As summer ends, marketers worldwide start gearing up for the holidays. The holiday season is here, and with it comes a vast array of tools for your holiday marketing arsenal.
One such tool is the festive widget—a jolly way to spruce up your website and get visitors in the holiday shopping mood.
In this article, we’ll cover the ins and outs of the widget, different types of festive widgets, how you can use them, and tips to make sure your festive widget stands out!
Skip to:
- What is a Widget?
- What is a Festive Widget?
- What is User Engagement?
- How Festive Widgets Boost User Engagement
- Make Your Widgets Stand Out
What is a Widget?
A widget is any graphical user interface element you can add to a website. Its purpose is to display information or provide a specific way for users to interact with an application or operating system.
Traditionally, the term widget means a small, discrete, mechanical object. However, nowadays, the meaning has changed with the times.
Widgets are versatile and come in many forms, including the following:
- Pull-down menus
- Buttons
- Windows
- Counters
- Toggle buttons
- Selection boxes
- Progress indicators
- Icons
- Pop-ups
- Scroll bars
What is a Festive Widget?
A festive widget is any widget that has a festive element to it! Let us explain: You can have a candy cane scroll bar, Halloween-themed icons, snow falling over your site, or a Christmas tree cursor.
These are not an exhaustive list by any means. The list is as long as your imagination is vast (and your software engineer’s pay reasonable)!
What is User Engagement?
The next question we’ll tackle is what we mean by user engagement because it is a rather vague term.
User engagement refers to how valuable people find your product, measured by how much they interact with your website or service.
Whether they share your content on social media, download an annual data lakehouse report, visit multiple pages on your website, or use your website’s features, these are all indications of how engaging your website and product are.
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Why user engagement is important
User engagement is an essential key performance indicator and very helpful for having repeat customers for your product or service.
Whether selling clothes or providing a VoIP phone service—and attracting new ones.
Engagement is critical to increasing brand awareness or website traffic via your Facebook or Instagram pages.
A strong user engagement plan helps users enjoy more valuable interactions with your products and services faster.
There is also an increased chance that they will return to buy something. They then go from just users to actual paying customers.
Customers can increase the awareness of your brand with their friends and family, which has a snowball effect, drawing more people to your product.
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User Engagement vs. Customer Engagement
The answer is yes if you’re wondering whether there’s a difference between user and customer engagement.
Simply put, a user can be anyone, including someone visiting your site for the first time or even by accident. On the other hand, a customer has already purchased one of your products.
You will likely have much more information about your customers, such as their names, socio-demographic information, where they live, what interests them, and the products they’ve purchased. Users are a bit more of an unknown.
By tracking and understanding user engagement, you can design better products and services that attract and keep users around, potentially converting them into customers.
This understanding also helps you to improve communication with your customers.
It’s no secret that engaged users are more likely to buy from you and recommend you to friends and family.
How Festive Widgets Boost User Engagement
We’ll run through some ideas for how you can spruce up your widget game to boost user engagement!
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Holiday announcements
Like a basic pop-up widget that can let your users know about a new update on your iPad remote desktop service, festive announcement widgets can let your users know about your holiday offers.
Something on your website’s landing page is ideal, though you can also make it a banner across your entire site.
A festive pop-up wishing holiday cheer and directing them to your holiday sale will help guide new visitors. These types of widgets not only help users feel joyful but also prep users for holiday shopping.
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Onboarding prompts
Onboarding prompts are a way to keep your customer focused on the goal of… buying something!
An onboarding prompt can remind them to click the “purchase now” button, adorned with festive lights for extra cheer.
You can move people along the critical milestones of their onboarding journey toward becoming a customer.
Since moving people along the purchasing chain can be tricky, widgets can come to your aid to remind people why they wandered onto your site or app in the first place.
If it was by chance, this is an opportunity to offer them a reason to stay, like a festive discount code such as SANTA10.
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Sign-up widget
A cheerful widget for signing up for your sparkly newsletter, accessing your festive recipes, or even downloading a Hadoop cluster ebook are popular ways to build up your email lists.
It is ideal for getting on your users’ radars and then getting the user to share their details with you so that you can bless them with even more content!
You are a winner if you can make your content fun enough to get users to tell you more about themselves (or just give you their email address).
If you’re not having as much luck as you were hoping with this, it may be time to spruce up your content with festive decorations.
Timing and placement are crucial with these widgets—too early and off-putting. Too late, and it’s, well, too late; they’ve moved on.
People’s attention spans are short now! About a fifth of the way into your article is an excellent time to suggest a download or sign-up action.
It shows enough interest on their behalf, and they’ve also had a delicious sample of your content already—perhaps enough to want more.
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Upsell widget
Whenever someone’s free trial ends, or their limited usage allowance is nearing a finish, that’s when you strike!
“Hello!” the widget says.
“I see you’re almost out of space with all those adorable doggy pics clogging up your storage. May I interest you in more storage?” Wink.
Offering a link at that crucial moment when your user needs a little more storage is critical to boosting engagement with your product.
You could also implement a holiday widget that appears when users go to the checkout page, suggesting small stocking fillers.
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Countdown widget
Do you have an exciting product launch event Or some cool competition winner announcements?
A countdown widget might be just what you need. It garners excitement. It garners enthusiasm. It’s a great way to create a sense of anticipation and pull people in.
A Christmas countdown can help people get in the mood for festive shopping.
You can use it for many things you want people to be excited and engaged with—the world is your Thanksgiving Turkey.
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Customer satisfaction measure
Another great widget, this time for measuring the satisfaction of your customers, is the widget that invites them to offer feedback on their experience today.
It can come in various forms, such as a simple poll, a survey, or even a simple thumbs-up or down widget.
Much like a red, orange, and green smiley system at airport security gates, a widget like this can be simple and quick to interact with.
You both increase customer engagement AND figure out how happy people are on your site.
Make Your Widgets Stand Out
So, now that we’ve covered some ideas for widgets you can try out, let’s talk about tips and tricks to make them shine!
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Bright colors
You want your widget to stand out and grab your users’ attention. It means COLOR. You should choose something festive but also in keeping with your brand.
If you have orange brand colors, for example, you could make your widget orange and purple for Halloween or orange and green to represent oranges and fir trees in winter.
Make sure you have enough contrast to make it pop but don’t clash. Got it? Great!
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Keep it simple
A widget, by its very definition, is short and sweet, like one of Santa’s elves. So, choose your words carefully, and don’t use too many.
A user should be able to know what the widget is for with just a cursory glance.
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Right time, right place
Just because it’s small and relatively unobtrusive does not mean you can place a widget anywhere, and it certainly shouldn’t pop up at the wrong time.
When deciding where and when to put your widget, take into account the user experience first and foremost—where the user is on their user journey.
You should also consider practicality—you don’t want the widget to be in an annoying place that will lead to the user jumping ship.
Wrapping Up
Widgets are small and mighty, and the holidays are a great time to get comfortable with them and see how they can boost your user engagement.
Like little elves, they are hard at work, while a big guy in a red suit gets all the credit. Typical. But effective nonetheless.
By implementing festive widgets, you can help get your users (a.k.a., potential customers) in the holiday mood—which is excellent for your bottom line and user engagement.
