Hanukkah has come and gone, but for those of you looking to capitalize on Christmas sales, we have some tips for you that will boost web traffic and increase your revenue. Especially with the looming threat of omicron, online sales are crucial.

1. Give ‘em the deets

When you go to a store in person, you have full use of your senses: you can look, touch, taste, smell, and hear. It’s not a good idea to lick a sweatshirt you’re interested in buying, but you could! When a product is online, that’s no longer an option because, hi, everything takes place through the screen. That means you, the small business, must provide as much information as possible. In the case of a sweatshirt, in addition to posting a picture of it, also include details like the material, the fit, the measurements, and more.

I’m using a sweatshirt as an example, but the principle applies to whatever you’re selling. Optimize your website copy by sprinkling in keywords, but also write persuasive copy, include trust factors, and have salient calls-to-action. If you need help with this, Web Symphonies is not only a Charlotte web design company, we also help with Charlotte internet marketing and Charlotte search engine optimization (SEO). (But not just Charlotte of course. We can help with internet marketing and SEO for any location.) Reach out to us today.

2. Simplify shopping

Make your checkout process as simple as possible. If your checkout process asks for too much information, or is kind of janky, your customer will checkout elsewhere. Make it easy for your customers to pay for your products. That means test, test, and test some more. Ask your friends and family members to conduct a test run. They don’t have to buy the product – they can stop at the entering payment details page, or they could purchase something and then cancel it.

After the trial run, ask them for feedback:

• What was the process like for you?
• Did you run into any problems?
• Is the checkout process similar or different from other websites? How so?

Also, to simplify the process, offer multiple ways to pay and make delivery costs clear so the customer isn’t blindsided. And again, if you need help setting up payment gateways, we can do that that! As an NC web design company, we’ve got you.

3. Fast finish

Your site speed, or page load speed, is huge because it’s a factor in terms of ranking on search engines, and also a longer page load speed means your customer says, “Buh bye.” If you’re wondering how your website stacks up, Google has a PageSpeed Insights tool that will score any page of your site, tell you how quickly (or slowly) it loads, and give you advice about how to improve it.

4. Less is more

Is your website complicated? Does it have a lot going on? Is it difficult to navigate? If so, you might be costing (ha!) yourself some sales. If customers can’t find what they’re looking for, the sale won’t happen. Keep your site simple with your homepage, then top-level categories, below which are subcategories, and then your products.

Also, use breadcrumbs! It’s a text path, often located at the top of a page, and indicates where the user is on your site. For instance, if you’re clothing store, your breadcrumbs might look like Home > Sweatshirts > Children’s > small > yellow. Every step of the breadcrumb path is clickable all the way to the homepage so at any point, one of those “breadcrumbs” can be altered. Want to look at children’s sweatshirts in green instead? Doable. Pants and not sweatshirts? Also doable. Along those lines, include filters on your website so visitors can customize what they’re looking for quickly. Related, make sure your search function works properly! As a Charlotte website design company, maybe you want to find a post that we’ve written on say, acing your call to action. Having a handy dandy search feature means you can find what you’re looking for.

5. Spruce it up

Last month, we wrote about landing pages. Now that you know why they’re important and how to make a good one, why not make a temporary landing page specifically for Christmas?  Hit ‘em with snowflakes and baubles galore. Who doesn’t like a good web redesign? No one. Except maybe the Grinch.

6. Prepare for the surge

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: having a quality web host makes all the difference in terms of sales. With the influx of customers to your website during this month, can your website handle the extra traffic or will it crash? Do you have enough bandwidth? Consider upgrading your site’s hosting to handle the extra traffic. If you want us to assess the health of your website, we can do that!

7. Make it mobile

Something else we’ve said a bajillion times is the importance of site responsiveness. More than half of online purchases take place on a mobile device so, um, how does your site look on those devices? Don’t know and unclear how to fix it? Contact us for support.

So there you have it, seven tips on how to boost holiday sales. Let us know how it goes!

Boost your sales and dominate this holiday season! Click here to unlock the secrets of Web Symphonies and watch your revenue skyrocket. Take advantage of this opportunity. Contact us now!