The holidays are a great time to be running an ecommerce website. With everyone looking for gifts for friends, family, and everyone in between, your site probably saw a great increase in traffic and sales in the final quarter of 2018.
That being said, the New Year can bring what many fear every new calendar year – a dead period. Having shopped until they dropped, customers sometimes have a harder time being influenced to continue shopping in the New Year, but that does not mean you are doomed for a slow and stagnant winter. Taking a few steps to refocus your site in the New Year can yield a successful Q1, and even propel you into a streak of success that lasts all the way until next Christmas.
Here’s how to retain ecommerce shoppers after Christmas:
Make a New Year’s Refresh
It happens every year when January 1st rolls around. Resolutions are made and everyone reevaluates their lifestyle and choices with the hopes of making themselves better.
In many ways, this is what you need to be doing with your ecommerce site as well. If the holiday season left some of your products sitting on their digital shelves, consider reworking the way that you are marketing and promoting them.
For example, if you notice that a line of products was not very popular in December, provide a new approach to presenting that item to your customer. If your ecommerce website allows you to sell cosmetics from home, you could produce a number of makeup tutorial videos to showcase your beauty products in a new and exciting way.
Other examples include updating your product pages and descriptions, strategically reorganizing navigations bars, and renewing images. Take a “New Year, New Approach” mentality to your e-store. It’s what your customers are doing this time of year.In that same vein, many use the New Year to make changes, and you can utilize this trend to make changes to your site that you may have been putting off; like changing your logo.
Admittedly, change can scare online shoppers. But when strategically planned, pairing a site revamp with the New Year can keep customers coming back. Change is only scary if it does not make things better, and customers who visited in December will be likely to return when they see that you constantly improve the shopping experience, even though what many consider to be a slow period of shopping.
Another way to entice customers to return in the New Year after festive shopping fun is to promote loyalty programs. Whether it’s a point system or even just a simple email list that provides customers with coupon codes, making your shoppers feel encouraged to return can go a long way.
In fact, customers who have the ability to create profiles and receive coupons do not only return more often, they think of your brand more frequently too. Saturating your brand into your audience’s mind when they consider shopping online to shop is a priceless tool to keep shoppers coming back, even through the slower months.
In the end, the most effective way to keep shoppers coming back to your ecommerce site after the holidays is to provide the best possible shopping experience. After Christmas has come and gone, return customers will revisit your website if they liked the process of browsing, shopping, and receiving what you have to offer. This means year-round, your priority should be managing and maintaining a successful shopping experience, and if you can capitalize on holiday traffic translating to return transactions in January, you will set yourself up for a very profitable and memorable year.
