What U.S. etailers are Doing Now to Prepare for the All-Important Holiday Season
U.S. etailers may generate as much as two thirds of their annual revenue in the fourth quarter (September to December), since so much buying centers around the Christmas and year-end holidays. So what are etailers doing during the summer? Forget the beach. They spend the summer focused on early planning for maximizing holiday revenue, improving the merchandise mix, and making sure service problems are managed, or minimized.
Given the continued growth of online sales in the U.S.—19% last year according to the Department of Commerce—this year’s planning is more important than ever. Here are the top ten tactics being pursued by U.S. etailers right now.
1. Review your organic search optimization set-up. It’s essential that customers can find you when they are doing their shopping. Begin with a thorough analysis of last year’s web logs. Some of the best new techniques:
- Add a dictionary of synonyms
- Analyze your most profitable keywords to from last year, and make sure they are used liberally in this year’s product descriptions
- Add new keywords, like common misspellings of product categories, and vendor-brand keywords that correspond to your product line
2. Test landing pages, promotional offers and key messages in advance, so you are ready to use the best ones during the holidays. (It’s too risky to make changes and do testing during the prime selling season.)
3. Pay attention to your shipping offer. If you are using “free shipping,†then be sure to feature it prominently in your advertising. Also use “Next Day Air†or “Overnight Delivery†to attract last-minute shoppers.
4. Add a wish list function. Customers who create their own wish lists convert to sales at higher rates, and also are less likely to return products.
5. Offer gift cards. Promote them on your home page, and allow for them to be redeemed easily at check-out.
6. Make it easy to buy. Some of the best techniques include:
- Create product best-seller lists.
- Add gift guides organized by price point, the type of recipient, and other variables.
- Offer a gift wrapping option.
- Add new product combination options, to promote cross-selling.
7. Add social media content, for example:
- Customer reviews of products.
- A blog, or several special-interest blogs.
- Video streaming to feature special products in action.
8. Update your listings on the comparison shopping engines. In the U.S., 75% of the traffic comes from the “Big Seven†comparison engines: Google Product Search, MSN Shopping, NexTag, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping, and Shopzilla. So it’s essential to ensure that your products listings are fresh, and that the most profitable keywords are prominent in your listings. During the holiday season, smart etailers are culling their listings on the comparison search engines, to cut back on the products that don’t sell well during the holidays, and then increasing their bids on the most profitable products, to encourage more clicks than the competition.
9. Prepare email campaigns. Appealing campaign themes include:
- Solving gift-giving problems.
- Holiday promotions, like discounted shipping.
- Last-minute gift ideas.
10. Get ready for steep sales peaks. The holiday action begins in earnest the day after the Thanksgiving holiday in late November. MarketLive, an ecommerce platform software provider, reports overall conversion increases of 66% (to 6.44%), and visit-to-cart ratio increases of 33% (to 11.89%) between the first half of the fourth quarter and the peak season in 2007. The best way to get ready is to follow a pre-determined marketing countdown calendar, with detailed plans for each week leading up to and through the holiday season.
|
Weeks prior to holiday
|
Marketing activity |
|---|---|
| Ten weeks to go | Optimize site content for top natural search keyword terms. (It takes 30-45 days for changes to register with major search engines). Send email messages to early shoppers with services such as “Shop now, ship later†or “Guaranteed delivery by ….†Make sure gift guides offer products keyed to the season. |
| 9 weekse | dentify the paid search terms you want to own and begin spending more on them. Encourage e-mail sign-ups in advance of the season by offering discounts to new registrants. Launch a holiday-specific e-mail newsletter with specialized content and product offers. Prominently display “top sellers,†“our picks,†and “top products,†to stimulate gifting ideas. |
| 8 weeks | Begin weekly e-mail campaigns encouraging early shopping and promoting popular gift products and categories. Participate in feeds for comparison shopping engines to boost visibility for your brand. Promote items that shoppers want in advance of a holiday such as decorations or party wares. Boost the prominence of customer service information and include event cut-off dates on shipping pages. |
| 7 weeks | arget loyal customers with offers for the season, such as a percentage off purchases above a particular sales threshold, or free gifts with a purchase. Move gift guide links and content into prominence on the home page and relevant category pages, along with gift card information. |
| 6 weeks | Use e-mail and paid search campaigns to emphasize collections of items and to highlight new products that may be out of stock later in the season. Stimulate wish list usage with a contest offering participants the chance to “win their wish list.†On the site, adjust cross-sell and upsell product mix to include gift cards and popular gift picks. Use search results pages to provide messages about gift items. If you offer free shipping above a threshold, prominently display the dollar amount the customer would need to add in order to qualify. |
| 5 weeks | Roll out an initial free-shipping offer to entice shoppers to complete purchases. Post shipping cut-off information on the home page and in the gift guide area. |
| 4 weeks | Step up e-mail campaigns to twice per week, scheduling campaigns on Thursdays or Fridays to stimulate purchasing on the weekend, when conversion rates peak. Place links for creating, sharing and finding wish lists prominently throughout the site. Move customer-service links to a prominent place on the page. Solicit and post holiday-related, user-submitted content. |
| 3 weeks | Offer sweepstakes games and drawings to stimulate visits during the peak period. Launch a holiday countdown, employing a ticker on the home page and spotlighting shipping cut-offs. Highlight a “gift of the day†or “special of the day†tied to the countdown. |
| 2 weeks | Roll out a second free-shipping offer to entice shoppers to complete purchases during the peak period. Use customer reviews to highlight which items are hot. Use a “top-rated gifts†category on the home page and in the gift guide. |
| 1 week | Discount expedited shipping for loyal customers and top spenders. Tie a special promotion to shipping date cut-off days, such as a gift with purchase or a 24-hour sale. On the site, use global banners to highlight shipping cut-off days, changing information daily as the deadlines pass. Once the cut-off dates have passed, begin allotting space to post-peak sale previews. |
| On The Holidays | Send an email alerting customers to sale offers to come. Boost the prominence of customer service information on how to make returns and redeem gift cards. Prominently place links into clearance categories on the home page, exposing sub-categories by price, gender and product type. |
Source: MarketLive, Inc.