5 Steps to Holiday Success - Online Readiness Checklist

1. Ramp up your advertising
Once your website is ready to go, you need to drive some new traffic. Earlier in the season (there is no ‘too early’ for this!) work on your search engine optimization, or SEO in order to optimize your stores placement in the organic listings before the holiday season arrives. According to a 2011 Marketing Sherpa Marketing Benchmark Survey (1), 75% of marketers consider search engine optimization to be effective for their business. 29% felt that SEO was more effective than any other form of marketing. After August, concentrate on more quick- win efforts like blogging and PPC campaigns. Pay-Per-Click remains one of the best ways to drive traffic to your store, even if your store already has good search engine placement for your major keywords.

Nobody wants to start thinking about the Biggest Shopping Season of the year while on summer vacation, but the truth is: If you haven’t started preparing yet, your competitors may have a head start on you already! To help you get started and get your online store in shape for the holidays, we’ve prepared a little Holiday Checklist – make sure you check it twice!
Web.com eCommerce has the services to help make this your best holiday sales season ever! And to help you out this holiday season, we’ve outlined 5 steps to prepare your online business success.
75% of marketers consider SEO to be effective for their business. — Marketing Sherpa Marketing Benchmark Survey01

2. Refresh your store design. Search engines love new and dynamic content. Holiday shoppers love clean, modern sites that simplify navigate and make it easy to find what they are looking for quickly. If you haven’t updated your store template in the past 18 months, now is the perfect time. Almost as important, make sure that you have a fresh and current blog to stir up interest in your products. Now is a good time to make sure that your blog matches your online stores, so that customers will recognize your brand. Some things to think about: Clean, simple navigation is one of the most critical elements in your control to help convince browsers to become shoppers once they’ve reached your site. Make sure your navigation supports shoppers by providing categories like ‘For Him’ & ‘For Her’ or ‘Gifts for Dad’ and ensure they can sort the products in each category by price, name, popularity, etc.

3. Maximize Online Shopping Engines. Make sure your products are listed in aggregate shopping engines. When trying to find a lot of gifts, consumers start on sites that display a lot of products to try and start narrowing their search. Make sure your products are listed in popular comparison shopping engines like ‘Shopzilla’, ‘TheFind’, ‘PriceGrabber’ and ‘Shopping.com’ so your store can be found.

4. Execute Enticing Email Offers.
Email Marketing is still one of the best ways to spend your marketing dollars in 2012. Email will boost traffic to your website, help reinforce your brand, and drive repeat customers. To maximize your sales with email marketing this holiday season, use a trusted email provider to ensure the best delivery for your marketing messages - don’t send from your personal outlook, or gmail account! Also, personalize your email to maximize opens and click- through’s, include a strong call-to action and be consistent in your message across the holiday season; eg “Avoid the lines, avoid the traffic, shop online for the Holidays!”

5. Engage a call center to handle volume. By now the holidays are quickly approaching. You love the look of your new store template, you are showing strong in the search engine pages, both in the organic and paid results, and you have email marketing campaigns rolling out regularly – and you are likely running out of hands. A good call center goes beyond simple customer service help. They can answer all your phone calls or just the overflow (talking to customer C instead of making them wait on hold while you talk to customers A & B!) They can help you during regular business hours, or just at nights and on weekends when you are off duty. They can be trained to sell, upsell and cross-sell your products, handle returns & exchanges, answer email, or even run live chat on your site.