Five tips to help you get set for Christmas

As a multichannel retailer, you’ve probably spent much of the summer preparing your Christmas campaign. If you still need some help fine-tuning your online marketing in time for the festive season, ecommerce provider Demandware has put together a white paper titled Preparing for the 2010 Holiday Shopping Season. Here are just a handful of its best-practice tips:

• Make giving easy—at Christmas it’s a fair assumption that many of the people coming to your website are shopping for someone else, so make sure you make it as easy as possible for them to pick the perfect gift. Demandware recommends creating “gift centres” that provide ideas for him, her, kids, pets and so on, and which can be further refined by price. Above all, remember to promote this functionality on your home page. Demandware also advises creating gifts sets—this type of bundling can “drive up average order value and gross margin”.

• Search pays—in the white paper Demandware quotes a Shop.org survey that found that “organic and paid-search yielded half of paying customers to online retailers during the 2009 holiday season”. To make the most of search in 2010, it advises updating your SEO data with Christmas-related messaging, reviewing which keywords drove the most organic traffic to your website last year, reviewing your paid-search marketing and results to find out which promotional messages worked, and beginning your holiday-centric keyword campaigns.

• Going mobile—m-commerce is a hot topic right now. To leverage it for the 2010 holiday season start with ensuring that your website is optimised for viewing on a mobile device such as a smartphone or an iPad. Demandware also suggests trialling a text-messaging campaign in the run-up to Christmas.

• Social skills—“mainstream shoppers are slowly beginning to find retailers through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media applications in 2010—this was not the case in 2009.” Social media can help you create buzz about your brand and some retailers are showering fans and followers with special promotions as a reward for them spreading the positive word. However, before you start giving away discount codes, first evaluate how best to target your audience through social networks and how it fits in with your business model.

• Put your site to the test—it always comes back to testing. According to Demandware, many retailers leave their sites vulnerable during the holiday season due to inadequacies in customer services, or performance management issues. To counteract this, remember to test all aspects of your site before peak trading—including load testing, whether your customer services team is up to speed with the latest promotions, and that you have sufficient stock to cope with a spike in demand. Mistakes at this stage can prove very costly.