13 Tips To Prepare Your Magento Store For The Holiday Season 2022 [+ Checklist]

Everybody needs a makeover during the holiday season.

Be it people, our homes, or your eCommerce store.

And you can figure out what you’ll wear on Thanksgiving or how you’ll decorate your home on Christmas.

But how would you prepare your eCommerce store for the holiday season? Especially if it is created on Magento?

That’s what we’ll learn in this blog.

Let’s dive in.

13 Tips to Prepare Magento Store for Holiday Season

Let’s see some tips you can follow at your Magento store to make it ready for the holidays. These tips will also help you maximize your sales and profits.

1. Offer Amazing Discounts

I don’t need to tell you how good discounts are at converting customers.

Discounts influence the buying decisions of the users and encourage them to complete their purchases right away. They also captivate the users and stop them from looking for other alternatives.

Statista found that 83% of American consumers use discount coupons for purchases.

In other words, you give them a discount, they’ll give you money.

So if you’re preparing your Magento store for holiday season, you can count on discounts.

Tips for Offering Discounts

• Always offer some discount on the very first purchase of a customer
• Create a good balance of discounts so that it doesn’t affect your profits
• Try to automate the discount coupons distribution through workflows

2. Strengthen Your Email Marketing

Email marketing could be the most effective method to increase sales, upselling/cross-selling your products, increase referrals, recover abandoned carts and nurture your leads.

According to a report, 60% of consumers say that the marketing email they received encouraged them to make a purchase.

So strengthen your email marketing to prepare your Magento store for holiday season to get significant results.

Tips for Email Marketing

• Avoid spam triggering words to successfully deliver your emails
• Use the double opt-in method for the email subscription
• Do not use heavy or unnecessary graphics in your emails
• Always provide an unsubscribe button to the recipients

3. Go Mobile-friendly

Mobile eCommerce sales as well as its share is continuously rising.

In 2021, $3.56 billion of sales came from mobile while its share was 72.9% in total sales.

It’s quite evident that mobile devices are ruling the eCommerce industry. And if you want to survive in this market, mobile optimization is the way to go.

So when preparing your Magento store for holiday season, make sure you optimize your store for mobile devices.

Tips for Mobile Optimization

• Optimize first fold content for quick loading on slow mobile connections
• Keep the important elements of your page in the thumb range of the users
• If you can, have a different subdomain for mobile devices to design it independently
• Reduce the size of the pages through minifying CSS/JS and Gzip compression

4. Clarify Your Shipping & Return Policy

Your policies play a key role in keeping your customers loyal.

80% of the customers read the return policies before purchasing a product. And they’ll switch to another brand if they have a bad experience with returns.

State clear return, shipping, and exchange policies for your products. If your policies are complex, users will step back from purchasing.

And if you sell physical products, you must allow buyers to track their package and know its whereabouts.

Anyway, the bottom line is, you must write clear shopping policies if you’re preparing your Magento store for holiday season.

Tips for Return, Refund, and Shipping Policies

• Share a glimpse of the return/refund conditions on the product page itself
• Try to deliver the product before the expected delivery date
• Clearly mention the conditions the product will not be returned in
• Always initiate the returns or refunds quickly and keep users updated
• Never ever refuse the return/refund if your product was at fault. If you’re refusing, explain the reasons properly

5. Use FOMO Marketing

Another point to consider while preparing your Magento store for holiday season is creating urgency.

Fear of missing out or FOMO is a marketing tactic where you create limited-time offers to create an urgency to make people buy your products instantly.

Data found that 60% of millennials make purchases because of FOMO.

You can create a “Limited period discount” or show “Only a few products left” to make people buy the product instantly, even if they didn’t plan to.

Tips for FOMO Marketing

• Create a captivating hook line for your FOMO offers
• Show what they’ll miss if they don’t grab the offer
• Display social proofs & customer testimonials to promote your FOMO offer

6. Squeeze Value with Social Media

Social media is not only a platform to market your business. It has become a way to scale your brand.

You can use social media to communicate with your customers, resolve their issues, or sell directly without redirecting them to your website.

And to prepare Magento store for holiday season, you need to identify every possibility you can cash in on social media.

Start with identifying the right channel for your business. There are plenty of channels, but not every platform would be apt for your business.

For example, if you want to use social media for sharing discount coupons, Facebook could be the right choice as it is the leading platform with over 40% of consumers using it to find discount coupons.

Tips for Social Media Marketing

• Leave the platform that isn’t working for you and focus on the right ones
• Don’t post just for the sake of being active. Identify your audience and share content that helps them
• Always try new ideas, formats of posts, types of content to entertain your audience
• Avoid being a stubborn salesman in your posts. Try to give people value

7. Sell Gift Cards

Gift card is an effective way to double your traffic and grow your store’s sales.

People purchase a gift card and give it to others which brings another shopper to your store who’ll claim it. This process can bring more traffic to your store while increasing your sales.

And a majority of the users like gift cards as it eliminate the pressure of selecting a perfect present the recipient would love.

So if possible, start selling gift cards at your Magento store. You don’t even need to do a lot to create gift cards. There are several Magento plugins allowing you to create gift cards.

You can check out this Simicart blog where they’ve compiled a list of some good gift card plugins for Magento.

Tips for Selling Gift Cards

• Create simple yet attractive gift cards
• Ensure your gift cards match your brand’s theme
• Add a generated dynamic QR code to your cards to redirect customers to the page you want when scanned

8. Minimize Load Time

People don’t have enough patience these days. This results in them leaving your website if it loads slowly.

Especially in the holiday season, when they’re in a hurry and have several other websites to buy from.

Reports say, every second’s delay in loading decreases your conversion rate by 4.42% .

Hence, you have to make sure your Magento website loads in a flash.

Minimal loading time improves not only the visitors’ experience but also helps you keep them at your store and encourages them to make a purchase. Thus, it is critical to minimize load time if you want to prepare Magento store for holiday season.

Tips for Minimizing Load Time

• Use .webp images instead of .jpg and .png on your web pages
• Reduce and if possible, eliminate redirects
• Minify your CSS, HTML and JavaScript on the pages
• Delete plugins you don’t use

9. Eliminate Security Vulnerabilities

An eCommerce store prone to hacking is a turnoff for customers.

In fact, 17% of the customers abandon their cart just because they think the website isn’t secure enough.

To avoid such a situation, a site holder should buy an SSL certificate. Even if they’re on a tight budget, many SSL providers offer cheap SSL certificates, and cheap wildcard SSL certificates(Unlimited Subdomains) for securing their websites.

Hence, you need to make sure your Magento store is able to dodge hacking attacks successfully. And if your store is strong enough to deal with security threats, it’s always a good idea to show it off.

So display any security certificates and badges on your website to tell customers they’re in safe hands.

This is a critical thing to work on if you’re preparing your Magento store for holiday season. Because after all, you don’t want your website to look fishy to your customers.

Tips for Security Vulnerabilities

• Show your security certificates on the homepage
• Do not display every badge and certificate if you’ve tonnes of them as it won’t look great
• Go with reputed brands for SSL certificates, firewalls, etc.

10. Pick Right Payment Gateways

Payment gateways can make or break transactions.

A user can leave your website if you don’t have their preferred payment gateway.

Stats say, 9 percent of the users will abandon their carts if you don’t have enough payment gateways.

Thus, it becomes important to integrate your Magento store with the payment gateways your customers use. The thing you need to focus on is your audience and their geographics.

For example, if you’re operating in the USA, you can use payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe. But if you’re in India, integrating your eCommerce store with PayPal or Stripe wouldn’t be a great option.

Therefore, you have to pick your payment gateways according to your audience’s location.

You can download the integration for the respective payment gateway you want to integrate with your Magento store.

Tips for Payment Gateways

• If you can’t use different gateways for different regions, integrate with the most used gateways
• Compare the transaction processing and other fees of different gateways before choosing one
• Try to use self-hosted or API-hosted gateways as they don’t redirect buyers to another portal for completing their transaction

11. Offer Excellent Customer Support

Often businesses stop caring about customers once they grow well.

And you must avoid doing it at any cost because excellent customer support keeps your customers loyal to your brand.

69% of customers abandon a brand if they have a poor customer service experience.

So if you don’t want your customers to leave you, offer excellent customer service.

Since the holiday season is a time when websites see a rise in footfalls, it’s important to prepare your Magento store for holiday season with an expert and robust support team.

Tips for Customer Support

• Add live chat and chatbot feature to your Magento store to answer repetitive queries automatically
• If you operate in multiple regions, try to give 24/7 support
• Analyze and identify the most asked questions and create content around it like knowledge base and blogs

12. Focus on Recovering Abandoned Carts

Abandoned carts can give you handsome revenue if recovered successfully.

The average abandoned cart rate among all industries is 71.49% in 2022.

And it causes a loss of $18 billion every year to the eCommerce industry.

You can assume how much revenue you can collect by recovering the abandoned carts. And prior to the holiday season, you must prepare your Magento store to recover abandoned carts.

How can you do that?

There could be many ways, but the most effective way and easy method would be using a CRM. A CRM would help you automate your abandoned cart recovery process so you can recover your lost revenue on autopilot.

Tips for Abandoned Cart Recovery

• Set up workflows for recovering abandoned carts
• Do not send the cart recovery email right after the user abandons it. Wait for at least 30 minutes before sending
• Insert a link to the user’s cart in the email
• If the user completes his purchase through your email, send a thank you mail with other relevant products to upsell

13. Use Exit Popups

Exit popups display on your website when a user tries to navigate away from your site.

For example, if you’re reading a blog on a website and move your cursor away to the back, close, or reload button on the browser, the exit intent popup will appear.

These pop-ups encourage users to interact with your website so they don’t leave it taking any action. You can use a form asking for their email, a survey form, a PDF guide, or any other content in your exit popup to engage users.

To prepare your Magento store for holiday season, adding exit popups can be a good way to move visitors into your funnel.

And since the exit popups make users take an action, it can help you decrease your bounce rate while getting you more leads.

Tips for Using Exit Popups

• Use exit popups as per the nature of the page. If a page is about spreading awareness on a topic, offer an in-depth guide through the popup instead of selling a product
• Do not add a whole lot of form fields in your exit popups
• Make your popup match your brand’s theme
• Add a clear button to close the popup

How MakeWebBetter Helps You With Your Magento Muddles?

MakeWebBetter has been working on Magento for over 5 years.

We possess superb expertise in Magento store development, plugin development, store designing, migration, and other services.

Just to give you a quick idea about our work on this platform, we have a Magento integration on HubSpot’s marketplace that connects both platforms.

And here’s what our customers have to say about it,

This is just a glimpse of our work.

We offer trustworthy HubSpot services too. If you’re also looking for Magento services or want to prepare your Magento store for holiday season, hire our experts.

Signing Off

The Holiday season is an opportunity to raise your sales graph.

And you need to prepare your Magento store for it so that the customers prefer you over your competitors.

Following all the tips I’ve shared above will get you ahead in this holiday season where people shop like crazy. You can also download the eCommerce checklist for Magento store I embedded above in this post.

If I missed any tips or there are some tactics you use in your Magento store, please let me know in the comments.