Posting store hours on your website for the holiday season is ÜBER IMPORTANT! To put into perspective exactly how important, I'd like to review some comparative statistics from the last 30 days to the 30 days of the 2011 Holiday Season.I routinely monitor web page layouts and how users maneuver a website once they land on a jewelry store home page. This is how I know what types of website designs and pages work, and which ones don't. Three specific pages I'm always watching are how users interact with are the Contact Us page, Directions page, and Store Hours page.
If you're like most website owners, the idea of a dedicated page for "Store Hours" should surprise you. It's not a page you usually see split apart on a website. Store hours are typically something that's casually included on the Contact Us page, but I discovered a few years back that this is an extremely user friendly page on a website.
In fact, I discovered that if you place a link that says "Store Hours" at or near the top right corner of your home page, it will get a lot of clicks. On one site I measured 18% of home page visitors clicking on the Store Hours link, but on average it will get 6.18% of all clicks from the home page.
On the other hand, the Store Hours page is not a popularly clicked link from most of the pages of the website except from the About Us page.
According to my tracking from the 2011 Holiday season, the Store Hours page was 88.31% more popular during the 30 days from November 25, 2011 to December 25, 2011 that the most recent 30 days from last month. That's a difference of 70 people viewing the Store Hours in October compared to 132 that would visit during the holiday season.
That represents 132 people who looked at your website really fast and then walked into your store. The Store Hours page only shows the hours of operation, which means anyone viewing that page is doing so with very specific intent. If the user wanted to call you, they would look at your Contact Us page for your phone number.
So, the goal of this Daily Golden Nugget is to show you that retail jewelry stores should have a very fast way for foot traffic customers to find your store hours. Many jewelry stores have complicated hours that will change weekly throughout the season. In that case you should always have the hours for the current week listed at the top of the Store Hours page, and delete the previous week's hours.
Lastly, 24.8% of the visitors to the Store Hours page during the 2011 Holiday Season were from various mobile devices.
