Your Holiday Marketing Timeline

September

• Craft some text for your holiday specials. Have a brainstorming session to come up with some creative copy. Ask everyone you know which one they would buy. Once you’re happy with the offerings and your text, talk to your graphic designer about implementing the special onto your website. They can create a graphic or button for you to draw attention to your new special.
• Double check to be sure your supply chain can accommodate your specials. There’s nothing worse than having time sensitive orders you can’t fulfill.

October

• Put the specials up on your Web site, make them pretty and appealing – link from your homepage or feature specials on the homepage. On these pages you’ll be able to market “seasonally” for these specials. Instead of just saying “unique ties for men” you can target it towards the holidays; “christmas and holiday ties: gifts for the man in your life”.
• Design an email marketing blast to go out to everyone on your list. If you’re really prepared, you’ve collected these from every online buyer you’ve had over the last year (or five), and you have a wide base of possible customers that want to be exposed to your holiday specials.
• Put the email blasts on your Web site. (Yes, before you send them out to your email list – it’s okay, I promise.) Email blasts are news, so put them on your Web site or blog, go visit some other blogs or forums, and talk about what you’re offering, then add the link to your email signature. Optimize this new content and get the search engines looking into what’s going on ahead of time. If you’re putting this up in early October, those pages should be indexed and ranking by Christmas.
• Send out the first blast in October – you probably won’t get many buyers yet, you’re just planting the seed with this email campaign.
• Write three more email marketing blasts to capitalize on shoppers in early November, the week before Thanksgiving, and the week before the last possible day you can ship your product to reach customers prior to the holiday.
• You want to be prepared for Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving). The term Cyber Monday, a neologism invented by the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org division, refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday, which unofficially marks the beginning of the Christmas online shopping season. In response, many retailers now encourage people to do their online shopping at home on Thanksgiving Day itself by offering their Black Friday sales online that day.

November

• This is when your hard work in September and October will pay off. Send out the emails you prepared for early November and Thanksgiving week. If you have a great email marketing team, send copy to them in October with instructions on when to send. You’re going to be busy and won’t have time to think about it then, so have it done and ready to go.
• Visit (or have friends visit) some social networking sites. Find out where people are talking about holiday shopping and online shopping, letting them know you’ve got specials and packages. A link from these sites will always help. Myspace, Facebook, or any industry-specific blogs you can find will do the trick. If you are in the electronics business, search google for “electronics blogs or forums” — sign up and start posting about your specials. This can be time-consuming, but it’s free advertisement for your company. Be sure to add your URL and keywords to the SIGNATURE of your account and any relevant information you post in these forums can help get you visitors to your site and help with your search engine ranks.

December

• Send out your last email blast and then take advantage of last-minute shoppers by offering them “one click” buying from the homepage. Give them last minute gift options in the email. Feature a description of your special, a “buy it now” link straight to the credit card form, and it’s done. Make sure you let them know when the last possible day to buy online is, so they can get the item shipped to them or their gift recipient on-time. Don’t worry about shipping; procrastinators know last minute shipping is expensive, and they’ve learned to deal with it.
• Tip: One thing I look for when I’ve procrastinated is the lovely phrase, “free shipping.” I’m just dumb enough to pay a bit more for a product if the shipping is free. Wrap some shipping cost into the product price, and give the impression of a discount along with the “package deal” you’re already offering.

Have a Stress-Free Holiday Season

Plan ahead. Get content on your site early to rank for the holiday season. This time of year is extremely competitive, and if you have a strategy that makes it easy to execute when you’re busy, the holidays won’t seem so hectic. Give it a try, jump on board with those early holiday revelers, and hopefully, your holidays will be merry and stress free.

resource: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3626915

Design & Marketing for the Holiday Season – Tip #8

Allow Shoppers to Narrow Their Search

Giving the customer advanced search features will help them to make a purchase more quickly and easily

This is my last tip for your holiday marketing plans. Creating a custom sort feature can help your customers narrow down their search into a price range and category that is customized to them. Another way to do this is by doing a “sort by price” feature within the category. For example, if you sell guitars and accessories and someone clicks on acoustic guitars… they can range anywhere from $150 – thousands of dollars. Once they are in the section if you give them the option to sort the items by price, they wont have to scroll through possibly dozens of pages to find something in the price range they are looking for. And by using that feature they are less likely to miss items for sale from tunnel vision of scanning so many items that are irrelevant.

That’s all I have for this year. I wish you all the best of luck and success this holiday season. Remember these tips to help prepare your store for the holidays and make the most out of this busy online shopping season.

Amy Fedele
Creative Director
BullzeyeDesign.com

Design & Marketing for the Holiday Season – Tip #7

Provide Timelines for Key Dates (Make it look Festive!)

Timelines are very helpful to your customers buying for a specific holiday. This gives them the peace of mind in knowing that their recipient is going to get the gift ON or BEFORE the holiday. Nothing is worse than sending a gift to a loved one and expecting them to get it by Christmas, only to find out later that the shipping was delayed because of the holiday rush and Aunt Mary didn’t get her personalized Christmas Ornament until after she already took her tree down for the year.

By offering this information to your customers on the item page of the site, you can help convert sales. Especially use this if you are offering a custom service such as embroidery or engraving. Send out a newsletter email to your customers letting them know that if they want to order a custom gift for someone to make sure they order it by a certain date to ensure delivery for the holiday. Your customers will thank you for the heads up.

Design & Marketing for the Holiday Season – Tip #6

Offer Gift Wrapping – Give a Sneak Peak of What the Wrapping Will Look Like

Offering gift wrap is a great way to make your store a “one-stop shop”. This is especially true if your site has the option of wish lists and gift registrys for weddings, showers, birthdays, etc.

Personally, when I buy gifts online I like to order the gift wrapping and the gift message and ship it directly to the person. A lot of people buy gifts for their friends, family and loved ones online because they may not live closeby, so offering the wrapping and gift messages right along with the purchase saves them from having to double-ship the item to their gift recipient. The extra $4.00 charge may be worth it for a lot of your customers in lieu of paying twice the amount of shipping fees and having to deal with the hassle of reshipment.

Design & Marketing for the Holiday Season – Tip #5

Allow people to buy gift cards, display them visually, and design them so that you would buy them for someone…

Let people choose between an online and physical gift certificates

Making the gift cards look nice is a major plus, especially because of the nature of the card – A GIFT. You wouldn’t want to hand grandma a slip of receipt paper for Christmas… you’d want to make it look more special than that.  This also yields true for online gift cards. Sometimes (depending on your target audience) it’s helpful to provide the option of a physical gift card that you can mail to the customer (which can be used for both in-store shopping and/or online shopping). Handing someone a nice gift card is a lot more personal than shooting them an email with a coupon code number. Which would you prefer?