If your business sells to other businesses, the fact that it’s Christmas may not make a huge amount of difference to your sales.  It may in fact depress them quite a lot as purchases are put off until after the holidays.

Whereas if you deal with consumers, it’s all hands on deck!

So certainly don’t let the fact that it’s Christmas make you complacent about marketing.  Your competition is hard at work optimising their websites and their marketing to make as much yuletide moolah as they can, so perhaps it’s time for you to do the same…

Faster is Better

This really can’t be said enough times.  If your website is slow for any of your visitors, you’re losing sales.  And you’re losing sales because people aren’t on dial-up anymore!  There just isn’t the patience anymore from website visitors to sit around waiting for websites to load.  Plus, a slow website can get you penalised by Google, so there’s that too.

So ensure that before the Christmas rush (in a good way) crushes your website with a virtual throng of buyers, make sure it’s fast loading for the locations where they’ll be visiting and buying from, wherever in the world that is!

Test, and Test Again

A/B testing and even multi-variate testing, helps you to make more money from every visitor.

Not sure what those are?  Well, simply put, by showing slightly different pages to different visitors and seeing which pages do best for sales, you can optimise your site for sales.

Such optimisations may include testing different headlines, different images, shorter pages versus longer pages, different layouts of the page…

You need decent amounts of traffic to actually get useful statistics from testing, and you may not want to apply such tests to 100% of your traffic, but by optimising your site in this way, it means that you end up making more income from every visitor, which frankly is the goal of every sales focused website, right?

Are You Really Ready for the Christmas Rush?

Even if you have one of those great problems where your website is deluged with sales during Christmas, there’s a couple of issues you need to resolve.  One of those is actually getting people’s questions answered as quickly and as well as possible.

Whether you offer support via phone, email, instant chat, or even forums, every question that goes unanswered is potentially a lost sale.  And those lost sales can add up, not just now, but also in lost future revenue from repeat customers.

And on the other hand, you need to make sure you can actually fulfil orders fully and on time.  Yes, the Christmas post does turn into a bit of a pile up, but you need to ensure you get parcels out quickly so as much as possible your customers receive orders from you before Christmas, rather than after!  If there’s any chance of it turning up after Christmas, this needs to be communicated before they order or they’ll get grumpy with you.

So for the Christmas rush, you need to make sure you fully support website visitors before they order, and once they’ve ordered.  This may mean extra staff members, and extra staff training.

So once you have all your ducks in a row for Christmas, hopefully everything will go smoothly, and it will help make December your best sales month of the year!