When the holiday season approaches, e-commerce business owners must gear up for the rush. It’s important to optimize your website for success—which means making sure that it works well for you and your customers. That’s why we’ve compiled a few advanced methods you can employ to maximize your website’s functionality during the holidays.
Boost Your Site's Customer Experience for the Holidays
Follow these tips to optimize your website and drive more conversions.
Simplify website navigation (Wayfinding)
Make it easy for customers to navigate your website by streamlining its layout, content, and menu. Incorporating page headers helps people know exactly where they are on your site, and adding buttons with clear, concise calls to action also helps customers quickly navigate to different pages of your website. And it’s always a good strategy to reduce the number of clicks it takes to make a purchase. Adding buttons that link to your product pages helps provide an easy point of access when your customer is ready to buy.
Along with standard on-site engagement data, Google Analytics can provide e-commerce business owners crucial information such as the pages that have the highest “bounce rate.” These are the pages that customers land on and leave rather than continuing to browse your site. After you’ve identified these pages, review them to see where they need improvement. Fix any broken internal links and rewrite the copy with stronger calls to action, if necessary. If traffic is low on key pages of your site, consider adding more links to them in your landing page content or adjusting your navigation menu so they are more visible.
Streamline customer checkout
A great way to maximize your website conversions is by simplifying the customer checkout process. By reducing the size of your checkout forms, improving your page speed, and enabling guest checkout, you can expedite the process for customers.
Another way to get more people to convert is to avoid checkout sticker shock. A recent analysis by the Baymard Institute found the leading factor in cart abandonment is unexpected fees and charges. Be upfront about all incurred costs like shipping and taxes with a detailed product summary. And consider adding multiple shipping options, so customers have more flexibility during checkout. For the customers who have left the site mid-checkout, don’t forget to leverage an automated abandoned cart email. Sometimes, a little reminder is all a busy customer needs to come back and complete the purchase.
Initiate customer support with LiveChat
Having a proactive customer support system is another way to drastically increase website conversions. Adding a 24/7 chatbot such as LiveChat gives customers the attentive service they’re used to getting in a traditional store, and gives you the opportunity to help customers find the perfect products. Furthermore, LiveChat allows you to service multiple customers at once, is easy for them to engage with, and offers automated responses that directly address customer needs.
From a data standpoint, a LiveChat integration provides valuable website information such as which web pages get the most activity and the average amount of time spent on your site. With LiveChat, you can start to learn who your customers are and what they are interested in. If they opt in, consider using an interaction with your LiveChat as a starting point for an automated email with Customer Journey Builder to close the support claim, ask for feedback or reviews, and more.
The holidays tend to be the busiest time of the year for many e-commerce businesses, and having an optimized website will help enable that you’re ready to succeed when they arrive. Explore Mailchimp’s integrations and tools to make your website work as hard as it can for you.