Holiday Marketing 2002 Starts Early

Is it just me, or do holiday preparations seem to be coming sooner and sooner each year? Stores are already being decorated, magazines are carrying holiday ads, television stations are already airing holiday commercials, and I just heard “White Christmas” on the radio. Perhaps it’s simply marketing or perhaps because this year, since Thanksgiving comes so late and there are fewer traditional shopping days than usual, everyone feels they need to make a jump on things now.

Online marketers are no exception. According to online shopping rating service BizRate.com, consumers spent $4.3 billion online in October. Terra Lycos announced their findings from a recent online poll which revealed that 41% of users have already started their holiday shopping while others plan to start the day after Thanksgiving (25%) and some plan to begin in December (26%). And eMarketer, in its fourth annual U.S. Online Holiday Shopping Report, projects that Internet sales will maintain a double-digit growth while overall retail sales will only grow by 3-4% over last year.

For those of you involved at all in online consumer retailing, these figures bode well. If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to polish up and shine, and we’re here to help.

Helpful Holiday Tactics

1. Customer Service

First and foremost, beef up your customer service area. On your site, it’s helpful to include all of your contact information (email address, phone numbers and physical address) on every page so consumers don’t have to go hunting for this information. Increase email response time from days to hours, and consider implementing a real-time customer service tool like live chat.

With each passing year, as consumers become far more experienced online and have increased expectations and far less patience, Internet customer service continues to grow increasingly important. CustomerRespect.com, a division of International Ventures Research, has released its 2002 Online Customer Respect Study of Fortune 100 Companies, which reveals that nearly half of the U.S.’s largest enterprises failed to even respond to a basic online inquiry. At holiday time this can translate into many missed sales.

2. Usability

Polish up your site. Keep your navigation as simple and direct as possible, particularly when it comes to holiday gift areas. Anyone visiting your site should be able to find whatever they are looking for in four clicks or less. Be sure that shoppers can find your privacy policy and check over your site for any misspelled words or broken links.

Atlanta-based consulting firm Enterpulse Corp recently surveyed 300 people who use the Internet at least once a day and found that user expectations have risen quite a bit over the past few years. Two-thirds of those surveyed admitted that they would NEVER return to a website that was difficult to navigate or didn’t meet their expectations.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen suggests that putting a search box on each of your site’s pages is an essential part of creating a positive experience for your customers. He points out that “search” is often a user’s escape hatch when they are stuck in navigation and predicting where that may happen is impossible.

3. Marketing & PR

Polish up your holiday campaigns. If you haven’t already, begin any campaigns you’ve got planned for this holiday season — you don’t have a lot of time. Don’t have any specific plans yet? Get busy now. You have two essential tasks at hand: 1) getting visitors to your web site; 2) converting these visitors into buyers.

To address the first objective, strongly consider search engine marketing as that’s where a lot of online shoppers go to find what they’re looking for. Re-visit our article, “Driving Search Engine Results - Does it Pay to Pay?“. If you can afford it, prominent and frequent advertising is also a driving factor for site traffic at this time of year. While off-line advertising has its place, the advantage to online advertising is that the user is just a click away from your site. [Shameless plug: if you need help with your holiday campaign, contact us (info below).]

As for conversions, concentrate your efforts on popular features or products you have to offer. Make finding these items even easier by setting up a holiday gift section of “Great Gift Ideas” on your site. Run some kind of promotion — free holiday shipping or promotional give-aways with every purchase, for example. Build urgency by placing expiration dates on your offers, and be sure to give “order by, arrive by” dates.

Don’t forget the PR angle: If you’re doing anything special for the holidays like charity work or hosting a special event, write up a press release and work those media relations.

4. Communications Plan

It’s a lot harder to acquire new customers than it is to retain existing ones. If you haven’t planned an email campaign to your customer list, you ought to by now. Don’t forget vendors and your own staff either, as they can be customers and spokespeople for you at the same time.

Whatever the case and whatever the method, we hope you’ve got plans to capitalize on Holidays 2002. Make it the start of a fruitful 2003.

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