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Springtime is here. Green is budding on the trees, birds are singing, and while customers may be stuck looking out the window of their home, we've seen eCommerce has not slowed down. For an eCommerce business, spring can be an exciting time of renewal. After a little post-holiday-season downtime, it's time to kick your brand into high gear for the rest of 2020.
What will get your customers excited? What will breathe new life into this year's sales conversions? A little spring cleaning is a great place to start. Let's shake the dust out of that eCommerce website with these 8 eCommerce spring cleaning tips to increase sales in 2020.
1) Update Your Images
Nothing dates your eCommerce site for returning customers quite like images. You might think the same image for the same product is fine, if the product hasn't changed, but your customers and current trends may have! Fresh new photos using what you've learned from customer feedback or photos that embrace new trends in design can make each product look shiny and new to return customers.
Snap new images and even build a new, more compelling style to unify all of your eCommerce product images and overall website feel.
2) Freshen Your SEO Descriptions
A product description is more than just something your customers read to find out more before making a purchase. Descriptions are also read by search engine crawlers that decide when and where your page appears for customer searches. It's important to keep up with current SEO standards and best practices by freshening up those descriptions to catch more SEO top-of-page results.
3) Clear Out and Clear-ance Slow Inventory
Which items in your inventory aren't moving fast enough? Whether they are out of season or just not a hit with your customers, they are taking up valuable shelf space. It's time to rebrand, repackage, or liquidate those products. Often, you can get customers excited to purchase your otherwise unwanted inventory if you offer it as part of a tempting product bundle. Some brands even present a product bundle as a "mystery pack", filled with assorted slow-moving inventory.
If all else fails, deep discounts can be very attractive to the shopper looking for a great deal.
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4) Audit for Broken or Low-Performing Pages
Of course, your products aren't the only part of this spring cleaning effort. The web pages themselves need a little airing out and touching up. Perform a website audit to identify the pages that perform poorly. This means pages that get the least hits, pages that load too slowly, and pages that are often the last page a customer sees before they bounce without converting.
Find out what's gone wrong with each page and either remove it, redirect it, or update it for better conversions and a better customer experience.
5) Clean Up Your Links
Check every link on every page, internal and external, throughout your website. Why? Link fidelity has skyrocketed in importance between 2019 and 2020. Google has recently made it clear that any page with a link that isn't secure (HTTPS vs HTTP) will be cast out of search results. Broken links aren't good news either. So it's time to do a full audit of your links and make sure every one is useful to customers and approved by Google standards.
6) Clear Out Old Files and Unused Pages
You can significantly speed up your site and reduce your server size by clearing out all old files, pages, and data that are no longer needed. There are plenty of pages created during a website's design or update process that aren't used or necessary anymore. Check for old CSS pages, unreferenced image files, and anything else that is included in your website directory that can be removed.
7) Add the Latest Widgets
eCommerce design has become a fast-paced race to the widget. Does your store have the ever-popular live-chat option? Does it have a self-help article archive? Does it have a floating navigation bar or parallax scrolling on the landing pages? Chances are there is at least one popular widget your website could use that is currently all-the-rage with your industry customers' online shopping habits. Now is the time to get with the latest to improve your site's functionality and user experience.
8) Start Your Holiday Calendar
Finally, spring cleaning your eCommerce site is the perfect time to plan for the year's holiday events and sales. Is your brand doing something for Mother's Day or Father's Day? Do you have a sale planned for the 4th of July, Back-to-School, or Halloween? Now is the time to plan.
In fact, you might find a few obscure holidays worth promoting for your brand like National Flip Flop Day. If you ship your products internationally, be sure to include any international holidays worth adding to your calendar, for an even more eventful marketing calendar this year.
Conclusion
Now is the perfect time to freshen your inventory, website content, and structure of your eCommerce site itself. As the weather warms up and your customers look forward to a hopeful summer, make sure your eCommerce website is ready to provide them the best possible customer experience.