How To Promote Your Online Store Ahead Of The Holidays

In our last blog, we highlighted the importance of starting a gift card advertising campaign, knowing that the holiday shopping season will soon be upon us. Let it be known, however, that paying attention to your company’s online store is equally important. It should go without saying that online shopping is incredibly popular during the holiday shopping season. We’re willing to bet you’ll experience a spike in sales as early as the first week of November!

That is, of course, if you promote your online store effectively. Naturally, there are many online shopping options for customers. It’s important to maximize the potential for your online store to attract web users.

Give your website a seasonal redesign.

Perhaps, it’s worthwhile to start with the obvious. The second the holiday shopping season arrives (read: November 1st), you should have your website updated to reflect the time of year. In addition, you should make it easy for your site’s visitors to locate all of the products you have for sale. In addition, as Jenni McKinnon intimates on Envato.com, it’s a good idea to invest in professional photos of your products.

“It’s definitely worth reviewing your site to see how you could make smaller improvements to your product pages,” she writes, “Product photography is hugely important when you’re trying to persuade people in to buy your stuff. After all, people remember 80 percent of what they see and just 20 percent of what they read. So investing in quality photography is well worth the time and effort.”

Get busy blogging.

If you haven’t done so already, start up a blog page on your website. Be sure to have it updated with inventive content on a regular basis. At Canadian POS, we post no less than three blogs a week. It keeps our website fresh as no visitor can visit our site without seeing a blog that’s no older than a day. And as Richard Lazazzera explains on Shopify.ca, regular blogging is great for SEO.

“We all know content is king and carefully preparing blog posts with search engine optimization in mind for the holiday season can help attract new visitors and buyers to your store,” he explains, “Consider blog posts for each of the major promotions you plan on having. With some careful SEO optimization your blog post can be an effective tool for attracting people looking for the products you carry.”

Get social media savvy.

One of the ways in which we’re able to help our blog posts get more traction is through links that we post on LinkedIn. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t have a single social media account. Be sure to get active and promote your company website’s online store on social media.

“The holidays is a good time to make use, or make greater use of your social channels as people are more open to shopping and are on the lookout for promotions,” says Lazazzera, “You can use Buffer to automatically schedule your Tweets to go out and fill your stream with your offers and details.”

If you haven’t yet opened an online store, please don’t hesitate to contact Canadian POS to learn more about our safe and secure e-commerce solution. Give us a call at 1-877-748-2884 or email us at info@localhost.