Update Your Imagery
When was the last time you updated your homepage carousel banners? Or changed your featured products? Does your Facebook or Twitter page still have the original cover image you uploaded when you created those accounts? Now is the time to update your high-visibility photos and images to give your brand an instant new look and re-engage returning customers and social media fans.
Clear Out Old Inventory
The more products you have, the more difficult it is for shoppers to find the item they want to buy. De-clutter your category, search and brand pages by removing poorly-selling of low inventory products from their primary category, marking down their price and adding them to a Sale or Clearance section. You can use your BigCommerce store’s built-in reports or Google Analytics to identify products that either don’t sell very often or get a lot of traffic without any conversions. Clearing out products frees up dollars to invest in new inventory and will save larger stores valuable shelf space.
Refresh Content and Meta Tags for SEO
It’s no secret that search engines like fresh content. Make a plan to rewrite any text content on your homepage and category pages so that Google will re-evaluate your website’s organic value and relevance. I also suggest updating meta titles and keywords for major pages like your homepage, category pages, brand pages (if you use them) and top-selling product pages. When you’re done, make sure to login to your Google Console (Google Webmaster Tools) and resubmit your sitemap so that Google knows to come check out your new content.
Scrub Your Email List
If you do a lot of email marketing, it’s worth scrubbing your list of un-engaged subscribers every so often. Over time, some customers will stop opening your emails but won’t bother to unsubscribe, while others will change their email addresses, leaving you with ghost subscribers. This dilutes your open and click-thru statistics, making it more difficult to measure and compare campaign results. Most email providers allow you to search for un-engaged subscribers or create segments of subscribers who haven’t opened any emails for a period of time. If you’re hesitant to remove them from your list entirely, you can move them to a separate list that you target only for important messages like holiday sales.
Toss Out Bad Strategies
If you’re like me, you’re always testing new strategies, new marketing channels and new apps. If they aren’t breaking the bank, it’s easy to forget about them – whether or not they’re really working. Spring is a great time to review your business processes, marketing campaigns and 3rd party apps to see what has value and what doesn’t. By shedding old strategies that don’t add to your bottom line, you can focus in on what’s meaningful, save time and money, and put your business in a better position for peak selling seasons.