With the holiday season approaching, it can be smart to inject some festive spirit into your website. This can get visitors excited about your products and help you drive more sales. Fortunately, there are different ways you can engage your clients this season.
In this article, we’ll show you how to design a festive website, from hosting giveaways to sprucing up your content. Let’s get started!
1. Offer Seasonal Discounts
If there’s one way to make customers happy, it’s to offer them discounts, especially at a time when they’re busy shopping for gifts!
A lot of people expect discounts around the holidays, starting from Black Friday and running through December. Therefore, offering Christmas deals can help you drum up business:
The type of discount you offer will largely depend on your current stock. For example, if you still have some leftovers from your autumn collection, you might try to get rid of them with a generous discount.
You can promote your offers on your website, or use email marketing to send out discount codes. Since most people are looking for gifts at this time of year, they might be more likely to take advantage of these deals.
However, you’ll want to highlight the validity of the offer. This should be tied with the end of the holidays to remind customers to get their shopping done before the new year rolls in.
2. Add a Countdown Timer
Another effective way to celebrate the festivities is to add a countdown timer. The timer can count down to Christmas or New Year’s Day:
A countdown timer on its own is just decoration, though. If you want to take things a step further, you can do a holiday giveaway that ends when the timer reaches zero.
Even a small giveaway can be an incredibly effective way to drive traffic to your website. For example, you might ask customers to submit their best holiday-themed photos or letters to Santa!
Alternatively, you might ask users to share your social media posts, leave a comment, or tag a friend.
3. Change Your Site’s Design for a Festive Website
Aside from giving users discounts or freebies for the holidays, it’s also a smart idea to make a few design changes to your website. This will show people that your website is still active, and you can use it to direct them towards your Christmas collection.
There are different ways to give your website a holiday vibe. If you use WordPress, you can temporarily change your site’s theme.
You’ll find a lot of themes with Christmas designs, so you can choose an option that best suits your brand:
If you don’t want to change themes, you can just add a festive effect to your website. For example, some companies display falling snow on their pages:
Implementing these animations will require a little CSS magic. The good news is you can simply copy and paste the CSS code from these examples of snow effects.
Keep in mind that animations shouldn’t interfere with the use of the website. If these effects make it harder for visitors to browse your shop and complete a purchase, it can lead to a significant drop in sales.
4. Leverage Your Mailing List
If you have a mailing list for your website, the holiday season is the perfect opportunity to send it into overdrive. This means sending emails with season’s greetings.
This can include discount codes, giveaway offers, user-generated submissions, and pretty much anything that encourages recipients to open the emails. You’ll also want to send a celebration message, thanking your subscribers for being a part of your community:
Remember that the goal of your mailing list should be to drive readers towards the website. Therefore, your emails should offer valuable content with clear calls to action.
5. Publish Seasonal Content
The Christmas holidays offer an excellent opportunity to post content related to the festivities and the upcoming year. That’s why you see so many websites publishing content such as “best books to read in the new year” or “most popular gadgets in 2023.“
It makes sense to publish this type of content around the end of the year, since you have more data to draw upon. Plus, readers tend to love list-based posts.
You can create fun content such as holiday gift guides, best activities around Christmas, how to spruce up your house in the new year, and more:
You’re likely to get a lot more traffic during the holiday season, as many people take time off work and spend more time online. Therefore, you’ll want to keep them entertained and engaged as much as possible.
Conclusion
Injecting a little holiday spirit into your website can help increase engagement and drive more sales. For instance, you might offer seasonal discounts, host a Christmas giveaway, and add some festive effects to your pages.
Do you have any questions about how to design a festive website? Let us know in the comments section below!
Image credit: Pixabay