How to promote your eCommerce at Christmas time

Setting up an eCommerce is now essential for companies that want to promote their products or services and intercept additional opportunities by exploring new markets.

An online store, however, requires versatility. With the holidays approaching, your website should be getting ready to tackle holiday shopping. You will find, below, some tips for Christmas-proofing your eCommerce.

Table of Contents:
Marketing strategies
Performance, security and scalability
Performance
Security
Scalability
Marketing Strategies.
Although every company has different needs and a diverse target audience, common and effective marketing strategies can be identified. Start by examining market trends and your competitors.

Website graphics and style. When people store in physical stores during the Christmas season, they are surrounded by decorations, lights, and music, and they are looking for the same atmosphere in digital as well. That’s why dressing up eCommerce ad hoc is important, and you can do this by changing colors, adding Christmas decorations to your logo, or inserting images related to the mood of the season.

Christmas landing page. Developing a Christmas-themed landing page, in which you highlight limited-edition products, could pique the interest of users. You can create different versions for different target audiences and segment customers to redirect them based on their interests. Seasonal landing pages can have a big impact on your sales.

Create email campaigns. Email marketing drives 20 percent of all Christmas sales, so it cannot be ignored. Leveraging this strategy can also be useful for strengthening the customer bond by sending exclusive Christmas promotions, instructions about a possible loyalty program or cart abandonment emails giving added value and inviting them to complete their purchase.

Sense of urgency. Limited offers and countdown timers trigger FOMO feelings, short for Fear Of Missing Out among consumers. They create such a sense of urgency that can push users to make a purchase of a product immediately.

Promotions. Discounts are key to boosting sales during the holidays. Not surprisingly, 49 percent of users expect brands to send dedicated promotions in line with their preferences, according to Deloitte.

Eventual return. When people purchase gifts for others, returns are common. Make sure customers can easily return products by highlighting your return conditions in detail. This increases trust and helps users make a purchase with greater peace of mind.

Ads. The Christmas season is crucial for launching an ad campaign. Competition is particularly fierce, and planning a strategy is essential.

Omnichannel. Omnichannel commerce is essential in any successful business, especially when it comes to Christmas shopping. Giving a personalized experience to your customers, regardless of the device they are using, will also benefit loyalty.

Customer care. Quickly resolving problems or responding to specific inquiries and concerns are key to winning customers and retaining them for the long term. However, the hustle and bustle of the holiday season can require demanding attention, so it can be helpful to plan for customer service management before the hottest part of the sales season begins.

Performance, security and scalability
When you need to reformulate your eCommerce for the Christmas season, the first step is to analyze all the available data and plan an ad hoc strategy.

In this regard, there are some features to consider: performance, security and scalability. Very important features in themselves, which can become even more relevant in the days leading up to Christmas. ECommerce, for example, may experience higher traffic, as well as more service requests. Special attention, therefore, must be given to the customer experience, but also to the more technical aspects.

Performance
First and foremost, it is good for eCommerce to ensure optimal performance in order to minimize shopping cart abandonment rates: this essentially involves constant monitoring of page load speed. According to recent research, one in two consumers expects a loading time of less than 3 seconds; therefore, if your site is too slow, there is a high probability that users will end up turning to your competitors.

Also, if you plan to reach international visitors, you might enable a CDN. A Content Delivery Network will help you manage your traffic in an optimized way, through the distribution of content across multiple nodes close to users that will ensure fast page loads.
Shellrent offers one-click enablement of one of the most reliable CDNs globally, Cloudflare.This feature requires no configuration and supports all our Hosting plans.

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Security
Another central aspect concerns security. When users make a purchase, they rely on the level of security of your website and your handling of transactions, data and sensitive information. Therefore, you need to ensure a high standard of protection.

Scalability
As mentioned initially, during particular times of the year there can be spikes in traffic. An eCommerce that is not properly equipped to support high volumes of users could result in server overload and subsequent service downtime.

To avoid unpleasant situations, it is important that your eCommerce can take a scalable approach, thus ensuring that you can allocate additional resources as needed. Shellrent’s Hosting plans and Cloud solutions are scalable: in the first case you can upgrade to the next plan quickly, and in the second case you have the possibility to increase the desired resources (such as RAM and space).