How to Dominate the 2013 Holiday Shopping Season

Holiday shoppers also have a whole different list of concerns than typical buyers. They probably don't have accounts with you, and value easy checkout. Make it easy for them to buy from you. Feature things like simple return policies and gift wrapping. It's also helpful to implement messaging around the idea of gifting and make people who typically fall outside your target market feel welcome.

Make Sure Your Site is Customer Friendly
The layout of your site may make logical sense to your customers, but remember that holiday shoppers aren't the same people. They're the husbands, aunts, cousins, friends and children of them. This may be their first time shopping with you, so nip any possible confusion in the bud and make quick purchases easy. Organize your products in a way that makes sense to shoppers with little to no context for your site.

Another key thing you can do to amplify conversion is help with decision making. Lead shoppers to items quickly through navigation. Adding categories like "most popular gifts for men, women, etc." and highlighting gift sets helps shoppers find suitable ideas. The customer experience should be centered on making products easy to find and purchase for first-time visitors.

Don't Forget to Test
The mantra of digital marketing is test, retest and then test again. This is the surest way to optimize conversion. Holiday windows can be short, however, especially during promotion periods. That doesn't mean you shouldn't test, it just means you need to have a testing strategy before launch.

A great approach is to redirect 10 percent of your traffic to a test landing page. If this page leads to an obvious conversion increase, more traffic — or even all of it — can be immediately switched over the test landing page. Be nimble and ready to react to any observed lifts. Evaluate intraday response rates on headlines, product pages and highlighted products. Change whatever isn't performing well. If you enter a campaign with testing in mind from the start, you can take advantage of very quick optimization and improve results.

Take Full Advantage of Google
Most of your holiday traffic is going to come from Google searches. Everybody wants a piece of the Google search pie, but you can increase yours with a few tactics:

• Go after the longtail keywords for your best return on investment, and add every model and catalog reference number to go after niches.
• Coordinate product listing ads, pay per click and search engine optimization for each popular gift item in order to increase rankings on Google's search engine results page.
• Eliminate links to maintenance and corporate pages during holiday time and use that real estate to highlight products.
• Align your messaging by making sure that any offer (e.g., free shipping or discounts) is duplicated in catalog, print, pay per click and the landing page.

Finally, consider highlighting your phone number. Even if you generally discourage phone calls, enabling customers to talk to you can alleviate shipping and return policy fears. Two-way communication goes a long way to closing sales during the holiday shopping season.

Many retailers rely heavily on holiday shoppers to drive sales that keep them profitable. The results of a holiday campaign can lead to spectacular success or abysmal failure. To avoid the latter, remember that the holiday season is anything but business as usual. Approach it as the unique time that it is, and make sure that you are marketing the right way, at the right time to the right people.

Ken Robbins is founder and president of RMI, a direct response marketing agency.