I saw the first holiday commercial of the season yesterday and I couldn’t believe that it was that time of year again. I immediately opened my calendar and once that had made a believer out of me, it got me thinking about how to help some of my clients out during the happiest, and most commercial, time of year.
While Santa may leave toys under the trees of children who have behaved themselves over the course of 12 months, he rarely visits e-commerce sites and buys everything he needs for his one night adventure across the globe.
So what can sites do to entice customers to visit their store instead of the millions of others on the Web? This question has a myriad of answers but there are a few things you can do this holiday season to try and boost your sales and holiday ROI, without major work.
- Create a holiday section on your site – Making a holiday section is a great way for you to catch people’s attention and drive additional sales. If you get this going early enough, you will be able to optimize for holiday terms so that the search engines have time to index the new section. If you are a little late to the game then at worst you will have a landing page to drive paid search ads to. Below are a few ideas to make your holiday section really stand out:
- Make the tab red.
- Place it at the end of your top navigation or anywhere in the upper right hand corner of your home page so people’s eyes naturally go to it.
- Use holiday images to draw people’s attention to it and to help them get into that holiday spending spirit.
- Holiday Product Bundles – It’s always a great idea, especially if you have a surplus of a particular item, to create bundles of products matching one popular item with one that you have a lot of stock for. This will give your customers the satisfaction of getting a 2-for-1 or something for free. Sticking two or three products together will entice people to buy the pack instead of just the one item that they want.
- Shipping Deals – Make sure to place a banner promoting any shipping deal somewhere above the fold so that your customers know the deal is going on and how to obtain it. Below are a couple of ideas on sales to run:
- Behold the holy grail of online shopping deals…free shipping. While this may seem like an obvious deal to run, in all of my time running eCommerce sites nothing is more popular than those two words. People flock from miles around to catch this deal and it is the perfect way to take some business away from your competition, as long as you do it right. It’s all about how you present it and what you are selling.
- For example: If you are selling big ticket, heavy items such as appliances, figure out how much it will cost you to ship something to your furthest destination and just build that into the cost. While your price may seem higher than your competition, the free shipping deal will put your customers at ease when they don’t have to add on anything to ship a refrigerator from New York to California.
- Free Shipping for purchases over X amount of dollars. This is an easy one. If you get people to buy more things to achieve the free shipping, then you will make more money. The average person will spend $20 over what they expected to so that they don’t have to pay for shipping. With the increased volume of the holiday season, and people’s affinity for free shipping, you are more likely to catch their attention and gain that extra income.
While SEO is usually a glacial process, moving around some stuff on your site to catch your customer’s attention is sometimes all you need. It’s not always about keywords and volume, but really just about how to place things correctly on your site to drive more sales. So try them out for yourself and have a great holiday season!
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