Online retailers are ramping up their businesses to take full advantage of the most important shopping season of the year. This is make or break time for many retailers and if you’re not well prepared, you could miss out on the year’s best sales and profit opportunity.

Get your store ready for this year’s holiday season by planning and implementing an effective email marketing strategy, engaging in social media, targeting alternate sales channels, implementing a cart abandonment solution, and creating mobile presence.

Email marketing for 2010 Holidays

According to Responsys, online retailers sent an average of 14.3 emails to subscribers during the months of November and December in 2009. The analyst firm Forrester reports that 20% of consumers indicated they will be more inclined to open emails offering discounts on products and services than last year due to the economy.

Your customer email list is one of your most important tools. Emailing your customers before the official start of the holiday shopping season is the best way to stay relevant to your customers and improve your email open rates and loyalty during the actual holiday season when customers will be bombarded with offers from all over.

So what should you be doing now to capture customer attention during the upcoming holiday shopping season?

Review past holiday campaigns. Look back at last year’s analytics to review which days during the holiday months produced the most sales and email your customers special holiday promotions on those days.

Develop an email delivery schedule. Set up your email delivery schedule with a unique message and promotional plan. And stick to the schedule.

Create highly targeted email campaigns. Remember that many merchants employ email marketing heavily for the holiday season so your email campaigns must be highly targeted, with every aspect of each campaign fully optimized. Develop rush email templates and create a sense of urgency within the subject line or within the body of the email:

• Only one week left till Christmas
• Today is the last day for Guaranteed Christmas Delivery
• Friday, December 17th is National FREE Shipping Day

Plan post-holiday programs now. The new customers you acquire during the holiday season may turn out to be very engaged and a well-planned post-holiday program can help you take advantage of that engagement. Rewarding your paying holiday customers with a discount, sending out promotions giving customers a reason to purchase what they wanted but didn’t get, and sending out promotions to people who created wish lists are some of the best ways to strengthen customers’ connection with your brand after the holidays.

Social media planning and execution

During the holiday season, when you can win or lose customers almost instantly, social media engagement can serve as an important touch point between you and your customers. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are the popular social media networks that you can use to engage with your customers online. According to statistics, the average Facebook user has 130 friends and 50% of them return to Facebook.com daily. Facebook can provide you with a lot of free advertising for your website and product lines at such a vital time of the year.

Engaging with your customers online and participating in the online conversations in various social media channels can help you increase your brand awareness, elevate marketing message, and ultimately customer loyalty and sales conversions.

Facebook will play a major role in holiday shopping so make sure your Facebook page includes your sales promotions. GoECart merchants can benefit from built-in Facebook integration which allows shoppers to “like” and “share” your products with their family, friends, and associates on Facebook. Also, offer exclusive coupons to your Facebook fans and friends.

Twitter is another powerful social media channel that you can use in your holiday Internet marketing strategy. Begin promoting your Twitter page now so when the holiday season arrives you can tweet sales, special promotions, and hot new products. Offer exclusive coupons to your Twitter followers.

How to deal with Shopping Cart Abandonment during the Holidays

Consumers are more budget conscious than ever. They may take several days or weeks to make a purchase. A study done in 2009 by McAfee, the online security provider, showed that of the 163 million shopping transactions they tracked, 65 percent of those shoppers waited a day or more to complete a purchase.

What should you do now to encourage prompt purchases and prevent lost sales and shopping cart abandonment?

Put an Automated Shopping Cart Abandonment Solution in Place. If you do not have a shopping cart abandonment solution in place, it is extremely important that you implement one. You could be losing half of your potential sales to abandoned carts; but an automated remarketing campaign can recover many of those lost sales, directly impacting your sales and holiday profits.

Offer Special Incentives to Buy Now. Send a personalized follow up email to shoppers who abandoned their carts before completing their purchase. Express urgency for the holiday season and consider offering them a coupon. Relieve their concerns about site security, privacy, and price protection to get the order now. If you have the capacity in your call center, call those customers who abandoned their carts and assist them with placing their orders.

Transform Service-Based Messages into Revenue Opportunities with Rich Transactional Emails. This holiday season, do not let the one-time buyers simply come and go. Instead of sending generic text based order confirmation and shipping notification emails, include links to related products and special incentives to order more gifts. Or, reward your customers with a special discount for themselves. These promotional offers should be secondary to the transactional message content and should be included as a soft-sell, not as an attempt to force another sale.

‘Tis the Season to Target Alternate Sales Channels

Customers are more likely to buy if they see messages coming through various marketing channels. The more channels you can use, the greater the penetration of your products and services into your customer base. Use these alternate channels to get the maximum payback during this holiday season.

• Online Marketplaces: Update and expand your marketing channels to include eBay, Amazon.com, Buy.com, Overstock, and Sears.com marketplaces. By selling your products on these marketplaces you can extend your reach to millions of customers that are already registered in these marketplaces.
• Coupon sites: Online coupons are a powerful tool in reaching consumers with greater precision and lower costs. Consumers of all income segments are increasingly making coupons part of their shopping routine. According to ComScore, 31.6 million people visited a coupon or promotional site as of December 2009, a 46 percent increase in just two years. The trend is most likely to continue this year.
• Affiliate programs: Most affiliate marketers look for new products and offers to promote throughout the holiday season, use this opportunity to increase the number of affiliate partners you already have. After the holiday season, you can then reach out to these affiliates that you have built a relationship with over the holiday season and offer them new messaging and content to continue promoting your product lines.

Don’t ignore the mobile channel – its here and happening!

As cell phones get smarter, people are using them less to make calls and more to text, shop, read news, play games, engage with social networks, and perform routine tasks. A recent study by Coda Research agency has revealed that mobile eCommerce in the US will hit $2.42 billion in 2010. It is more important than ever to have a mobile presence for the 2010 holiday season.

You should seriously consider investing in an m-commerce solution if you do not have one in place already. Notably, two-thirds of mobile consumers say they prefer the mobile web over mobile apps for shopping. Understanding the ways in which consumers want to interact with your brand through mobile phones is a new and important task you need to do as you prepare for the 2010 holiday season.

The key to successful mobile commerce is knowing how to interact with consumers through the mobile channel and then creating an excellent user experience. Keep the product assortment limited to your popular products. Focus on ease of navigation, quick checkout, and fast loading pages on your mobile site.

By taking the time to prepare for the holiday season with an effective e-mail marketing strategy, social media engagement, alternate sales channels, cart abandonment solutions and mobile presence, you will have a jump start on your competitors and your sales will be much higher than if you wait till the last minute.

Is your ecommerce solution provider ready for this holiday season?

GoECart can help you succeed by implementing tailored ecommerce solutions to boost sales during the holidays and all year round. GoECart understands how important it is to convert your website visitors into paying customers. GoECart Ecommerce Solutions allow you to easily create and publish effective custom landing pages that motivate customers to buy from you.

It is crucial to have social media integrated into your marketing strategy this holiday season. At GoECart we have built-in integration with Facebook, Twitter, ShareThis and more to help you easily facilitate social media engagement with your audience.

If you want to take control of transactional emails, GoECart offers a built-in solution that allows you to monitor transactional emails as they are delivered and easily change content on-the-fly for an optimized performance. With no need for any third party integration and easily configurable built-in abandonment solution, this feature is guaranteed to produce high return for merchants.

Visit GoECart today and join hundreds of companies that rely on GoECart to Sell More™ products and services this holiday shopping season and all year round.

Many factors contribute to increasing online sales with your ecommerce website. The first step is attracting the right visitors. The second step is converting those visitors to paying customers. But how do you maximize conversions? Start by working on your website’s usability and customer shopping experience. Website usability and a positive shopping experience encourage sales and customer loyalty and significantly impact conversion rates. The following best practices for increasing conversions on your ecommerce website can easily fit into any marketing budget.

Website design tips for increasing conversions

When website visitors cannot find what they are looking for quickly, they abandon the website without making a purchase. For an ecommerce website, every aspect of your website must serve the purpose of encouraging sales. Use the following website design tips to connect with potential customers and drive profitable sales:

• Differentiate your company from the competition. Emphasize the unique benefits that make you stand out from the competition.
• Personalize the shopping experience by “remembering” the potential customer from their previous visits to your site. Greet them and display items and information relevant to their past viewing habits and keep unpurchased items in their shopping cart similar to sites like Amazon.com’s persistent shopping cart feature.
• Add user-friendly navigation features such as advanced site search that enables search by size, price, brand, and more.
• Build credibility and trust among potential customers by displaying relevant certificates and seals on your website home page and critical action pages, such as a Better Business Bureau seal, a McAfee Secure seal, a TRUSTe seal, an SSL certificate, or a consumer ratings badge.
• Let your customers get to know you by putting employee bios and photos on your About page and use social media platforms such as a blog, Facebook fan page, FourSquare or Twitter to interact with customers on a more personal level.

Product page tips for increasing conversions

Once a website visitor has found a product that may fulfill their needs, give them everything they need to make a purchase decision. Dynamic, informative content that answers all their questions will keep your potential customer from comparison shopping on a competitor’s website. Increase conversions and profits with the following product page best practices:

• Incorporate images and rich media features into your product pages like zoom, colorizing, dynamic image re-sizing, and online video.
• Add complete product features and specs for each product including differentiating factors, customer reviews and testimonials, and frequently asked questions about the product. Indicate if the product is available or out of stock and the shipping methods.
• Make the “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button prominent on the page.
• Include complementary products on the page in order to give your customers a complete range of options and potentially increase the amount of the purchase.

Simplify the ordering and checkout process
No matter what you are selling, be it Apparel and Accessories, Furniture or Office Supplies, a drawn out or confusing checkout process may lead to a potential customer abandoning their shopping cart.  Improve conversions and increase sales by eliminating unnecessary steps in the checkout process. For example, displaying the total purchase cost including shipping in the shopping cart before checkout gives customers peace of mind and helps avoid sticker shock that may cause them to abandon the purchase.

Other factors that encourage customers to follow through on a sale are quick one page checkouts and multiple payment options. With one page checkout, the customer knows where they are in the buying process and can see all information related to their order at the same time. Give your customers the convenience of multiple payment options such as PayPal, credit cards, online checks, BillMeLater, eLayaway or Google checkout.

Recover shoppers with abandoned shopping carts by contacting them later via email. Find out what prompted them to abandon the cart so you can make necessary changes in the future. Increase conversions by offering them customer service assistance in completing their transaction and a discount if they complete their purchase within a certain time frame. A reminder email greatly increases conversions and the added attention builds customer loyalty as well.

Analyze visitor behavior and make website adjustments

Use web analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Omniture, and eye tracking tools like Crazy Egg or ClickTale, to understand the online activity of your visitors and potential customers. You may also consider employing website feedback forms using tools like Kampyle or GetSatisfaction to analyze visitor behavior. Analyze your exit pages to find out why visitors are leaving. Is all information clear and accurate, are any links broken, and is the page easy to navigate? Remedying these factors will keep visitors engaged and interested, thereby improving conversion rates. In addition to the exit pages, analyze the top entry pages as well. Make these pages even more effective with up-to-date information, easy navigation and call to action links.

Eye tracking is another element that can improve conversion. Find out where visitors give the most attention and where they click – even if it is not a link. For a graphic or photo that gets many clicks you may want to add a quick zoom feature, additional information, or make it a navigation point. Analytics and eye tracking tools tell you what website your visitors come from, where they click within your site, and how long they spend on a given page.

Enhancing a potential customer’s experience on your ecommerce website is the key to increased conversions. Every contributing factor combines to make purchase and profits more likely, eliminate abandoned shopping carts, and acquire and retain loyal customers.

Increase conversion rates with GoECart’s suite of Optimization Tools

GoECart® offers innovative solutions designed to help merchants and retailers of all sizes to compete more effectively in rapidly maturing ecommerce markets. GoECart has long been known for its quick one-page checkout and recently introduced transactional email module that helps recover lost sales from cart abandonment.

Further, GoECart’s built-in integration with leading Web Analytics tools allow online businesses to understand the customer experience by providing deep insight to what visitors are doing, where they are coming from, how much time they are spending, what they are buying most often, and when and why they are leaving. GoECart integrates seamlessly with advanced ecommerce analytics including Google Analytics, Omniture and Unica NetTracker (now part of IBM, NYSE: IBM). GoECart also features Web Usability Testing Optimization through tools like Google Website Optimizer to help ecommerce businesses eliminate design and UI pitfalls and increase website and shopping cart usability.

Visit GoECart today and join hundreds of companies that rely on GoECart every day to Sell more™ products and services online.

“What can we do to convert more of our site’s visitors into buyers?” This is one of the most common questions our clients ask us. We have found that one of the best and most cost effective methods to convert your current visitors into buyers is to accept and display customer product reviews.

The most popular online shopping networks, Epinions.com(SM), BizRate.com, and Shopping.com, have been built from the core concept of allowing consumers to write reviews on products. More and more consumers are using the web to research products before making their purchase, and customer product reviews now play a major role in the sales process.

Marketing Experiments Journal tested product conversion with and without product ratings by customers. Conversion nearly doubled, going from 0.44% to 1.04% after the same product displayed its five-star rating.

There are a number of ways that integrating consumer reviews into your site can substantially increase your conversion rates. These include answering common questions to help skeptical or ‘on-the-fence’ visitors close a purchase decision, introducing additional uses for a product and helping to up sell additional products.

Not only do consumer product reviews have a long history of increasing sales, they can also make your site stand out from your competitors. If your site provides the consumer with the answers they need, this builds their confidence in your product and increases your credibility. If you combine this with a competitive price, the chance of the customer making the purchase from you has increased substantially.

Now that we have covered some of the positive effects of customer product reviews, let’s touch on a potential darker side of the product review feature. Some smaller merchants who have a small client base might feel tempted to fabricate reviews. However this practice will ultimately hurt a merchant as most consumers can tell if a review is authentic. Your customers are trusting that your reviews are real, so be honest.

When assisting some clients with launching a customer product review program we have been asked the question “What should I do with negative reviews” We then remind the merchant that some negative reviews can actually help them and can bring validity to the program. A negative review can be beneficial to the merchant in identifying what product(s) consumers are not happy with, reducing returned orders by setting buyer expectations and answering their common questions. They can help consumers by possibly directing them to the correct product that meets all their needs, alerting them of additional items that may need to be purchased, or providing the ‘truth’ on a product without all the marketing hype.

One way we recommend dealing with a negative review is when you are notified of the issue and the product service was purchased from you, you can initiate contact with the client to see what needs to be done to rectify the issue. This feedback can then be sent to manufacturers and suppliers to improve their products and improve your relationship with them.

So how do you launch a customer reviews program? First, you need to start collecting consumer product reviews. We recommend emailing past clients with an incentive to write a review for the product(s) they purchased. The incentive can be a discount coupon, gift certificate, or similar token of appreciation. You can also start accepting reviews from the general public. Many ecommerce platforms such as GoECart require the reviewer to enter their email address to submit a review; this is a great way to increase your newsletter subscription list. Going forward you can send an email to customers a few weeks after they have received their purchase seeking feedback on the product and inviting satisfied customers to write a testimonial.

Customer reviews also provide some indirect benefits. For example, they supply your website with relevant original content that can be indexed by search engine crawlers. The reviews typically contain keywords and phrases that are unique from technical specifications and standard manufacturer descriptions. It also exposes customer-generated terms to the Search Engine Crawlers that other customers may be searching for to find that same product. This can help to increase your search engine rankings and help you better connect with customers.

All GoECart merchants have the Customer Product Review feature built into their standard platform. The GoECart site administrator can approve each of the reviews before they are taken live on the site, thus removing any irrelevant reviews. The GoECart platform treats consumer product reviews as normal page, because of this when a user performs a site search it scans the reviews to display them in the search results page.

Since people can easily to jump from one site to another, today’s internet merchants must look at what they are going to do to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Product reviews not only have been shown to increase browsers into buyers, but they also contribute to your differentiation from your competitors. Over time this will cause customers to come back to your site when they are ready to make the purchase. There is definite value in that.