After the holidays, businesses often face a slump in sales after the party is over, mainly because consumers tend to tighten their budgets and spend less. Investopedia stated that retail sales dropped by 0.8% in January 2024, more than the previous year.
If you can’t recover from the post-holiday sales slump, you might lose momentum and continue losing sales throughout the year. One way to prevent this is to ensure you’re driving traffic to your website. In this article, we’ll explore actionable ways to adjust your strategy, connect with your audience, and turn your website into a go-to destination for solutions to your customer’s problems in the new year.
9 ideas to drive traffic to your website this new year
1. Make your site customer-friendly
A customer-friendly website has a higher chance of converting visitors into loyal customers. According to WebFX, 94% of users believe that easy navigation is a website’s most important feature.
Here are a few strategies to help you achieve a more customer-friendly website.
Improve your page speed
Your customers are busy individuals. So, the faster your site loads, the better—a good guide is three seconds or less.
Free online tools like Pingdom, WebPageTest, and GTmetrix allow you to evaluate your site’s overall performance. Slow loading speeds can typically be corrected with smaller image files or by finding a website host with greater data storage capacity.
Make your website mobile-responsive
Today, more people are browsing on mobile devices than ever, with over half of all website traffic in 2024 coming from smartphones and tablets. Ensure a mobile-friendly website so visitors can navigate it easily without pinching or zooming.
You don’t want to lose this traffic just because your site isn’t compatible with their phones. Optimize your web pages for smaller screens. This will help customers find what they need quickly and improve user experience.
Refresh your content regularly
Ensure your content is updated so site visitors know you’re a credible and authoritative source in your industry.
You also need to fix broken links (e.g., links that point to pages that no longer exist) that can frustrate readers and result in missed sales opportunities. You can make this process fast and easy with free website link validators, such as BrokenLinkCheck.com.
The bottom line is you don’t want to give outdated and inaccurate information to your readers.
2. Create engaging, helpful, and relevant content
Speaking of keeping content fresh, consider regularly publishing website blog articles to attract more attention online. When someone wants to learn about something in your industry, they usually use search engines like Google to look for information. Publishing helpful content makes your brand more discoverable to your target audience.
Providing high-quality and relevant content in every blog post also encourages other websites to link to your page, boosting credibility and driving relevant traffic to your site.
Here are some tips to create engaging and relevant content for your website.
Showcase testimonials
Highlighting customer testimonials in your latest blog posts and product pages goes beyond building trust. More importantly, it shows how real people benefit from your products and services. People usually trust real experiences over promotional claims since they feel more authentic, making testimonials a persuasive tool to emphasize your product’s value.
Encourage interactions
Consider adding a comments section to your blog channel to encourage feedback and questions. Such interactions may give valuable insights into your customers’ needs and preferences. They also encourage a community where your audience can belong.
Publish holiday-themed content
Creating content related to the holidays can be beneficial to drive more traffic in the New Year. For example, you can publish New Year-related topics in your blog, such as goal setting, fresh beginnings, and resolutions. To push this to the next level, introduce your brand and products as the perfect assistant to help your customers achieve their new goals and resolutions.
Make your product listings more informative
Speaking of products, make sure your product information is accessible, clear, concise, correct, and up to date. If customers can easily find what they need to know about your product or service, they’ll be more likely to learn more and eventually make a purchase.
3. Refresh your site’s design
Does your website accurately reflect your mission, brand objectives, and offerings? If not, then consider updating your site’s ‘look and feel’ to match your business’s current goals.
Update your website header, rotating sliders, and banners with your latest business details.
Replace or enhance the graphic elements on your site so they look modern. Outdated graphics can make your business appear suspicious, spammy, and out of touch with current trends.
Adding media, such as short videos or infographics, to your product pages can also enhance the customer experience. For example, a short demo video can show your product’s features more effectively than text alone.
Since you’re preparing for the new year, you can use new-year-related images to match the holiday spirit.
4. Optimize your site for search engines
On top of creating helpful content, you should do search engine optimization (SEO) to capture organic search traffic from search engines like Google, Yelp, and Bing. If they recognize your content as relevant to a user’s query, they’ll put it at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
Essentially, you’ll want to be on the first page of the SERPs.
One of many ways to improve your SEO strategy is by enhancing your on-page SEO strategy. This involves ensuring your meta tags, like meta titles and meta descriptions, and relevant keywords accurately reflect the content on each page.
Another key tip is to use long-tail keywords in your headings and subheadings. This makes your content more relevant to specific search queries, improving your chances of ranking higher in search results.
For those with limited SEO knowledge, you can use SEO tools to aid you with this process. Web.com’s SEO tools provide a list of prioritized actions to improve your SEO performance. Plus, it’s easy to use.
You can also use Google Search Console to analyze your website’s performance. Through this tool, you can view keywords that are driving organic traffic to your website.
5. Leverage social media platforms
Social media is a global hub for billions of users, with over 76% making purchases through these platforms, making social media a powerful channel for driving sales. So, start identifying the platforms that your target audiences use most. Focus your efforts on those platforms to ensure maximum reach and engagement.
For example, LinkedIn or Instagram may be more effective if your audience is young professionals.
When crafting social media posts for the New Year, ensure they align with your audience’s New Year goals.
For example, a fitness brand can feature how its offerings support common resolutions like staying active and eating healthier. Then, they can link their product or service’s landing page on the caption, enticing readers to learn more and visit their site.
Attention-grabbing visuals, motivating captions, and relevant hashtags are also beneficial. After all, your social media strategy is nothing without good content for your audience.
Finally, paid social media ads are another powerful option. You can set specific parameters based on your customers’ demographics, devices, locations, interests, and behaviors to ensure the right people see your ads.
6. Offer exclusive promotions and discounts
Create irresistible and unique offers specifically for New Year’s Day. When customers feel exclusivity, they’ll want to engage with it sooner before the time limit is over.
You can have product or service discounts, bundled packages, or limited-time deals. These offers are enticing and align with the spirit of New Year’s Day.
And how do you let people know about your deals? Aside from placing them prominently on your home page and posting them on social media, you can run paid ads or pay-per-click (PPC) ads to showcase your promotions in search engines. If you don’t have the skill or time to do this yourself, Web.com’s PPC services let you work with Google Ads Certified Experts to run campaigns that achieve results fast.
Be sure to emphasize urgency-driven phrases, like “ends at midnight” or “while supplies last,” to create a sense of fear of missing out and encourage immediate clicks. When paired with targeted campaigns, this strategy can significantly drive more website traffic in the new year.
7. Collaborate with influencers
Influencers are individuals with a loyal audience who trust their recommendations. As we stated earlier, people tend to trust real people’s opinions. Influencers add authenticity through their reviews.
Look for influencers that align with your brand and collaborate on co-branded content or joint promotions. This can include:
- Guest blog posts
- Online reviews
- Social media takeovers
- Collaborative videos
These partnerships can amplify your brand message, increase awareness, and drive a broader audience to your website.
You can start the year with a holiday-related collaboration. For instance, cosmetic businesses can work with popular beauty gurus to review and promote their products.
8. Optimize email marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies to engage, boost traffic, and drive conversions. It lets you reach your audience directly in their inboxes, making your marketing more personalized.
Here are a few actionable tips to ensure a successful email marketing campaign.
Grow your email list with value-driven incentives
Offer meaningful incentives, such as exclusive content and discounts, to encourage sign-ups. Ensure your email opt-in forms are prominently displayed on your website and social media channels to attract potential subscribers.
Appealing designs, concise copy, and strong call-to-actions can encourage readers to take action, such as purchasing or visiting your site. For the New Year, make sure your design relates to the holiday.
Personalize your emails
Tailor your email content to your audience’s needs and preferences, as it makes your messages feel more relevant and engaging. Customers nowadays prefer brands that form a connection with them. Personalizing your emails makes the readers feel like you care for them.
By offering content that matches their interests, you can increase open rates and strengthen customer connections.
Segment your email list
Of course, people are unique and have different personalities, likes, dislikes, and interests. You can only personalize your emails if you know your readers. Research your subscribers and learn everything you can about them.
Organize your email list into segments based on demographics, interests, purchase history, or previous interactions with your brand. This allows you to send more targeted and relevant messages to specific groups, increasing the chances of conversion.
9. Monitor, analyze, and adjust
To keep your momentum, don’t stop after implementing the tips above. You need to monitor them to determine what’s working and make adjustments based on the data you collect.
Use tools like Google Analytics to monitor your site’s performance and New Year’s Day campaigns. Analyzing data like page visits, click-through rates (CTR), and engagement rates will help you see what’s working well and needs further improvement.
Track conversion rates to measure how effectively your marketing strategies turn visitors into customers.
Lastly, keep a close eye on customer engagement metrics, such as:
- Social media interactions
- Time spent on site
- Email open rates
All these metrics will help you understand how your audience connects and engages with your brand, helping you build a stronger relationship with your customers and boost brand loyalty.
Maximize your website’s reach and drive more traffic in the new year
The new year brings change. To continue pushing toward success, you must embrace these changes and plan accordingly. This is the perfect time to refresh your strategy with a website update.
Explore Web.com’s Online Marketing Tools to optimize your website further and drive more traffic. With resources that aim to help improve SEO and manage campaigns, we can support your efforts to grow your business online. Partner with Web.com today.
