For all of us, holidays are the time to relax and enjoy. But for businesses, holidays are a time to boost sales and make more money. People around the world will agree that they tend to spend more money during holidays. Insider Intelligence predicts that in the 2022 holiday season, eCommerce sales will experience a rise of 15.5% compared to the previous year. All businesses are buckling up their shoes and getting ready to enter a period of high competitiveness in the market. Is your business ready for this race? Is your website prepared for the upcoming festive season?

Read this article to learn effective tips to make your website festive-ready.

8 Tips To Make Your Website Festive-Ready

People tend to do a lot of shopping during holidays. Most of these purchases are gifts, decorative items, home decor, and furniture. Since the demand for products increases exponentially during holidays, businesses must change their strategies based on the market.

Even though it is called a “Christmas Sale,” your holiday sale and the preparation for that sale should begin before the holidays start. One-third of the people start buying things in November. So your website needs to be prepared for the festive season at least a month before.

Moreover, ranking on Google takes time. Therefore, your Christmas content should be published on your website in advance so that your web page begins to rank higher when people start searching for Christmas-related products. This is a crucial step in making sure your website is generating ample amounts of traffic. You can always outsource SEO services if you need a solid SEO team to work its magic on your website. 

But if you have decided to do it yourself with your in-house team, we have put together a list of tips below to help you prepare your website for the upcoming holidays. 

Let’s have a look at it.

1. Get the technical stuff right 

You can expect good traffic whenever you have a huge sale (with proper marketing efforts). But if your website cannot handle a lot of traffic, all your time, money, and marketing efforts will be in vain. So it’s essential to ensure that your website is technically strong. 

Get in touch with your developers to get the technical stuff right. Although there is a plethora of things to do, you should focus a little extra on the following three technical aspects.

Faster loading speed 

A faster loading speed is a necessity, whether you have a holiday sale going on or not. You don’t have to read a research paper to know why better loading speed is essential. It is pretty obvious. Do you wait for the website to load if it’s taking more than a few seconds? You don’t! Nobody does. 

It’s important to understand that your website will lose credibility if it takes a long time to load. It increases your bounce rate considerably and will affect your search engine rankings. Moreover, your customers are bombarded with ads from a hundred other brands. They will close the tab and look for another sale instead of waiting for your website to load. 

Keep your website from crashing

You can expect heavy traffic on your website during the holiday season. Websites crashing on critical days is common. Even the big fish in the market with big servers face this issue. Ask your technical team to do everything they can to keep your website from crashing. 

All websites crash for reasons only people who know technical stuff can identify. It is always a good idea to have a team ready to tackle the issue before people start talking about the website crash on Twitter.

Make it mobile-friendly

Most people now buy things on their mobile phones. Say you put up banners on the highway for the festival sale. People see it and immediately search for your website. But if your website lacks responsive design, the customers will close the tab because of poor user experience. Keep your customers from going away once they are on your website by making your website mobile friendly.

2. Give your website a nice festive makeover

Festive seasons demand a makeover. When people visit your website, it should look like some fun festival is coming. For example, if it’s Christmas, you can use some graphics of Santa, bells, Christmas lights, trees, snow, and whatnot. It attracts your website visitors’ attention because your website looks appealing. Moreover, it feels like you are celebrating with your audience.

Many businesses tend to go wrong with holiday branding. So let’s discuss some dos and don’ts to ensure your festive makeover is done correctly.

Here are some things you can do-

• Add a festive element to your brand logo 
• Change the colors on your website
• Add a few festival-related illustrations  
• Add banners on the home page that reflect the fun and happiness associated with festivals 
• Change the copy of your website and make it more festive
• Change the background to something more relatable to the theme

Some things you should not do-

• Keep the festive elements from overpowering your brand logo and colors. You still want people to recognize you by looking at your logo. 
• Stay moderate with changing the colors on your website. Going full red for Christmas is too much. Strike the right balance. 
• Make sure to keep the colorful graphics and images from hindering the legibility of the copy. 
• Refrain from stuffing your website with graphics. Keep it minimalistic.

Whatever you design, ensure your website looks clean and not loaded with graphics. Breathing space and legibility are essential. Moreover, it should be easy for the audience to find what they want.

3. Publish holiday-focused content 

When people buy stuff, they first search for it online. They try to get information regarding the same before they make the purchase decision. You need to make your website a reliable source of information for them. Start publishing content that syncs your audience’s festive season needs.

The simplest example would be the “Top 10 Christmas gift ideas in 2022” type of article. It is easy to insert your product in these articles subtly, and the audience also gets excellent value from the article.

You don’t have to make all your articles sale-oriented for the festive season. Just shift the approach. For example, you are a skincare brand. You must already be writing blog posts to help your audience understand the various skin care products and their application and benefits. Just add a little twist to these. Instead of writing a blog post titled “7 ways to take care of your skin on a budget,” you can write “7 pocket-friendly ways to make your skin healthy this Christmas”. The information didn’t change, but the approach did.

4. Promote sales via multiple channels

The marketing funnel starts with the awareness stage and moves toward the purchase stage. In the awareness stage, you must reach out to your audience using multiple relevant marketing channels instead of sticking to one channel. Your website is undoubtedly the first place to start promoting your upcoming festival sale, but there are other places. Use your social media pages, TV, newspapers, Google ads, email marketing, influencer marketing, or any other channel that is relevant to your business.

When creating content for your webpage, start creating content for guest posts. Guest posts are great for receiving quality backlinks. If you are a new business, building backlinks for a new website might seem complicated, but it isn’t if you put in the right effort. Backlinks affect your SERP rank significantly; hence, you should build more high-quality backlinks. Another advantage of writing guest posts is that you are perceived as an expert in the field.

If you are yet to start with influencer marketing, you should. People trust influencers more than they do celebrity endorsement and advertising. According to this report, 40% of people make a purchase after seeing their favorite influencer use the product. Most of the younger audience (70%) trust influencers more than any paid celebrity.

Promoting your content and sales on various channels ensures that your audience will remember your message better. Do you remember the ad you saw before you started reading this article? It is hard to recall marketing messages that you see only once. So you also need to remember that repetition ensures retention.

5. Make separate landing pages for a festival

A landing page is an independent webpage designed especially for a particular sale or marketing initiative. So if you use your social media to direct people to your website, instead of leading them to your website home page, you can create a great landing page with the information your audience came for. There is more than one goal for your website. The primary objectives of your website could be informing, communication, promotion, or anything else. But landing pages have a single goal. So if you are having a sale on certain products, you can create a page that displays all those products on sale. People will be led to this page directly when they click on the links in your social media bio, emails, and Google ads.

Landing pages are necessary when someone clicks on your link because they want to see the sale offer. If they are left to explore the webpage and find the sale offer themselves, they might feel it’s a lot of work and lose interest the next minute.

Also, remember that your landing page should have a holiday theme and stronger CTAs to get better conversions.

6. Focus on the call to action

During the festive season, you will be going all out with your best marketing strategies, so it is expected that your website will receive a lot of traffic. But what is the use of all this traffic if your conversions are low? Your value proposition and the CTA are the most important things that lead to better conversions. Use your copy wisely to communicate the significant benefits of your product and the holiday sale. Use strong and crips CTAs to ensure people buy your product or service. Make your CTAs fun instead of just writing the boring “buy now” text.

The CTAs should be placed very strategically to induce action. Usually, they are present toward the end of the advertising message.

However, the festive season decorations can steal the attention of your CTA. Pay attention to making your CTAs stand out.

7. Use countdowns on the website and in emails

You can use your marketing efforts and website to create a buzz for the festive season. If you have a special sale, start giving away small details of this sale through your emails and website. Use a countdown to show how much time is left for the sale and when it starts, use it to show how long it will last. The latter is used to create urgency, while the former is used to make people anticipate great benefits. Countdowns are usually placed on the header and the footer. But if you have a better plan, you can go for it. 

If you want to avoid putting up a countdown on the page, you can create a pop-up notification. Design an attractive ad with a countdown, value proposition, and CTA. Keep the words short and visible. People should get an idea of what it is about at first glance.

8. Give them something unique

You can include something on your website that is unique and will be remembered by your audience. For example, if you target Christmas, you can add jingle bells’ audio on the webpage. The audio is sure to lift everyone’s mood. Or, you could use a small Christmas-related game on the web page to keep them on your webpage for a long time. You can get creative here and do something memorable. 

Bottom line

Holidays are the most significant time for all businesses. There is no other time of the year when people tend to spend more money. It is the only time when customers make purchase decisions emotionally and not rationally. Tap into these emotions. Use your website in the best possible way to make people buy your products or services. 

All your digital marketing efforts try to bring customers to the website. But if the website doesn’t play its part well, you cannot expect better conversion results. Make sure you use all the suggestions we have included in this article to revamp your website and prepare it for the upcoming festive season.