The holiday shopping season is in full swing and retailers are scrambling to get their shops in order for the most important time of the year. Here are some last-minute tips that are proven to help ecommerce stores maximize the holiday shopping rush.  

Retargeting is your best holiday gift

Don’t forget: your best holiday shoppers are the ones who have already visited your site. This sounds very rudimentary — of course they need to visit my site — but you’d be surprised to see how often ecommerce businesses prioritize getting new customers versus focusing on the ones who have already visited their site.  

That’s why retargeting is your best friend this holiday season. It lets you target the most primed customers: those who already know your brand and the products you offer. Most of you may be using retargeting ads on Google and Meta but don’t ignore other options that will help you have an extremely successful holiday season.  

One example is SafeOpt. It lets you send promotional emails to shoppers who abandon their carts, even if you don’t have their email address in your database. This is a form of retargeting that lets you send them a discount code or other promotional incentive via email to make sure they get across the purchasing finish line. 

SafeOpt does this in a way that’s fully compliant with email and privacy regulations. Merchants only have to install a simple line of code and it then allows you to reach a highly-lucrative audience of shoppers who have already visited your site. These shoppers have joined SafeOpt’s network through their website or through publishing partners to receive these discounts— this means they actively want these deals from sites like yours.

Best of all, SafeOpt can be implemented in just a few days (or even sooner if your developer team is nimble). 

Even though SafeOpt has already helped brands recover more than $100 million in revenue, it’s still kind of a secret that more ecommerce brands should know about to capitalize on this holiday shopping season.   

Last-minute optimizations to boost conversion rates

Many ecommerce sites have a code freeze for the busy holiday shopping season. While it may be too late to make dramatic changes to optimize your site to increase page speed or to fully optimize for mobile, there’s still a lot you can do: 

• Test your CTA text: You’d be surprised at how often ecommerce brands try to get too clever with their CTAs. If this button lets the customer buy something, make that explicitly clear in the text. Direct and clear will always beat clever when it comes to CTA copywriting. 
• Change your product meta descriptions: Even if you’re in a code freeze, you should still be able to change your meta descriptions to maximize your SEO. Organic search traffic typically converts at a high level because shoppers are going through the trouble of putting it into a search engine. This shows purchasing intent and that conversion rate tends to go up during the holiday season.  
• Deliver your best abandoned cart flows: Hopefully, you’ve been honing your abandoned cart email flows throughout the year. The holiday season is when you should go all-in on your best-abandoned cart emails because that’s when it will deliver the maximum results. Remember that tools like SafeOpt can also let you deliver abandoned cart emails to shoppers who aren’t currently in your email database.     

More sales = happy holidays

We all know how important the fourth quarter and holiday sales are to merchants. If you follow these last-minute tips of using innovative new services like SafeOpt and doing last-minute optimizations, you’re bound to have a happy holiday sales season.