7 Ways to Optimize Your CTAs for Conversions This Holiday Season

The holiday season is the best time of year for anyone in e-commerce, as it is the prime time to increase sales. Maximize your conversions with CTAs that take advantage of visitors while they’re in a buying frame of mind.

1. Help Your CTA Stand Out

When people are busy preparing for the holidays, they may have little time or patience to read through a lengthy email or social media update. Make sure your CTA is highly visible.

In email newsletters, this means positioning the CTA near the beginning, while offering more content further down for users who want more information. In social media posts, get to the point quickly and include just the essential details.

2. Push for a Sale Now

Around the holidays, consumers are most worried that their orders will fail to arrive on time, and that the products they want will sell out, forcing them to settle for something less than ideal. Play with this sense of urgency in your CTAs by using phrases that suggest you have only a few items left in stock.

You can also tell users to purchase early to ensure orders reach them in time. However, be careful about providing guarantees for when the order will arrive. The postal service is under a great deal of stress at this time of year, and you need to be certain that orders really will arrive on the date you advertise  in order to avoid paying refunds or losing potential repeat customers.

3. Make Action Easy

Making sure the action in your CTA is easy to complete is important all year round, but this is especially true during the holidays, as users have no time to waste. Keep the shopping process fast and simple.

4. Limit the Number of CTAs

Another way to prevent confusion is to include just a single CTA per piece of content. More than one makes content difficult to skim and increases the risk that users will take no action at all.

5. Link to an Appropriate Page

Ideally, CTAs should lead users to a holiday-themed page rather than just your regular product page. Adapt landing pages for the time of year by highlighting why the product makes an ideal gift. Never send users to landing pages that just offer more information without giving them a chance to take action — users may start to feel as if they will never reach the purchase page and give up.

6. Convert Comparison Shoppers

Comparison shoppers cost you money when they reach your site through ads and slow you down by increasing your traffic. It is necessary to turn as many of these users into customers as soon as possible, and to prevent those who will never convert from even reaching your site. There are a few ways to achieve this:

• Improve landing pages with A/B testing.
• Remove low-conversion keywords from your PPC ads and consider including negative keywords in your campaigns.
• Re-market to visitors who abandon their shopping carts with ads on other sites. Save the content of shopping carts for at least 30 days, ready for users if they return.

7. Encourage Repeat Sales

There is no better time than during holiday shopping to encourage customers to come back for more of your products. As you already know, it is easier and cheaper to hold on to repeat customers than to market to new users. Start your efforts from the moment a customer completes a sale with another CTA. You can provide a coupon for a future purchase, suggest a similar item to complement the order, or ask the customer to subscribe to your newsletter, or to follow you on social media, for exclusive deals.

Although consumers may be too busy to read in-depth articles over the holiday season, the time is ripe for sales. Use the above tips to maximize your clicks and conversions.

This post was originally published in November 2016 and has been updated to reflect current statistics and information pertain to 2017.