5 super easy last-minute website tweaks for Christmas 2020 from Studio Cotton
Studio Cotton is an independent marketing agency based in Bristol. Their founder Aime Cox-Tennant and her team of talented creatives develop brand identities, websites and marketing campaigns exclusively for small creative businesses in the UK.
Credit: @georgiadelotz
With the festive season around the corner, Aime shares 5 easy last-minute website tweaks to help make the most out of your 2020 Christmas sales strategy.
From giftifying your website to making it more accessible these simple but effective change can make all the difference.
Credit: @georgiadelotz
Written by Aime Cox-Tennant
Running an online shop on the run-up to Christmas can be, well, utterly exhausting madness. Still, nothing quite beats the exhilaration of seeing those order notifications come through, or thinking about all the joy loved ones will feel when they find your products under their Christmas tree.
You’re about to be rushed off your feet packing products, helping customers, keeping up with your marketing and sharing awesome content on social media. The last thing you want to do is work on your website, even if you have a feeling that it could be working a little better for your small business.
That’s why I’ve put together a shortlist of five of my quickest and impactful website tweaks for Christmas 2020. These super easy actions will improve your user experience, help you to sell more, and take away that website admin guilt we all get from time to time.
1. Sell your products as gifting solutions
You might be amazed at how often small businesses neglect to glitz up and gift-ify their websites at Christmas. When us needy customers are shopping for the 25th of December, we’re not really looking for products - we’re looking for solutions.
I know I need to buy something for my Aunt Geraldine, but I don’t know what, and it would be really helpful if you could point me in the right direction.
Small changes to the language and imagery on your website can help us picture your products as the solutions we need. By changing a header that says ‘bestsellers’ to one that says ‘bestselling gifts’ - I know I am one step closer to knocking Ger’s socks off
Adding a gold ribbon to the background of a flower pot instantly turns a product from something that houses my Monstera Deliciosa, to something that helps me retain my title of ‘best family gift giver’.
Focus on your home page and top-selling products if you can, spending about 5-10 minutes on each to gift-up your website pages.
2. Curate product bundles for gifting price points
There are four main gifting price points at Christmas:
Under £15: Stocking fillers and secret santas
~£20 - £30: Extended family & friends
~£50 - £70: Close family & bezzies
~£80 - £120: Partners
Now that’s not to say that every person out there spends their present budget the same way, just that we know a large portion of your audience will probably fit into one or more of these gifting brackets.
We can use this information to make sure we have suitable gift options at each of these price points - a really easy way to do this is to create gift bundles or gift sets.
A great highstreet example of these is the beauty boxsets that fill up your local branch of Boots or Wilko. The average consumer probably wouldn’t spend 20 minutes perusing the aisles for a body butter, a pouffe, shower gel, and ruddy deodorant (yep, apparently that’s a gift) - but put them all in a box that meets a gifting price point and suddenly I’ve sorted half of Maureen’s Christmas.
Spend 20 minutes and think of ways to combine your products into totally giftable bundles, and see your item per order and average order value increase too.
3. Remove distractions from your website header/menu
This is my favourite website optimisation job that works all year around. It takes less than 5 minutes and is the easiest and most impactful method for increasing website usability.
Let’s start with looking at the ideal user journey for an online shop:
Visitor arrives on website
Visitor find product(s) that address their needs
Visitor adds to basket
Visitor checks out
You might have spotted that on that list, nobody read an ‘about’ page, or looked for the contact form. On an ecommerce website that is streamlined for sales, every single link in that top navigation should take your visitor one step closer to converting.
That’s not to say those non-sales-y web pages are not important - they totally are - but the majority of your visitors do not need them, so pop them in your website footer. That way, they’re easy to find when needed, but the customers following your ideal user journey won’t be thrown off their path.
@grahamandgreen
Instead, focus that top menu on your main categories, topped and tailed with ‘New’ and ‘Gifts’. Fashion brands owners, think: New in, Tops, Dresses, Skirts, Trousers, Accessories, Gifts. For jewellers: New, Earrings, Rings, Necklaces, Hair & Body, Gifts.
@notanotherbill
@notanotherbill
Drop-down menus (where the options are only visible with a tap or a hover) should be used only when absolutely necessary - still, try to make that first hoverable word as useful as possible. Ditch ‘shop’, and think of more specific language like womenswear, furniture, or makeup.
4. Really sell your mailing list experience
Email marketing really is the best. It’s not as sexy as paid ads, not as fun as Instagram, and doesn’t come with that awesome high of seeing your products in the press. But it does work.
@thisworks
@thisworks
Email marketing has the highest return on investment for any marketing channel by an absolute lightyear. According to the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), the average brand in 2020 earned £35.41 for every £1 spent on email marketing.
If you can convince your Christmas shoppers to join your mailing list in November and December of 2020, you’ll be able to communicate with them, using this incredible marketing channel, all year round.
To do this, add a sentence to every sign-up form on your website, really showing off what someone will receive when they sign up so that they’re actually excited to subscribe. High street fashion brand Monki do this really well, and are a great source of creative inspiration for indie sellers.
Make sure you are encouraging your website shoppers to opt-in at the checkout too.
5. Make your website more accessible
Optimising your website accessibility just means making sure your website is usable for all your customers, regardless of any disabilities or difficulties (like dyslexia), or additional needs like the use of a screen reader.
Website accessibility is the most overlooked aspect of website design by DIY designers, largely because it’s not always something they’ve ever encountered personally.
There are hundreds of actions that will improve your website accessibility, but this blog is all about last-minute Christmas jobs, so we’re not going to tackle them all today. Instead, here’s an easy list of small changes that will make your website usable:
If your background is pure white (#ffffff), tone it down to a paper-white, cream or light grey.
Make sure your text, especially in product descriptions, is at least 16px
Make sure that same text is 400-500 weight (regular - medium)
Minimise text ‘in’ images (where the text is part of a JPG/PNG graphic or banner)
Make sure any text ‘on’ images (where the text is a separate element) is readable by minimising the amount of clutter under the text
Ensure any key/crucial information is in a legible font, avoiding overly ornate, script-style or handwritten fonts
Check your contrast between your foreground/text and background is suitable, this free website will tell you in no time
Complete image alt tags for any sales banners and product images
Include a thorough physical description of your products in the product description
Use your headings (H1s) and subheadings (H2, H3 etc) appropriately. Screen readers use subheadings to jump through a piece of content, so using them out of order, or not using them at all, makes it hard to find the right info.
Test a couple of key pages and products with a screen reader, and really find out how other people experience your brand. A lot of people don’t realise these are already built into a lot of devices, like Mac’s VoiceOver.
Not only will these accessibility tips make your website accessible to a greater audience, but most also improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) and user experience (UX) too. Win, win, win.
And one last website tip…
Finally, book in a little time every fortnight to check in with your website. You’re about to have an amazing, busy, profitable and exhausting Christmas shopping extravaganza, which means very little time to check in with your online shop.
Block out 30 minutes a fortnight to take a look at your stats, run through a user journey, or make little content tweaks, and sell even more of your incredible products this Christmas 2020.
Fancy more brilliant and actionable marketing tips and insights like this?
Aime writes a lot and you can find an immense amount of free advice and expertise over on the Studio Cotton blog. Alternatively, dive into Aime’s Instagram via @studio.cotton for bite-size nuggets of small business know-how.
Want to get your product-based business featured in the Christmas gift guides?
On the 7th of July, we open our yearly 2022 Christmas Gift Guide PR membership - but we only have 100 memberships available. Last year we sold out of all our Christmas Gift Guide memberships in just 8 hours and we expect the same this year. So make sure you join the waitlist now for early bird access.
The Christmas Gift Guide PR membership gives you everything you need to pitch your product to the Christmas press and you'll have access to 200+ UK Christmas press contacts for over 150 gift guides between July and December 2022 covering long-lead, short-lead and online magazines and newspapers.
Last year our Christmas Gift Guide members were featured in The Guardian, Vogue, Good Food, The Financial Times, and many many more.