Top tips to taking advantage of Valentine’s Day online

With Christmas a distant memory and Valentine’s Day 2012 fast approaching, online competition is fiercer than ever. Now is the time to ensure online retailers are making the most of their websites and in turn, maximising those conversion rates.

Rule number one is to ramp up your marketing, but it’s not necessarily how much you spend but where you spend it. Sage Pay’s e-business benchmark report revealed recently that almost half of respondents who had above-average conversion rates spent no more than 9 percent of their annual turnover on marketing related activity. Here are some more top tips to make the most of your marketing spend:


1. Up your SEM or PPC campaigns
Optimise your content to make sure you appear at the top of results listings such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing.  It’s the simplest and most powerful way to reach an audience that is actively looking for your services. Consider writing Valentine’s-themed blog posts to boost visibility, it can be anything from top gifts for Valentine’s Day to more editorially led pieces on Valentine’s Day for non-romantics, recipes for sweet treats, make-your-own Valentine’s cards and gift ideas,  and surviving Valentine’s for your single customers.

2. Special offers
Limited-time offers and freebies all help to entice a customer to buy from your site so make sure any special offers are clear and visible on your homepage. Romanticism aside, UK shoppers love a bargain so slashed prices are a sure-fire way to attract customers. Research from the annual Sage Pay eBenchmark Report shows that 76 percent of high performing etailers boost web traffic and increase sales through special offers.

3. Spread positive word of mouth
If you have case studies and quotes from happy customers then you should be shouting from the rooftops about it.  No matter how much marketing you do, nothing is more effective than previous customers as advocates of your brand.  Make use of product reviews on your website and share positive feedback through Facebook and Twitter.

4. Make sure your website is friendly and usable
It may sound obvious, but making sure your website is easy to navigate and is performing at optimum functionality is vital. Customer confusion is one of the biggest sales conversion killers for ecommerce businesses. You can get a professional third party to give you feedback, or make use of usability testing services, but at the very least you need to invite honest feedback from friends and family, as this is often just as useful. You might also want to make you hosting provider aware of potential spikes in traffic, so that your site is available 24/7 should visitor numbers peak thanks to your increased marketing efforts.

5. Push your best sellers
Make things easy for your online customers by promoting your best sellers.  Think about placing these on your homepage or creating a new area to showcase these.  Online shoppers are a fickle lot and by making things as easy to find as possible, you can reduce your drop-out rates. Consider also introducing a “gift centre” area for seasonal items.

6. Stock up
There’s no bigger mistake than underordering stock to see you through a key national holiday for the consumer market.  There’s no point driving traffic to your site, only for potential customers to find their wanted products out of stock.

7. Offer free or next day delivery
Consumer expectations are at an all-time high and shoppers now not only want a good deal, they want it quickly.  Offering a premium next-day delivery service, or a free “super-saver” option, is vital in helping to encourage customers to place their order with you.

8. Increase resources
Checkout abandonment rates are a natural part of online shopping with many customers changing their mind at the last minute.  But in many cases, it doesn’t mean you should do nothing. Make sure you’re not losing customers that would otherwise convert by contacting them either on the phone or via email to identify the barriers.  If you can find out what the problem is you can analyse, fix and proactively reengage with shoppers.

9. Watch out for fraud
With all the excitement, don’t forget to keep an eye out for fraud. Thirty-one of our Benchmark report respondents said they had lost money to fraud in the past year, with a further 5 percent stating they didn’t know how much money they had lost.  With a sudden influx of transactions, it can be hard to monitor, but the three key things you can do to help mitigate the risk are:
* Analyse the results provided by your fraud screening tools
* Check the postcode against the area code at the start of the telephone number
* Look out for a low cost transaction followed by several high cost transactions.

Colin Mould is customer services manager at payment services provider Sage Pay.

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