The Holidays are upon us and your website traffic levels should be increasing, but are your sales? How can you impact your online sales during this Holiday season? Be prepared and implement a few suggestions as below.
Tips to Increasing your online Holiday Sales!

1) Single Click to Purchase off the Home Page!
Do you have an “Add to cart” button on your home page? Often times I am asked to critique websites and they simply are not displaying a product or multiple products for consumers to purchase on the home page (YES I mean above the fold), ensure your holiday or other high AOV (Average order value) items are well placed on your home page and ensure their is a consumer engagement device (Add to cart button) next to the photo of the product or the short description of the product, the product photo and add to cart button should both be linkable and take the consumer directly into your cart, we call this single click to purchase, get them in the sales funnel and quick!

a) Home Page -Add Gift Ideas Categorized by Price Levels
Categorical Gift Ideas help the need for the consumer to find it fast and from your home page or side navigation. Offer Gifts under $25 – Gifts Under $50 – Gifts Under $100 and so on, entice consumers into specific price offerings to get them into your sales funnel fast. If you do not have a navigable gifting by price section within your side bar navigation consider adding one. Test adding Gifting Ideas on your home page this Holiday season (Yes above the fold)!

2) Are you offering Gift Wrapping Service?
One of my clients did very well by offering gift wrapping service, his fulfillment center charged a fee of $3.50 cents per package he charged the consumer $10.00 and made a nice profit and had happy customers.

a) Ensure your cart has the ability to add this additional “Gift Wrapping” service to an order

b) Ask your fulfillment center if they offer gift wrapping and at what cost

3) Does your Website offer a Web Hosted Gift Card for the Gift Recipient?
Web hosted Gift cards are a great way to virally promote your website and let someone know they are about to receive something special. Give the consumer who made the purchase the ability to email the gift card which can be simply viewed online by the gift recipient upon email delivery via a linkable url. The email should have a forward option within the body so the gift recipient can send the email to friends and family letting them know what he/she will be receiving! They get to brag about the gift they are about to get, you get viral traffic!

4) Gift Cards – Gift Coupons – Gift Registry – O’My!
Ok, your online marketing team must have been prepared in July to launch some type of Holiday promotion in the way of your online marketing platform, right? NO! Ok, well there might be time to throw out a Holiday coupon through your direct marketing channels but these items will hopefully be on your radar to implement for either this Holiday season or the next.

a) Offer a branded Gift card or email-able Gift Coupon to your consumers! This company might be able to get your Gift Cards ready for this years Holiday purchasers if you hurry – Valutec

b) Get your company listed with http://giftcards.gifts.com – And give consumers the choice of redeeming their Gift.com Gift cards by purchasing your merchandise through their site!

c) Create a Gift Registry application to your website. Give consumers the ability to create a Gift registry account for a daughter, son, friend, grandma, grandpa, husband, wife, or for themselves? Allow consumers the ability to create a Gift registry on your site for any occasion, assign each account with a Gift ID or registry ID so other people can purchase items from your store that can be added to their gift account and shipped to them. A great example of this is at Wedding Channel Registry. Another example Check out Crate&Barrels Online Gift Registry!

Get your products sold – Become a Merchant Partner through the following sites:

www.MyRegistry.com

www.WeddingChannel.com

www.Gifts.com

5) Gift Tracking and Shipping Methods choices and Tracking is a must!
Consumers will feel “confident: purchasing Holiday items from your online store if they have shipping options as well as have an estimated delivery date before they make the purchase. You should implement shipment tracking with email notifications for the consumer, they will feel cared for and a true part of your collective brand community when they receive timely notifications of their items shipping movements!

a) Your shopping cart should have a second address selection for gift sending from purchaser, if not implement this quickly.

b) Consumers should be able to choose from overnight, regular 2 day or ground shipping the more options you offer the better!

6) Recruiting Holiday Centric Affiliate Sites to your Affiliate Program!
I don’t want to post any examples here as I am sure the affiliates who own the Holiday Gift websites will be bombarded with inquiries. The smart affiliate director would have been contacting, recruiting, brokering deals with, and ensuring home page ad placement for your affiliate program creative PRE holiday season on these affiliates sites. Often times these affiliates need additional incentive during the Holiday period to promote your affiliate program, (Yes they know what your call is about <smile>) offer them an additional performance incentive or a straight bonus for joining and promoting your company during the Holiday season. Gaining a ROS (run of site) or home page placement for your affiliate media on some of these sites can truly increase your affiliate sales during the Holidays!

7) Paid Search and Gifting Keywords!
Target gifting keywords centered on your specific product type based on demographic usage. The long tail extension for gifting keywords includes color choices or sizes as well as Gifting by price; descriptive gifting phrases are at a much lower CPC then their high volume Gift keyword counterparts. Is your product a great Gift for Woman? Or is your item a great Gift for Pets? I must say this is excellent exposure for your company, I do recommend you qualify this traffic by offering a price in your ad copy as well as other negative qualifiers to ensure only those consumers truly interested in what you have to offer actually click on one of your paid search ads. Be as specific and descriptive as possible when qualifying paid search traffic with your ad copy. Also do not expect this traffic to convert immediately, they will shop around and if they recall your domain name or if there is an option for them to bookmark the page they will hopefully come back and convert when they are ready!

Let the Holiday Emailing Begin!
Segment your email lists, offer items that are matched by previous consumer data purchases. Example’s include segmenting email offerings by gender, location, as well as previously purchased items. Emailing is normally stepped up this time of year to include Free Shipping offers for a specific price point. I have been receiving Macy’s Free Shipping with Purchases over $75.00 emails almost daily now since the start of last week. Get your offers out often and quickly.

9) Online Advertising, Make it Stick during the Holidays!
With so many consumers online now is the time for spot product promotions through major ad media outlets. Line up your vertical venues by promoting on Microsoft Partner properties such as Digg and Facebook as well as MSN properties such as MSN Shopping.

Another tip, be prepared for server overload and have a backup plan! This is the perfect time of year to offer new and exciting product offerings on your website, enjoy your Holiday sales!