5 Easy Steps To Optimize Your Website For Black Friday (Or Any Other Promo)

If you run an e-commerce business, preparing for the busy holiday season can feel like training for a marathon. By now you may have already started to plan your promotions, prepare your marketing materials, and ramp up your fulfillment capacity, but is your website up to scratch?

We all know that competition is at its peak around the holidays, so don’t let your hard earned website traffic go to waste! If you want to make sure you’re putting your best foot forward, follow these 5 easy steps:

Step 1: Take a good hard look at your website (Like really, when was the last time you REALLY took it for a spin?)

There’s so much more that you can do to boost your e-commerce site than just updating your homepage banner and adding products.

When was the last time you actually tried to buy something from your own website? You might be surprised by what you learn by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and going through the buyer’s experience.

Grab a cup of coffee, think of a person in your life who might like your brand and go through the process of going to your website and actually shopping for a gift for them, right through to the checkout process. It can be helpful to ask a friend or family member to go through the same process and share their feedback too. If you have localization turned on, try using a VPN to experience what it’s like to shop from other countries. You may be surprised by how things look!

Was the process as easy as you expected? Is there anything that surprised you? Did you find all the information you were looking for? What would make things easier?

If your website has been running for a while, there may have been backend updates that you’re not even aware of (hello Shopify 2.0!), so start by getting a baseline understanding of how your website is running today and what might generally be needed to finetune that engine.

Step 2: Review your navigation (are you finding the things you want with ease?)

Ok, so now you have a general idea, now let’s look at specifics, such as your site navigation.

Your navigation has a very important role to play: it guides the customer on a journey to explore your website and find what they’re looking for. If you haven’t been regularly updating your navigation, it might not be a logical representation of your business and buyer’s journey today.

If you’re not sure how well your navigation is working, you can use tools like Hotjar to figure out how your actual customers are navigating the site, and you can check your analytics to see what search terms customers are using to find your website and search for products once they’re there. For example, are they searching by product category, by season, by theme or by something else? These insights can help you understand how to enable customers to find what they’re looking for more easily.

Bonus tip: if you don’t have a prominent “shop all” button, add one! This is the easiest way for customers to see everything you have to offer and filter from there. This might just inspire them to buy more than they came for. On that note, major success factors in e-commerce are being able to filter and search a collection effectively to find what you want. Make sure your filter and search functions are awesome!

Step 3: Update your tech stack aka your apps and plugins

There are so many amazing tools that can help you optimize your website — many of which have come online or been improved over the past couple of years, thanks to the pandemic-boosted rise of e-commerce. From live chat features to post-purchase upsells to reviews and more, there are literally hundreds of apps and tools designed to turn more visitors into customers and increase your average order value.

How do you know what you should be using? An easy place to start is by looking at what other companies are using, from big brands to DTC startups to your own competitors. Browse through a variety of websites to learn about what makes a good e-commerce experience, and compare this to your own website. Then identify the right apps or plugins to add to your website,

You don’t need to be on top of every trendy feature, but a few small and easy updates could make a big difference.

Step 4: Review your SEO — at least the basics

Hopefully your website has already built with SEO best practices in mind, but if it’s not, a few simple changes could make all the difference.

Here are a few things to check:

• Is your website appearing on Google as you expected?
• Do you have descriptive file names and/or alt-text on your images, so they can come up in search?
• Have you added descriptive page titles and meta descriptions to all of your web pages?
• Are you using your URLs effectively?
• Have you used relevant keywords strategically throughout your website? (No keyword stuffing!)

If all this sounds overwhelming, an SEO consultant can help you make these changes.

Get in touch to learn about our website development and consulting services.

Step 5: Update your critical information

This may seem obvious, but if you’re running a promotion, it’s probably a good idea to make it easy for your customers to learn about it on your website.

Whether you add your promotion to your homepage banner or create a landing page for an exclusive offer, make it clear what you’re offering, for how long, and what customers have to do to take advantage. One way to let customers know about your promotions is to create a dedicated offers page and link to it from the announcement bar at the top of your website.

Beyond your promotion, think about what other information customers might want or need before making a purchase.Are your shipping and returns policies up to date and easy to find? If you offer international shipping, make it clear what people in different locations should be aware of. Simple information like this goes a long way toward building trust and confidence with customers, so don’t overlook this important step.

Bonus: Learn from past promotions on your website

If you’ve run promotions on your website in the past, dig into your data and learn from it!

Small changes can make a big difference to your sales and your profits. For example, you might find that you drive more sales when you apply a discount automatically versus when you require customers to input a discount code at checkout.

You may also want to experiment with requiring customers to jump through a small hoop, like subscribing to your email list, vs offering promotions to everyone.

Whatever you do, remember: every company is different. Test, learn and refine and do what works best for yours!

Want to get deeper into shaping your website for the holiday season? Get in touch or send me an email at mreussink@the-emms.com.

This article was originally published at https://www.the-emms.com/blog on 5 October 2022.