Do you see a big drop in ecommerce traffic and sales after Christmas?

You’re not alone.

Happily, there’s plenty that can be done to help smooth out the seasonal rollercoaster ride. Follow these suggestions to keep customers coming back all year long.

Here are five examples to get the ideas flowing:

1. Focus on what you can’t do during the busy times

If you have a code freeze during the busy season, then your off-season is the perfect time to make changes. Less traffic means less load on your resources – both machine-based and human.

Have you been putting off a site redesign? Do you need to generate new images or other creative assets? Are there employees to hire or train? Do you need to launch an in-house initiative to make sure the team is working together effectively?

Slow time is the best time to get those and many other tasks accomplished — not the time to take a break.

2. Tailor your website to your target audience

Use A/B Testing to optimize your website for your targeted audience segments. That will help to increase conversions and bring in more sales revenue all during the year.

Here’s something else: once you’ve optimized your site, you’ll get more return on ad spend (ROAS). That will allow you to get more aggressive with advertising and attract even more visitors to your site.

Ads alone won’t provide the desired results. You can get ten times more traffic, but fail to get an appreciable number of more sales. The often-overlooked ingredient is conversion rate optimization.

Higher numbers mean nothing if those visitors aren’t converting from prospects into buyers. More about that in the next tip.

3. Find the roadblocks

Remove friction. Use the slower periods to analyze data from when things were hopping. Where did you underperform? Where are your biggest bottlenecks? Once you’ve identified your stuck points, you can plan improvements based on your highest impact areas.

All of that assumes, of course, that you’ve identified the metrics you’ll need and the formulas you’ll use. If you find there are holes in your strategic view, you’ll need to patch them. Maybe you’ll need new tools, maybe you’ll need to train staff members, maybe you’ll have to hire to cover lapses.

Your off-season strategy will include time to take a close look at the buyer’s path to sales and kick the rocks out the way. It may be there is no other activity that can pay off like this one. Traffic that doesn’t convert is like a car with no wheels; you can steer it all you want, but it’s not going to take you anywhere.

4. Bring your new customers back

Keep your first-time customers coming back by designing and implementing an effective onboarding campaign via email.

You can bring them back with offers of complementary products, for instance, or by offering special rewards for purchasing again soon. You’re limited only by your imagination.

The main thing is to let those new customers know you appreciate their business, you’re open to feedback on their shopping experience with you, and you want to keep them as ongoing customers.

Your onboarding campaign begins the grooming process for those who will eventually become your evangelists. Statistics consistently show it’s considerably easier and less costly to sell more to an existing customer than to acquire a new customer.

5. Develop a loyalty program to reward repeat customers

Those customers you acknowledge and treasure are the ones you keep. Make sure your loyal customers receive special treatment, and you’ll cement the relationship – they’ll be “in the family.”

It’s in this group that you’ll find evangelists who will freely provide invaluable word-of-mouth testimonials for you (unsolicited). They’ll talk about you on social media, they’ll brag about you to their friends, and they’ll love the fact that you not only recognize them, but that you do special things to reward them for their consistent support of your business.

It’s difficult to find a company – online or off – that’s really good at this. One huge, but often overlooked key, is that you want a high percentage of your messaging aimed at serving these loyal customers instead of selling them.

You’ve already sold them, and you should know them quite well. Now focus on giving them unexpected value. Don’t make it all about sales and discounts. Throw in informative content on topics you know they care about.

If your customer loves to camp, for instance, send updates on the latest advances in sleeping bag construction. It’s okay to mention your products, but don’t make the message a barely-hidden sales pitch.

Be real, and provide real value.

Conclusion

Go over the five suggestions above. Not only will your increased conversion rate provide more revenue during the rest of the year, but it’ll pay off in spades when the high-season rolls back around. You’ll get more conversions at that point too — maybe a whole lot more.

5 Powerful Ways to Boost Profits with An Off-Season Strategy

PS. Focusing on converting new customers into repeat customers is crucial. Another important one is personalization based on customer segments. These two areas are usually in the “we’ll have to do it sometime” bucket. Make the “sometime” now.