Here are 4 ways to put your website into summer mode all year long!
Schedule Promotions in Advance
One great way to reduce the work that you need to put into your website on a daily or weekly basis is to plan promotions ahead of time. Many ecommerce platforms let you schedule promo codes to be applicable during certain timeframes, which means that you won’t need to login and create them on the fly each time you want to give shoppers a special offer.
But in addition to just creating promos ahead of time, you should also be communicating them to your employees in advance. Tell your sales reps what’s coming up and make sure that they get all of their questions answered in advance. This will help you identify any areas where extra communication may be needed and allow you to better equip them with the tools that they need to sell your product/services. This isn’t just a good thing to do when you’re planning on being out of the office - it’s a best practice that you should be utilizing all the time!
Create a Content Calendar
Just like promotions, your content should be planned ahead of time. This goes for ALL content - everything from blog posts and videos to product descriptions and infographics. Having a content calendar will help you to identify who needs to be working on what when - allowing your employees to plan their time more effectively so that they can get away as well.
A content calendar will also help you to space out various pieces of content to create a good balance of topics and formats. This is essential to avoid bombarding your audience with too much of one thing all at once.
When planning your content calendar, don’t forget to enumerate how you will promote each type of content. Will you blast it out on social media, use it in an email marketing campaign, fill your regular newsletter with it, or do some combination thereof? Knowing this in advance helps you figure out what kind of elements you’ll need to support your content (images, dedicated landing pages, tracking code, page redirects, etc.). Not needing to scramble to generate these items at the last minute will save you a lot of time and stress later on!
Automate Processes
Hopefully your website is already making use of automation in a way that’s meaningful by doing things like automatically sending order confirmation and order shipment emails, listing out of stock products as unavailable, allowing shoppers to sign up for email updates on pre-release products, etc. But if your business is lagging when it comes to these big time-savers, you need to find areas where automation can help you to take a step away from your business from time to time. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to get away to take a break!
This should go without saying, but I’ve met a lot of business owners that want to do everything themselves - you should train at least one other employee on how to run the things that you’ve automated. This way if there’s a problem you can rely on them to troubleshoot and fix the issue. You don’t want to get an emergency text while on a beach somewhere and have to try to call into support yourself to fix an issue when you’re not in front of it. This can make for a terrible vacation!
Have Faith
Lastly, you need to just believe that all of your hard work will pay off and your business will be fine no matter where you are. In the summer many businesses aren’t feeling the same stress that they do around the holidays, so business owners just feel more at ease that their efforts will pay off and everything will run relatively smoothly. But this needs to be a year-round feeling. Life is too short to stress over everything that might go wrong! And in many cases, your stress won’t do much to help you prevent major issues from cropping up. So, sit back, and have some faith that everything will be okay!
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Business Blogging and Web Copywriting. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and son and enjoys cooking, watching sports, and spending time together as a family. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about current marketing trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!