How to Make the Most of Increased Digital Holiday Traffic

The holiday season is when you can expect a higher-than-average number of visitors to your online store. This is because of the promotions businesses organize to celebrate the festivities.

There are various holiday events and deals that can happen. For example, the Black Friday web hosting deal is one that many small businesses are looking out for.

You need to be able to handle the increased traffic to make the most of it. This article will provide seven ways to leverage the increased digital holiday traffic.

Optimize Site Speed

Improving site speed is crucial when it comes to digital holiday traffic. Site speed refers to how fast the content on your website loads and how quickly users can see and interact with it.

75% of users claim that they won’t return to a website that takes longer than four seconds to load, and a further 40% of them will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

Your website should load in a blink of an eye, so in between half a second to two seconds. To make the most out of holiday traffic increases, you’ll want to achieve such load times.

Luckily, optimizing site speed is not difficult. Here are some things you can do to speed up your website:

• Uninstall plugins that aren’t in use.
• Compress large photo and video files.
• Distribute your site’s traffic load through a Content Delivery Network.
• Upgrade to a better hosting plan to ensure optimal speeds.

You can check your site speed using free tools like Google’s Page Speed Tool.

Improve Store Inventory

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Take a look at your past years’ sales trends. If you just opened up your store, analyze the recent sales to predict which products will be prevalent during the holiday season.

Based on the data, stock up on inventory or reach out to third parties to source your products. Learn about the stock levels of the items you’re selling and refill them before the holiday season starts.

Adjust Your Website for Mobile Shoppers

Optimizing your website for mobile shoppers is a vital part of preparing it to receive many visitors. Mobile commerce is continuously growing, with mobile sales in the United States of America alone projected to reach $3.56 trillion by the end of 2021. Adding to that, in 2020, the mobile holiday season sales reached $3.6 billion.

This means that your website needs to be adjusted for mobile shoppers if you want to sell more. To do that, you can check to see whether it is mobile-friendly using tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

That said, making the site accessible on mobile devices isn’t enough. You need to make sure that customers have the best experience possible. Here are some tips to offer a better customer experience on mobile devices:

• Use a responsive web design.
• Resize pop-up messages on mobile.
• Adjust font and button sizes.
• Enable mobile payments.

Secure Your Website

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Cybersecurity isn’t something you should compromise on at all, especially during the holiday season when traffic is at its peak. You need to be able to provide buyers with a sense of safety.

Your website’s security needs to be the top priority – in 2019, 88% of businesses worldwide encountered spear-phishing attempts. What’re more, data breaches exposed over 36 billion records in the first half of 2020.

Reassure your customers that there’s no need to worry about their personal information being stolen. Use SSL certificates to showcase that your website is secure for transactions.

Optimize Checkout Page

If your marketing campaigns work, people will want to purchase your products. The next step is to ensure that the checkout page is intuitive and straightforward. This is vital because it’s the place where people will abandon your website the most.

Here are some tips to optimize the checkout page:

• Simplify the checkout process to happen on one page.
• Enable guest checkout.
• Add a progress bar.
• Offer multiple payment options.

Improve Customer Support Strategies

Besides ensuring that your website runs as smoothly as possible, you will also want to ensure that your customer support is impeccable. This is because purchasing products doesn’t always go smoothly. Here’s How to Sell Digital Marketing Services in effective ways.

Depending on what you’re selling, customers may come up with questions. If they’re able to get proper assistance, the number of order cancellations and return will decrease. If you’re selling globally, having 24/7 customer support is even more crucial.

When things go wrong, a positive customer support experience can lead to loyal customers. Strive to offer support through social media, phone, and email. Utilize an AI chatbot to help answer FAQs and connect users to human support agents for more complicated queries.

Ideally, any queries should be answered within a few minutes to prevent users from leaving your website.

Offer Free Shipping

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A lot of websites offer free shipping, and they do this for good reason. One of them is increasing conversions. Based on a study by Comscore, free shipping continues to be a significant driver of sales, with about 60% of customers willing to add more products to their cart to get free shipping.

With shipping costs becoming the top reason for cart abandonment and the fact that holiday season shoppers are looking for every way to save money, offering free shipping is one of the best ways to increase conversions during holiday sales.

Conclusion

The holiday season, especially Black Friday or Cyber Monday, is the time of the year buyers are looking forward to the most. This is because businesses then usually offer significant discounts on their products. With the increase of traffic to your website, you need to fully utilize a number of strategies to ensure the best conversions.

Let’s recap the seven ways to leverage the digital holiday traffic:

1. Optimize site speed.
2. Improve store inventory.
3. Adjust your website for mobile shoppers.
4. Secure your website.
5. Optimize the checkout page.
6. Improve customer support strategies.
7. Offer free shipping.

All that’s left for you to do is to implement these steps and prepare for the next holiday season. This way, you’ll maximize the conversions from the massive traffic that comes your way.

Good luck!