to show there’s only a few items remaining and the visitor needs to get it right then before it sells out.
4. Secure your site
There are a few ways to make sure your site is protected. To help instill trust with visitors you should have your SSL certificate. Another visible cue for building trust and increasing conversions are payment badges and a visible refund policy. On the back end, we also recommend securing your site with a plugin like iThemes to prevent hackers from causing any trouble on your site.
5. Make sure you’re mobile friendly
Last holiday season broke records for mobile sales, and we expect that trend to continue into 2021 and beyond. This is a huge audience to miss out on if your site is not properly optimized to be viewed on a mobile device. The whole process from landing page to check out process should be tested on mobile.
6. Don’t forget to follow up
There are two big marketing tips that can help the conversion of people who left your online store. The first is to ensure you have an abandoned cart notification in place, which will send a reminder to visitors who forget to purchase the item in their cart. The other is to use a social media pixel on your website to retarget them with ads.
If you have any questions or would like some help getting holiday-ready, reach out today.
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