Low-lift ways to keep your site running and secure this holiday season, so your business stays reliable, visible, and trusted while you’re away.
You finally found the Perfect Coffee Place. It’s a little bit of a drive, a detour, really, but when you have reviews and pictures like this shop, going out of the way is no big deal. You pull up right at opening time. You hop out of the car and walk briskly to the front door, ready to taste the brew to beat all brews. Your hand is almost on the handle of the front door when you see it:
“Closed for Our Winter/Holiday Vacation,” the sign announces, its cheerful verbiage a slap to your freezing, uncaffeinated face. Closed? But you checked the hours on their website, social media and Google business profile. How could they be closed? You peek through the glass like a kid into a toy shop on Christmas Eve. Stools on tables. Lights out. You’re about to drive 45 minutes to a Starbucks.
What happened? Where did the Perfect Coffee Place go wrong? It all started with the wrong plan for their web presence.
Let’s rewind. If we went back in time, is there some way we could have avoided this crushing disappointment?
BEFORE the Holidays
When small business owners and entrepreneurs make plans, it’s often with great difficulty and trepidation. After all, when you run your own business, vacation time comes out of your account. On the other hand, one of the joys of being a small business owner is working hard to earn that time to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
A critical part of taking that break for a business owner with a web presence is making sure their website is set up for time spent Out of Office (OOO) and Away From Keyboard (AFK) during the holidays. When you’re OOO and AFK, you really need your website to run smoothly, provide pertinent information to your customers and keep your business in good stead until you can get back and put fingers on keys once again.
In the case of the Perfect Coffee Place, the first step to avoiding their hours mishap was to set up relevant messaging on their website and email accounts with regard to their summer vacation plans.
Business owners heading out for vacation, no matter the time of year, should always take the time to update their hours across all channels. From your business website to Yelp to Google to Facebook, making sure your hours are up to date and accurate is essential to providing a good customer experience. We’ve all experienced a moment similar to our coffee afficionado, where our expectation for a business fell well short due to no fault of our own. It’s not a great look for the business, or a good feeling for the customer, and it’s totally avoidable with a little care and attention to your business’s online availability.
A Little Peace and Quiet
Once the Perfect Coffee Place’s owner is finally on holiday, what they want to do is to unwind completely, but worries about their website’s functionality could have them checking their phone by the pool every five minutes, and that’s not really a vacation at all. Peace of mind with regard to your website means not having to worry about downtime, security issues or unfulfilled orders or bookings. All of these potential problems are easy to head off with the right website partner and plan.
That’s really step one. Choose a reliable web presence provider with great uptime and the security products you need to feel confident in your website. Just having that degree of confidence in your online partner is half the battle and is truly table stakes for website providers in today’s industry. You want to work with a one-stop-shop that has you covered on SSL certificates, website backups and daily malware scans so you don’t have to sweat security while you’re skiing the slopes.
Step two is taking an inventory of your customer touchpoints and possible interactions and seeing where you need to make adjustments. Have a bookings calendar where customers can book appointments directly? Remember to block off the days you’ll be out. Unable to fulfill shipping for orders due to being OOO? Provide notice of this on your storefront pages and adjust displayed stock availability as needed, so that customers know what they’re in for. As with many matters in life, a little communication goes a long way.
Step three towards peace, relaxation and quiet is to be honest, upfront and relatable to your customers. But what does that look like?
Turn Out of Office Into an Advantage
We’ve talked about how to cover yourself on the basics of your web presence while you are out of office – but what about turning the very fact of being out of office into a marketable advantage for your business?
What if instead of taping a hastily written note to the inside of their window, Perfect Coffee Place had started proactive reach outs to their customers through their website, email and social media weeks before you head to the cabin for a relaxing holiday vacation? A post could have looked something like this:
“Brewing Up … a Vacation
We’ve had an incredible year serving you at Perfect Coffee Place so far, but we’ll be honest with you all – we need a break. We’ll be closed for an early holiday vacation during the first two weeks of December, but expect us to return rested, roasted and ready to serve up some special deals and even some new flavors we can’t wait to share with you. We’ll see you bright and early on December 15!”
With this messaging wafting across channels like the unmistakable scent of a delicious cuppa, Perfect Coffee Place could have achieved three things: one, become more relatable to their customers; two, remind them of their existence and of how great their coffee is; and three, promote what’s coming next.
Instead, what they left their customers with is a sad sign, a locked door and a tumbleweed rolling down a weathered boulevard of broken coffee dreams.
Shot of Espresso to Go
The quick version: update your hours across all channels for your vacation, work with a trusted website partner to give yourself total peace of mind and turn lemons into lemonade (or beans into coffee …?) by transforming your standard out of office messaging into a chance to connect more deeply with your customers.
Follow these tips, and you can feel confident in your business and web presence all winter long – and maybe even put down your phone for five minutes.
“How a small business nurtures their customer experience during the holidays can determine how you build trust and drive future sales. Keeping customers aware of business hours, inventory levels, discounts, and holiday deals via your website and social channels will ensure you’re making the most of the holiday season and building relationships to drive repeat business in the new year.”
-Brian McMullin
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