It’s a well-known fact people invest more time online during the build up to Christmas and the holidays. In fact, 67% of consumers will use multiple devices sequentially to research and shop online, spending even more time on one screen or another. While demand is at its highest in December, there is also an enhanced opportunity to communicate with your customers. Your website allows you to reach your audience directly and is the most effective communication tool you have to attract your ideal customers, establish credibility and ultimately increase conversions. Now is the perfect time to start implementing your Christmas marketing strategy to boost brand awareness.
Communication is the art of nurturing relationships and building new ones. This is a crucial part of growing any successful business. By focusing on improving the way people interact with your website, you’ll be able to deliver a better user experience, increase website traffic and grow your business. Here are 25 tips on how to communicate with your audience in the lead up to Christmas:
1. Define your value proposition: Studies show that websites have fewer than 10 seconds to engage with their audience. Your domain name and your homepage need to be extremely clear about who you are and what you can offer so that it encourages your customers along the natural next steps to explore your site. Ensure to communicate clearly the purpose of your business and how you deliver value to the customer throughout your website.
2. Create an FAQ page: During the lead up to Christmas you may receive a greater number of enquiries than usual. Answering these on an FAQ page can create clear communication between you and your customers. Not everyone will take the time to make an enquiry so by creating a place where people can go to find a solution can also increase conversions. Pay close attention to any questions frequently asked, it could be that some details are missing from your website or there could be an opportunity for a blog topic and other content ideas to engage with your audience.
3. Add personality to your site: The language and tone of your site is an important factor to build connections with your audience and draw people in. Ensure that the content across your site is consistent with your core message and that it is both engaging and professional.
4. Include testimonials: With the permission of your existing consumers, showcasing some testimonials on your homepage can help to reassure potential customers. Building trust is essential for increasing conversions, particularly more so when dealing with consumers shopping online.
5. Offer live chat: By adding the option of live chat you have a better opportunity to convert traffic into leads. Live chat software creates another communication channel to effectively engage with your audience. Live chat also offers the ability to provide convenient answers your customers want to know. Rather than watching a customer click away due to some confusion regarding your product/service, you have the ability to provide immediate help and guide them through to a successful transaction.
6. Streamline your contact form: Completion of the form should be made as easy as possible by making it quick and simple to complete: most importantly the form should be designed to be user-friendly. By streamlining this process, it may help encourage more customers to contact you if the process to do so is easy. This will then help increase direct communication with more customers and generate more leads.
7. Review page titles and meta descriptions: Meet consumer expectations by clearly communicating what your site contains before someone lands on it. Be as helpful as possible to the searchers by updating and improving your page titles and meta descriptions to create a good first impression. During the festive season, some websites will even change their page titles for Christmas to drive more traffic. For example a gifts website might change their title to “Christmas gifts for men.”
8. Sprinkle some color: Utilize the festive colors to engage with your audience and draw attention to possible deals, sales and offers. Consider changing the usual colors on your site, just for the holidays, to add a seasonal and inviting feel to both existing and new customers. Paultons Park (a UK family theme park) went gone all out on their homepage to embrace the Christmas spirit and entice customers to visit their attraction.
9. Make the search box more prominent: During this busy time make it as easy as possible for your customers to find exactly what they are looking for by positioning, or enlarging your search box.
10. Create social media buttonsMake it easy for your users to engage with you on social media because many customers will head to social platforms to get a better sense of your business. Having social buttons visible on your site enables more interactions and allows followers to keep up to date with your business through this channel.
11. Send out newsletters: Create newsletters with new and exciting content to allow visitors, even after they have left your site, to stay in touch with your brand. Provide useful and engaging content to generate potential leads.
12. Use a review system: A survey that revealed 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. This can create a way to let your consumers do the talking by sharing their feedback with others. Amazon invites every customer to leave a review on the product they have purchased on their website. This helps future visitors to make quicker and easier decisions to purchase.
13. Update your “about” page: During the discovering stage of the customer journey, many potential customers will be trying to understand whether your brand is right for their needs. By updating your “about” page you can communicate your story, explain how you are unique from others and direct your customers to this page for further information about the business.
14. Make it easy to call: 75% of consumers still regard the telephone as the quickest response method and conversations may help to increase conversions. Place a visible contact phone number on every landing page and track your calls to understand how your customers are communicating with your business. Call tracking software, can help track conversions and discover which landing pages and channels are generating high volume of phone calls. By utilizing this data you can better enhance and personalize the customers’ call experience.
15. Sharpen your photos: Professional photographs can add life and colour to your site. A photo can speak a thousand words and clearly display your brand to your audience. Consider investing in professional photography and enhancing the look of your site instantly. You could include 360 degree photos, or look to include customer photos and lifestyle shots of your products, to give a more personalized feel.
16. Launch a blog: This can provide additional value to your site and your customers to help educate, engage and provide more reasons to convert. Blogging is a great way to attract new visitors to your site, share your expertise and, ultimately, build loyalty. When it comes to effective blogging you’ll need to create a blog content strategy by defining goals, market research, keyword targeting and topical content ideas. The most effective blogs are those that focus on what the reader will find valuable which means that you need to know and understand exactly who you’re aiming your products/services at. Consider your topics carefully and how they relate to your brand, then create a calendar to plan when you anticipate publishing your content and being aware of any business or seasonal events that you could write about.
17. Hold a contest: Wouldn’t you like to win something for free? Add some Christmas spirit and engage with your customers by rewarding them for their participation. Examples of contests you could hold could be to ask customers to share interesting photos with your products or tag in your business. Perhaps some form of a voting contest with the winner receiving a free product or service.
18. Create guides: Guides are a great way to provide further detail of your product/service, communicating a deeper understanding of how your business works and how it is different from the competition. If you have a particular product or service that you want to launch or create interest around, guides can explain and provide a tremendous amount of useful information.
19. Have clear calls to action: Ensuring that your website contains strong and relevant calls to action will help lead your consumers down the path of a conversion or sale. This can also increase user interaction and achieving those goals such as sales, sign-ups, calls, emails and so much more.
20. Use interactive videos: Videos and demos for your visitors can be a fun and creative way to speak to your audience. You could even consider personalizing videos for returning visitors.
21. Include a comments section in your blog: Giving the option for your customers to voice their feedback or questions regarding content is a useful way to gauge how readers feel about your brand. Providing a space where your blog readers can convey their thoughts is also an excellent way of understanding your audience and monitoring the feedback. This can provide useful insight and help with making future changes or improvements.
22. Provide a subscription option: Continue to build brand loyalty and customer relationships by creating an opt-in to blog subscriptions or an email newsletter. Even after your visitors have left your site, you’ll still have the opportunity to further strengthen your brand awareness by regularly putting your name in front of your customers.
23. Develop a mobile-friendly site: With nearly 60% of searches performed on a mobile device, it is vital to ensure your website is mobile-friendly and that your pages perform well on all devices. You can check how easily visitors can use your site on their mobile device by running this mobile-friendly test on the Google Search Console.
24. Consider a visitors’ survey: The most important questions you may ask is why is the site performing well? Why is the site not performing well? To improve the user-experience and conversions consider a visitors’ survey to increase user interaction and uncover valuable insight.
25. Link to other helpful content: You may find many consumers visiting your site are there to initially research what they are looking for. Not all visitors are ready to purchase. Point them in the right direction to other/similar resources and get them the help they need. For example, Cornwall Good Seafood Guide provides a helpful page and a link to another site if visitors are unable to find exactly what there are looking. This builds consumer trust in your website and your core brand values so consumers are more likely to return to your site for their needs.
Natalia Selby is marketing coordinator at Mediahawk.
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