9 Ways You Can Prepare Your Online Business For Boxing Day
While it's still Christmas and the holiday season, one big day for retail business is boxing day.
What is boxing day?
Boxing day is a holiday that is celebrated after Christmas. Some European countries celebrate this day as a second Christmas. This day is a great deal for both shoppers and retail businesses as many companies offer great deals for the day and even the week.
Today, we’ll discuss how you can prepare your online business for boxing day. If your business isn’t prepared, you will miss out on opportunities and sales.
According to Adobe Analytics, online holiday sales will total $189 billion this November and December.
You still have time to prepare and plan so take the time to make sure these tips and steps are implemented as soon as possible.
But before we get started, we want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and happy holidays! From everyone at Moment, we thank everyone for the support this year!
So let’s get into it!
Here are 9 ways you can prepare your online business for boxing day:
- Test your online purchasing process
- Product info is updated
- Have your discount/ promotions on your website
- Website speed and hosting can handle your visitors
- Have a live chat
- Figure out a system and stick with it
- Create social media posts
- Have an email marketing campaign
- PPC campaign
How to prepare your online business for boxing day
Make sure your website is updated
This is the most important step, ensuring your website is prepared to allow you to gain the most conversions and sales. We recommend checking the following elements of your website. This will allow your website to have a great foundation for boxing day.
Test your online purchasing process
Do a couple of test runs to ensure the purchasing journey works fine. If they are any issues during the process, this can result in customers having a negative user experience and leaving your website.
Test things like your cart, product pages, billing and delivery information, and the checkout process. You want to make sure this is as easy as possible.
If you do find any issues like slow loading time, pages aren’t interacting properly or you're not receiving any orders, be sure to fix this as soon as possible.
Product info is updated
Make sure that all product info is up to date and optimized for search. Proper descriptions, headings and images are ready.
You can also include any warranty or return policies on the products to avoid any confusion for customers in the future.
Have your discount/ promotions on your website
Have your discounts and offers ready. Display the promo on the home page and create CTA’s like buttons on how they can get the discounts.
When creating a discount, make sure that it creates excitement and action. This can help increase the conversion rate of your discounts
You also want to test your codes to make sure they are applied properly during the checkout process. If the code doesn’t work properly, this can cause your customers to abandon their cart.
Your website speed and hosting can handle your visitors
No one likes a slow website, ensure that your website can handle your predicted number of website visitors. Plan and prevent your website from crashing.
Be sure to check your web hosting plan and that it can handle a high number of visitors coming to your website at the same time.
There are many ways to increase the website speed like compressing images and videos, improve server response time, minify CSS, Javascript, and HTML code and many more.
Have a Live chat
With an increased number of visitors, a great way to interact with them is having a live chat. Customers that have questions about your product can easily contact your team through a live chat on your website and help them get answers almost instantly.
This can minimize any confusion about the product and can build customer trust.
You can use a free live chat tool like Moment. Register for free today!
Now let’s go over other tips you can do to prepare for boxing day.
Figure out a system and stick with it
You need all hands-on deck for boxing day/ week. Make sure your staff knows any vacation day policies to avoid any confusion. Since visits and sales will be up more than usual, you may need to figure out a system that is both efficient and effective.
If you have a system that worked from previous years, make sure to train seasonal and new staff on the system. If your staff is on the same page and your operations run smoothly, everyone will be less stressed, and customers will have a better experience.
This could mean establishing a channel of communication from one department to another, breaking up job roles into smaller parts or delegating new roles. Whatever you decide to do, make sure you and your managers are monitoring the system and staff to ensure everything is running smoothly.
Plan and distribute your promotions early
In our previous blog post about how to prepare your store for the holiday season, we discussed how preparing early is important. When you prepare early, you have time to make adjustments and are less stressed.
Not only do you want to have your staff and website prepared early, be sure to plan and distribute your promotions early enough to create some excitement.
Here’s how you can use the following marketing tactics to spread awareness of your boxing day promotions.
Create social media posts
Making several social media posts about your products and promotions can create excitement among your followers and get in front of new audiences. Use high-quality images, engaging captions, CTAs, Proper Hashtags, and geotag your posts for local audiences.
You can use tools like Hootsuite to plan and schedule your posts and use Canva to design them.
Have an email marketing campaign
Your email marketing list is a big asset to your company. Since your customers have to agree to receive them, they’re already interested in your product! Designing a simple email to inform repeating and interested customers about your promotions is a great way to directly tell them.
There are many different email marketing tools you can use, but we recommend using Moment! You get features like live session recordings, live chat, email marketing and is a full CRM software.
The great thing about Moment is you can sign up for free and get many of the features on the free plan!
PPC campaign
If you have the budget, we recommend investing in some paid advertising, this could be on Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and display ads. Paid advertising is an effective way of getting your brand and product in front of your target market.
Big companies like Google and Facebook will only show your advertisements to people who they believe will be interested in your product. The great thing about digital paid advertising is you only pay when someone clicks on the ad, so you only pay for conversions!
We recommend advertising with Google and Facebook as both have proven to be a great return on investment.
Closing thoughts
Boxing day can be stressful for both shoppers and businesses. But preparing early and having a great operating and marketing plan will give your business a great foundation for a successful boxing day/ week.
Be sure to prepare your staff, website and promotions early enough to avoid any stress or confusion and make any adjustments needed before the big day.
If you have any questions about Moment, you can reach out to us using our live chat or contact page.
Once again, we want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and happy holidays! Thank you all for your support this year!