How to enhance website performance over the holiday season

Now it’s the start of the festive season and shoppers expect more deals and bargains in the run up to Christmas and throughout January.

For retailers that prepare in advance and get their digital advertising strategies right over the holidays, the chance to win big and bring some festive cheer is there.

This is what you should be doing.

Making sure your website can handle another surge in traffic.

Yes you will have done all this work for the big hit over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but it’s vital to continue to monitor your website to ensure it is responsive, mobile compatible and capable of handling increased volumes of traffic. You also have to guarantee it won’t go down at this crucial time either.

Run tests on the following:

• Downtime: continually monitor for any downtime. You can’t afford for this to happen.
• Site speed: check what might be causing any problems with load times.
• Mobile compatibility: it’s predicted that up to half of all sales over the holiday season in the US will be from users on their mobile devices. It’s therefore critical to your success to make sure that your website is optimised for mobile and that it can handle the volume of expected mobile traffic. Continue running mobile compatibility tests from Black Friday and Cyber Monday onwards.
• Infrastructure: stress-test infrastructure to understand where there may be any issues with capacity limitations and stability. Cloud solutions will likely be an effective approach for this moving forward.

Boosting performance over the holiday season

Competition is tough. You might be coming off the back of a strong performance over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Capitalising on that success and driving sales over the festive season is a sure fire way to promise a high-performing end to the year.

Here’s where you should be focusing:

– Keep your Retargeting Campaigns running

Retargeting campaigns shouldn’t begin with Black Friday and end with Cyber Monday. It must be a continual cycle of customer contact to keep engaging with users early in their purchase journey and guiding them through to conversion.

Product remarketing is integral to a successful holiday season of sales.

Once a user has landed on your website and viewed a certain product, engage with them immediately when they leave your website, with a tailored and relevant Retargeted ad that includes the exact product they viewed.

Adding this level of precision into your digital advertising approach will help you tackle cart abandonment and boost your conversion rates across your product inventory.

Build brand (and sales) awareness

There are two approaches you need to consider here. One is to increase awareness of your brand with new users, with the second being to boost awareness of your sales and offers with existing customers.

Increasing sales awareness through email marketing

Creative emails will be central to your approach in enhancing sales awareness with your existing customers. Consider the following:

• Creating hype by informing your email subscribers of upcoming sales well in advance
• Ensuring user engagement by providing exclusive deals for email subscribers
• Sending personalised emails to users that have left products abandoned in their baskets or haven’t purchased from you in a while

Boosting sales awareness through Retargeting

Retargeting can also be used to re-engage with users that haven’t purchased from you recently. Where product retargeting is crucial to reach out to active users immediately after they’ve left your site, here your messaging will be more focused on your upcoming sales and offers.

Driving sales awareness through social media

A focused social media campaign is a crucial way to boost sales and offer awareness over the holidays.

Creative campaigns will cut through the noise and make a memorable impression on your potential customers, as will exclusive deals, one-time offers and time-limited deals that are too good to turn down.

Building brand awareness at a product level

When the sales hit, it’s all about products, offers and deals.

Your brand awareness campaigns need to be all about this with your products as the central focus of these ads. Tactics to do so include engaging with users through contextual targeting, Geotargeting and Geofencing (for retailers with brick-and-mortar locations).

Crucial to an effective product-driven brand awareness strategy will be the use of In-Feed ads and Dynamic Creative to ensure messaging is always up to date and in front of the right users at the right time.

Learn more about how Fluid Ads can improve advertising and website performance over the holiday season and get in touch with us today.