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From the previous article: The 2016 holiday shopping season is set for another epic, record-breaking year in sales. The predicted 13.3% 
overall rise in e-commerce sales is attributable to faster connectivity, safer transactions, and the increasing number of quality e-commerce websites ready to serve shoppers.
To leverage the online traffic boom and make more sales running the same old vanilla offers and promotions that you do during the year just won’t cut it during this time of increased competition as vendors clammer for increased revenues from Christmas shoppers.
To get ahead of their competition and cash in on Christmas traffic, vendors need to spice up their websites, offers and promotions to more accurately target shoppers this festive season.
Now, let’s examine 7 simple ways to spice up your website this Christmas and make it more appealing to visitors and set the stage for maximizing festive season sales revenues.
Tip 1) Know Your Objective
Before you start making tweaks and applying design changes, understand what you are expecting your website to deliver. The level and type of customizations you make when seeking to make additional sales and generate more revenue should be different from those you make if you’re simply showing your users that your company is in the festive spirit.
The principles of scarcity and urgency work to improve your conversion rates by incentivizing users to take action.
Tip 2) Know Your Users
Don’t dress your website up like a Christmas tree if your user base or customers (for whatever reason) do not celebrate Christmas. If your business deals with a demographic that does not celebrate Christmas or are of a specific ethnic or religious group that may be offended, use the appropriate wording and design cues. Eg. Referring to the festive season, or Happy Holidays, rather than Merry Christmas.
Tip 3) Keep it Classy
Resist the temptation to decorate your websites like a Christmas tree with a plethora of cheap and tacky decorative elements or effects. A plethora of effects and scripts to dress your website up can lead to bad user experience as a result of increased loading time for web pages.
The popular snow effects and such can also make navigation tricks for users and cause them to go elsewhere where the user experience is better and they don’t need to fight off a barrage of falling snowflakes to reach the buy button.
Tip 4) Employ Christmas Themed Offers and Landing Pages
Keep your users in the mood to shop by theming your offers and landing pages for the festive season. You can even re-use your existing offers if they’re working for you, but just dress them up a little bit to make them feel more festive.
Some great ideas include updated graphics for your offers on the website, a subtle change in your packaging during the festive season, or updating your messaging or communications. Make use of the traditional colors associated with Christmas such as green, red, or gold.
Although it’s not Christmas themed, WordStream shared a great example of how REI tastefully spruced up their site for Christmas using small design cues and a themed offer:
Tip 4) Make it Mobile Friendly
Many shoppers are starting their research via mobile when they have an idea for a gift, or are looking for a vendor for something specific, so be sure that your offers, landing pages, and website allow them to find the information they need. If you can help them make a purchase via mobile as well, you’ll be ahead of the curve for sure.
According to a 2015 article from whereoware.com, stats indicated that Christmas Day mobile traffic reached new records at 57.1% of all online traffic and mobile sales soared to 34.8 percent of all online sales.
Check out our previous article The 25 Principles You Need to Follow to Make Your Mobile Website Amazing which highlights some handy insights from a Google Research paper into mobile-friendly website design.
Tip 5) Make it Fast – Optimize Your Website for Speed
Although the Christmas season is a festive one, online shoppers are still normally amidst a frenzy of shopping ideas and things they need to get done. A slow site or shopping experience is a sure-fire way to ruin your chances of making additional sales.
It’s not only shoppers who appreciate mobile page speed, but Google has also been using it as one of their ranking signals for quite some time now, and the emphasis is only going to continue to grow.
Tip 6) Build Your List By Getting More Subscribers to Your Newsletter
With the additional traffic that is generated during the festive season, you’ve got a golden opportunity to build up your email list. Be sure to offer something Christmas related and something which your users would deem valuable in order to encourage more sign-ups to your newsletter. This will pay dividends down the road when you extract more value from your list by encouraging repeat business or upselling customers.
Tip 7) Highlight Your Shipping and Returns Policies
Be sure to highlight your shipping or delivery times so users feel comfortable that anything they order will arrive in time. Similarly, it’s a good idea to highlight your return policy so users know ahead of time what the deal is with returns.
The festive season is a bumper sales period during which regular (and new) online shoppers who are flock to the web in droves to do their Christmas shopping because it’s quick and convenient.
Optimize Your Website = Optimize Your Sales
By employing these 7 tips for spicing up your website during the festive season you’re placing yourself in a far better position to leverage the pulse of online traffic and sales and ramp up year-end revenues.
According to The National Retail Foundation’s 2014 Holiday Consumer Spending Survey, your customers have already made their list, checked it twice, and completed more than half of their shopping by December 10th. So, let’s get to work and make it a December to remember.
