The holiday season is coming near, and like everyone else, you too might want to get the most out of your holiday period. Now is the time to make changes to ensure the stability of your WooCommerce site.
Last year, consumers spent $9 billion on the web the day after Thanksgiving, up 21.6% year over year, according to data from Adobe Analytics. Ecommerce just keeps getting bigger. And this period doesn’t end here, there is a list of holidays following Black Friday, some of which are Cyber Monday, Christmas, Hanukkah, and so on. So, we need to remain well prepared for that. This year it is estimated that the consumers might spend close to $17 billion during the holiday season and it definitely makes sense to be well prepared in time for this time of the year.
Here are some quick tips to optimize your WooCommerce store for the coming holiday. Don’t just sit around and wait for customers to come to you, make your marketing plan, and get started with it.
1. Check your current store status
There are frequent updates scheduled to WordPress and WooCommerce and it might be tempting to update your WordPress or WooCommerce whenever you see an update available. The question that comes is when shall you update? Definitely NOT during the sale duration. Your store needs to be prepared well in advance let’s say around a month before the sale is scheduled.
Try to update everything to the latest versions and a test must be performed to check if everything is in place. This includes placing a test order, checking if Shipping and Tax rates are getting calculated properly or not.
Always use a staging site to test everything once before deploying the changes on the live site. This ensures the store is online every time. Also, there could be instances where you might need to update plugins immediately during the sale season as there could be security releases being rolled out. In such cases, one must not panic and update the plugin once on the staging site and test once before deploying on the live store.
2. Speed of site
Speed of the site is very essential especially during such holiday time when people have limited time discount offers to grab. So, if you’re running holiday promotions and driving traffic back to your site then it is essential to make sure that your site loads at a lightning speed. This will help keep your visitors browsing through your store.
It is proven that 40% of people who visit a website will leave it if it takes more than 3s to load. So, if you care about your SEO performance and your visitors, a powerful caching plugin is a must-have add-on to achieve an excellent PageSpeed score and pass the Core Web Vitals.
WP Rocket is recommended by WordPress experts to achieve incredible speed results.
Also, keep a check on your Site performance. You can use GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights that allows you to analyze the performance of your landing pages with a single click. Also, it helps to overcome issues if any on either of the devices.
3. Email Marketing Campaign
“If you’re running a real business, email is still the most effective way to universally reach people who have expressed interest in your product or site. For that, it really can’t be beaten.”
– Colin Nederkoorn (founder Customer.IO)
Each year the number of email users is growing at an astonishing rate which makes email marketing a vibrant and powerful way to connect with people. As it gives a personal touch it has an unbelievable impact on your target audience.
You can keep the list of emails ready beforehand so at the time of holidays you simply have to click send and your work is done. Don’t forget to send test emails and make sure everything is proper.
Without testing, it is entirely possible that a given message will have some sort of flaw that makes it difficult or impossible to read on certain devices or browsers. If this happens, the recipient will undoubtedly have a negative reaction. Also, make sure to test that the emails don’t land up in Spam/Junk folders of your Inbox.
Keep Mobile-First Approach in your mind while composing emails. Because it is more likely that your emails will also be opened and clicked on mobile.
4. Some additional plugins
- Discount Coupons
With holidays comes promotional offers and discounts. So, it is advisable to discuss with the team beforehand which approach you want to follow and how much discounts you want to offer. Want to offer discount coupons or directly reduce the price of products.
For coupons, we will recommend checking Smart Coupons by StoreApps. Smart Coupons will run discounts and promotions automatically. Using it well will give you higher sales, repeat customers, and better customer loyalty.
This plugin is not only able to create coupons but will also generate store credits. Store credits and vouchers always bring customers back and repeat purchases will help boost our company sales any day.
- Shipping Methods
Many times, shipping is a deciding factor in sales going through or not. People might see which shipping methods are available and what are the shipping charges. To boost your sales locally it is advisable to create some local custom shipping methods on your site which can deliver faster in your local area. Accordingly can create other shipping methods as well based on weight, quantity and volume of the cart.
With Custom Shipping Methods for WooCommerce Pro plugin, you can add custom shipping methods to WooCommerce. It has all the options and rules to configure shipping methods that would suit your store.
- Payment Gateways
Apart from shipping methods, payment gateways are also another reason for higher cart abandonment. Always place test orders to ensure that the payment gateways are setup correctly or not. One survey shows that more than 40% of users abandon their cart if the payment gateways are not of their choice.
To overcome this offer as many payment options as possible. You might even want to offer local payment options that are much easier for users to pay and complete the purchase. In such cases, the Custom Payment Gateways for WooCommerce could be very useful.
- Cart Abandonment
There could be other reasons as well for cart abandonment apart from the ones listed above such as distractions or moving away to another site etc.
It is advisable to capture the email ids of such customers abandoning the cart and contact them again. You could provide them with some additional discounts or limited-time discount coupons or can use any strategy which you feel will lure customers to complete purchases on your site.
For capturing such emails I will recommend checking the Abandon Cart Pro for WooCommerce plugin by Tyche Softwares. This plugin will automate the process of sending emails and Facebook messages to those captured emails at the intervals you define. This would definitely recover some of the lost sales and give an extra boost during the holiday season. Moreover, the plugin also has an Exit intent strategy that can help users stay on the site and complete their purchases.
- Ease of Shopping experience
Once the above things are up to mark don’t forget to give a nice shopping experience to your customers which will bring them back on your site. Making shopping almost effortless could be the key to generating more sales.
It’s obvious that if you make something easy to do, people will spend more money. For helping you provide ease of shopping experience there are various plugins in the WooCommerce ecosystem.
Some which I personally love are WooCommerce Product Table plugin and Quick View Pro plugin. These plugins will provide features like One Page Ordering, multiple orders with single clicks, preview items from the shop page and add them to the cart.
Such settings always attract customers during such rush hours and make it easy for them to buy.
Final thoughts
Don’t leave any stone unturned. This is the ideal time to check everything and set up plugins that you feel will help boost your company’s sale.
But, the main and the most important thing is to make sure your site remains stable and handles the traffic well. Don’t forget to offer some memorable promotional offers.
If everything went well you will definitely experience more traffic and sales in this holiday season. Good luck, I am sure you will do great. Also please mention your thoughts in the comments section.