With Christmas just round the corner, you may have noticed some changes to many retailers’ websites over recent weeks. We wanted to share some of these observations, along with some last minute quick-win changes you can make to your landing pages to improve conversion rates in the few remaining shopping days before Christmas.
Not all recommendations will apply, but it should hopefully give you some creative inspiration – if not for this year then certainly for Christmas 2012!
Without further ado, here are our observations and recommendations;
Create a buzz
Amazon offered a week of deals in the lead-up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two key days in the shopping calendar. If you haven’t heard of these before, Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving in the US and has become known as the start of the Christmas shopping season. Cyber Monday is the Monday immediately following Black Friday, and over recent years has become known as the busiest day of online shopping with many retailers recording substantial increases in online sales.
Amazon created dedicated pages to create a buzz around both of these key shopping dates. The Black Friday page also drives visitors to sign up to their newsletter or follow them on social networks to be the first to know about the deals, increasing customer engagement.
The Cyber Monday page was used to promote a number of deals with many offers and discounts clearly highlighted on the page (we will come on to this a little bit more later on).
Other ideas to create a buzz include a countdown to Christmas – Whistles have created a very clever advent calendar with daily deals behind each door. They have also created a unique hashtag (#whistlesadvent) on Twitter.
Add a Christmas colour scheme
Create a Christmas-like environment by adding seasonal images and making small design changes to your site. This helps to create an appropriate seasonal atmosphere for people browsing your site. This can be implemented across the whole site, or you could create a dedicated Christmas section, similar to Next:
Highlight special offers and promotions
One of the most important things to boost conversion rates is to clearly highlight any offers and promotions, similar to Boots below. Make sure they are above-the-fold of the page so visitors can actually see them too…
Add gift/voucher card options
Remember, many people like to give others the freedom to choose what they want to buy, so make it easy for visitors to purchase gift cards or vouchers. Once the last order date for guaranteed pre-Christmas delivery has passed, this is a great time to promote “digital” gift cards for those ultra, last minute shoppers (probably men!) who have left it too late. Debenhams have a dedicated section to gift cards for their range of gift card services:
So there you have it; just a few ideas to take from one or two of the major retailers. It’s not too late in the day to increase conversion rates during the busy festive period so take a few minutes out to sense check that your key pages are communicating your special offers and promotions in the most effective way possible.