Marketing Tips for Cyber Monday and the Christmas Rush

With every year that passes, we see an incredible and record breaking rise in online traffic during the holidays. American’s will spend 830 billion dollars on Christmas gifts. Follow along as we walk you through some essential marketing tips to get you through the holiday season.

Almost half of holiday shopping, consisting of browsing and purchasing, will be done online: average consumers say 46 percent of their shopping (both browsing and buying) this holiday season will be conducted online, up from 44 percent last year. You can also factor in that 94% of people will go online to research or purchase a gift this year.

That’s 415 billion dollars up for grabs. Smart Offices of Okemos, MI would like to give you some tips to ensure you get a piece of the pie.

1 in 3 holiday shoppers believes that buying the right gift for a loved one is more important than adhering to a budget. (CLICK TO TWEET)

1. Secure Your Site with SSL

If your site isn’t secure not only will customers not trust to enter in their credit card information but the browser is likely to show a terrifying warning that could potentially scare people away for good. A mistake like this could cause damage to your brand.

Every E-Commerce site needs to be behind a valid SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. SSL is what turns the green lock icon in the browser where the URL Is. Have a look at the page you’re viewing right now. You’ll see that we have a very secure certificate.

2. Is Your Site Moble-Friendly?

Virtually all 18-34-year-old millennials (97%) are mobile users, while 20% do not use a desktop at all. The age 35-45 demographic has the highest percentage rate of multi-platform users at (82%), while the oldest segment still has a sizeable, but shrinking, portion of its audience that only uses a desktop.

If your website isn’t mobile-friendly you are unlikely to show up on a mobile search. This will also hurt your search ranking in the desktop arena as well. If you’re unsure if your site is mobile-friendly or not please see our post about it or give us a call at 517-381-5171.

3. Define Your Targeted Audience

After reading the mobile statistics you’ll want to be careful on what content you put on your product page. While every product needs a featured image you won’t want a large gallery that will cause the page to load slow. Google research states that of a page takes more than 2.7 seconds to load the user is likely to close the page or click the back button.

You can use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool do test out keyword ideas and traffic estimates and work toward higher rankings in search engines. You should optimize your site for holiday keywords in well advance, at two months before Christmas (if not sooner), so Google has time to index your pages.

4. Run a Campaign and Create Promotional Codes

Everyone loves a sale. Run a social media campaign and add the promotional to your receipts and confirmation emails. You can give a percentage off, fixed dollar amount or perhaps encourage your target audience to save by bundling items together. Instead of the dull emails that WooCommerce generates, we like to use a plugin called Conversio for WooCommerce.

With Conversio you can create beautiful receipts and even generate secret promotional codes to be used at a future date. This method is a great tool to engage your target audience after the new year and entices them to come back!

You can contact us for all your web development and web design needs. We are located in Okemos, MI and serve the Greater Lansing Area. However, we develop professional websites for businesses across the country. You can fill out the form below, and we contact you immediately or give us a call directly at 517-381-5171.

Happy Holidays!

Edward Grubb III
Smart Offices – Senior Software Engineer