It's late November and your holiday e-commerce strategy has been in place for months. But as we enter the most crucial season of the year, there are still a few final reminders and strategies you can adopt to ensure your site is ready. Consider the following:
Boost Your SEO
Be sure you're speaking directly to your target audience while they're conducting web searches for the best gifts of 2013. Here are a few simple things you can do to fine-tune your search engine optimization strategy:
- Visible promotions: Ensure your holiday offers are in all visible site areas for further optimization, including pay per click, social media, email marketing and homepage content.
- SEO copy: Include targeted offer language from all channels within relevant landing and product pages with optimized meta descriptions, page titles, ALT tags and header tags.
- Relevant links: Evaluate and update all referral and inbound links from marketing campaigns so they're 100 percent relevant to the ad, email or search result.
- Fresh content: Keep adding fresh content and targeted keywords to your top category and product pages, and be sure they live on the upper half of the page.
- Internal linking: Ensure your top-selling products have direct links on your homepage.
- Micro data: Embrace the micro data in your schemas and optimize it to feed in all relevant data, including reviews, rankings, category names, pricing and more.
Leverage the Power of Promotions
Many retailers already employ these tried-and-true promotional strategies. At the very least, make sure you're leveraging some or all of the below as part of your holiday marketing plans this season:
- Shipping offers: Think outside the box when it comes to differentiation through shipping. For example, tie offers to a promotion such as "free shipping with a ‘Like,’ tweet or share" to boost social media presence while offering a valuable perk to shoppers.
- Cart abandonment campaign: Optimize your cart abandonment emails so that an initial email is sent within the first two hours of abandonment, and then another one a day or two later. Have each email build in the promotion incentive.
- Free gifts: Offer a free gift with purchase to incentivize shoppers to buy from you instead of the competition.
- Cross-sell and upsell: To increase average order value, leverage cross-sells, upsells, buy-one-get-one half off, price breaks on multiple purchases and/or show the customer how to qualify for free shipping.
- Digital advertising: Banner ads and retargeting campaigns are a great way to promote your holiday specials. They're easy to implement with a third party, cost effective and clearly demonstrate return on investment.
- Modal pop-up. To continue building your holiday email list, add a modal pop-up to capture addresses. This will also be helpful for the cart abandonment campaign.
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Last-Minute Holiday Tips to Ensure E-Commerce Success
It's late November and your holiday e-commerce strategy has been in place for months. But as we enter the most crucial season of the year, there are still a few final reminders and strategies you can adopt to ensure your site is ready. Consider the following:
Boost Your SEO
Be sure you're speaking directly to your target audience while they're conducting web searches for the best gifts of 2013. Here are a few simple things you can do to fine-tune your search engine optimization strategy:
Leverage the Power of Promotions
Many retailers already employ these tried-and-true promotional strategies. At the very least, make sure you're leveraging some or all of the below as part of your holiday marketing plans this season: