Summer means fun for many people, but the internet seems to be a quiet place at the moment. That forces online entrepreneurs and makers to think out of the box if they want to avoid decreasing online sales. Now is the right time to step up your social media game and optimize your website. In the summertime, you should be able to research the newest online trends and think about how you can integrate them into your WooCommerce shop. Also, when was the last time you improved your business strategy? While there are fewer orders on your website, you can use the summer to set yourself ahead of your competitors.
Tips to Boost Your WooCommerce Store
1. Use Social Media
Social Media has its peak season during summer. People are sharing pictures and videos from their vacation and writing reviews on pages of restaurants and hotels. It is the perfect time to drive people to your page by social media. Furthermore, statistics show that social media influences people’s buying choices. It means you have to make sure to launch a powerful advertising campaign on social media or let your followers take part in a competition such as posting the best summer selfie of the year.
2. Improve WooCommerce Store
If you were looking for the right time to do some maintenance on your WooCommerce store, wait no more! Since summer might be a quiet time when it comes to visitors, you can implement some new features, such as a bot for improving customer communication or software that helps you with the WoocCmmerce inventory management. No web store is perfect, but with a few changes, you can make sure that fewer shopping carts get abandoned, which leads to the next point.
3. Optimize your Online Store for Mobile Users
In summer, it might seem as if nobody is spending time on the internet anymore. In fact, that is not true, as people are still browsing the web, sharing pictures on social media, and reading the news. But since they are spending more time out in the sun than on their computers, mobile usage increases. Therefore, your WooCommerce store must be optimized for mobile usage, not just to get more traffic to your web store but also to make the visitors stay there and turn them into buyers. And since mobile use is on the rise in general, this is not only an investment for the summer months.
4. Create Special Offers
Every customer loves good summer sales. Therefore, you can create special offers, lower your prices on some products, or create bundles and packages. Learn more about your customers and have a look at the products that are often bought together. Sell these products as a bundle so that your customers will not only buy one product but two at a time. You can learn a lot by analyzing the data you get from your website and use it to create a personalized shopping experience for them.
5. Improve Your SEO ranking
It is always essential for online merchants to improve the ranking of their WooCommerce shop for search engines. Therefore, do proper keyword research and adjust the content on the pages accordingly. It can also help to invest in an app that helps you figure out which sites need improvement and what can be done to rank better. One of the most effective ways to rank higher is outbound links on a website, so make sure that you add more of them. Soon, you should be able to notice a change in traffic that is coming from search engines!
How to do Keyword Research using KWFinder? How to do Keyword Research using SEMRush?
6. Plan Ahead
It’s almost the middle of summer and a bit late to launch a big summer advertisement campaign. But the next season lies right ahead of you, and therefore, you should stop thinking about what went wrong in the past, but think of how you can perform better in fall and later this year. And good planning is already half of the job! The hotter months give you time to research properly and get some feedback on your new ideas. Find out who your target group is and which social media networks they use. Focus on the group of customers that are most likely to present the most incredible opportunity for success. Furthermore, it would help if you thought about all the details of communication and the campaign’s sales structure. In general, these things should be ready three months before you launch your campaign.
7. Launch a Newsletter
Newsletters are a powerful marketing tool to keep in touch with your customers. Compared to social media, email still has three times as many users as social media platforms. However, a lot of entrepreneurs are hesitant to launch a newsletter. Some think they won’t find time to write to their customers regularly, and others are concerned that their writing isn’t good enough or that nobody will read what they are sending out. Clearly, that isn’t the right mindset, and it might not even be true. Believe in yourself and start seeing it as an opportunity to add value for your existing and future clients. Firstly, you will have to do some brainstorming. Which content ideas do you have for a newsletter? Which topics would your clients find helpful? How can you share your expertise with them? If nothing comes to your mind, think about frequently asked questions that you get from customers and write about the answer to it. As soon as you’ve written down enough topics that will cover the next months, you will have to think of your behavior. What does it take to open an email that arrives in your inbox? Correct, a good subject line is key. So, you need to come up with a good one for each idea. When you are ready to launch your newsletter, you should compare email marketing tools to determine which one could work for you. To win subscribers, you can host a giveaway on social media and get names and email addresses in return. You can also add sign-up for more information buttons on the blog posts that people can press if they want. You can do a facebook-live where you introduce your newsletter to your audience and add some valuable content to your WooCommerce shop that is only visible when entering the email address. In general, there are lots of opportunities on how to get subscribers to your newsletter.
8. Expand Your Market
Thanks to globalization, the world is becoming more integrated. Every year more people are getting better access to the internet and use it to buy goods. That means that eCommerce is still growing, and it is predicted to become the most prominent retail channel in 2021. Experts believe that there will be a shift in online shopping, and clients will buy more goods from non-western countries. Now you might think: How does that affect me as an online merchant when I am already shipping worldwide?! Well done, if you do that already. But your next challenge is to make the buying process seamless for your international customers. Think about payment methods. How do you feel about adding cryptocurrencies as a payment to your web store? In that way, you can offer your products at the same price worldwide, and your clients won’t have to deal with bank fees for international transfers. While everybody is talking about cryptocurrency as an investment, it could soon be normal to use it as a payment to purchase goods on the internet. Therefore, you can use the summer to implement that kind of payment to your WooCommerce shop and determine if your customers would like to use it.
9. Sell on Pinterest
While having a web store is important, social media is becoming more important as an outlet market. Especially in the summer, when people are spending so much time on social networks, you could try selling your products via Pinterest. Using WooCommerce and its plugin, you already have access to the WPSSO (WordPress Social Sharing Optimization) that allows you to set up Rich Pins for your product pins. As a next step, edit your photos to the Pinterest format (600 pixels). In general, pins with tall images get more shares, and the image should not contain a face or a disturbing background. You should then find the right strategy to encourage pinning, for example, by integrating sharing buttons to your WooCommerce store.
10. Have Faith in Your Business
Summer is not over yet, and we know that these months can be challenging for small businesses. But try your best to make the most out of this season instead of looking for reasons – why are your customers finding the sun more attractive than your products? With a little bit of courage, a lot of research, and some patience, your sales will soon grow again.
