The 12 Days of Holiday Revenue Maximization for Your Online Store

Coremetrics data shows that online spending on Black Friday this year was up 15.9% compared to last year, and up even more on Cyber Monday. That is a great start, but it is too early for online retailers to rejoice. While it is good news that more holiday dollars are being spent online, most online retailers will fall short of achieving their full revenue potential this season.

For those of you who are committed to maximizing revenue during the holidays, here are 12 ways — for 12 days — to do just that. If you can address these 12 important opportunities in the next two weeks, your holiday revenue could dramatically surpass your expectations.

Day 1: It’s All About Quality Control

Check for major bugs, code errors, security errors and long load times on browsers, new and old, including IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 3.0, Google Chrome, and Safari. Also, ensure your site is highly usable by making sure the following elements are present on your site:

A highly visible “View Cart” button on the top right of your site (this is where consumers expect it to be)
An “Add To Cart” button that sticks out like a sore thumb on your product page
A ”This Site Is Secure” promise above the fold on your shopping cart
Product review stars that accompany product thumbnails on your section pages (not just your product pages)
At my company, we’ve run scientific conversion tests on these elements and, for most sites, they should have a significant impact on conversion rates.

Day 2: Check for Content Thieves

Dozens of shopping portals have emerged this year as popular destinations for shoppers. Most of the traffic that goes to these shopping portals, however, comes from search engines. Quite often, these shopping portals have a search engine optimization strategy that relies on literally copying unique product descriptions from a merchant’s site and then using the descriptions to outrank the merchant.

The first sign that you may have been a victim of content theft is an abrupt, seemingly unexplainable drop in your traffic at some point in the past 12 months. Try searching for snippets of your unique copy in Google (one or two sentences at a time, with the text in quotes), and if you find shopping portals ranking above you with your copy, you’ll want to take action. For example, it is usually helpful to ensure that the public XML feed of your products does not include your unique copy.

Day 3: Map Promotions for the Holiday Shopping Season

Many online retailers leave holiday promotions until the last minute. This year, plan your promotions well in advance to ensure that your website, paid search campaigns and e-mail campaigns are all in sync. There is nothing worse than promoting a free shipping offer to a shopper through e-mail or paid search advertising, and then having that shopper abandon your site because they can’t find the details of the offer on your site.

Day 4: Build and Promote Clearance Pages

I hereby dub 2010 the year of the “daily deal.” Many online shoppers are hyper-focused on finding time-sensitive, extraordinary offers. Don’t ignore this huge source of revenue. Create a clearance center, promote it aggressively on your homepage, populate it with deals that are truly too good to pass up and swap the deals out on a regular basis.

Make sure you encourage shoppers to sign up for a special mailing list or to join you on Facebook and Twitter to be notified of new deals. Tools like the DailyDealBar will help you to time deals in advance and automatically post them to your Twitter and Facebook Page each day.

Day 5: Show a Pulse

If you operate an online store that is not backed by a well-known brand name, shoppers will be immediately skeptical of you. They’ll wonder if you’re a real company, and if you are, whether you care about customer service and helping them give gifts this holiday season.

One of the best ways to overcome this angst is to show a pulse. Update your site’s header to reflect the colors of the season or to showcase holiday promotions and/or promises. Go a step further by beefing up your “About Us” page by writing content that talks about your mission, your commitment to your shoppers and showcases pictures of your employees that are accompanied by their personal commitments to serve shoppers well.

Day 6: Promote Specific Products on PPC

Many online merchants spend significant time and money chasing clicks from shoppers who are very early in the decision-making process. Such shoppers may be searching for very general phrases like “gifts for Dad” or “golf gifts.” During the holiday season, however, you have a better chance to drive profitable sales on searches that relate to a specific product that shoppers have already decided to buy. Invest time in creating campaigns in AdWords and AdCenter that promote specific products that have the potential to be big sellers.

Day 7: Analyze Bounce Rates to Re-merchandise Key Pages

Identify the most highly trafficked pages on your site (likely homepage and section pages), and assess the bounce rate for each. Once you’ve identified pages that don’t encourage shoppers to browse deeper on your site, drill down further to identify the bounce rate for each of the keywords sending traffic to that page. Then, re-merchandise your products on that page to ensure the inclusion of products that shoppers intended to find on this page when they originally clicked into it from a search engine. This will help conversion rates and SEO.

Day 8: Clear Your Cart of Distractions

“Yes, Mr. Shopper, I understand you would like to purchase a leather briefcase, but before you do, I’d like you to first browse through our catalog of jewelry boxes, money clips, and fanny packs…”

Is that the message you want to send to shoppers? Probably not. That is the message you’ll send, however, if your “View Cart” page (the page a shopper sees after adding an item to their cart) has your standard left-hand navigation on it. My company has run countless tests on shopping carts, and quite often our testing leads us to make the following recommendations:

Remove your standard navigation from your cart page (except for shipping/return policies)
Make the proceed-to-checkout button more visible than anything in your cart
Highlight the fact that your cart is secure
Include only relevant cross-sell items
Simplify your cart pages as much as possible
In the meantime, you can easily install tools like The Cart Closer that are proven to prevent shoppers from abandoning your shopping cart.

Day 9: Create a Shipping Calendar, Communicate Milestones

If I buy it today, will it arrive by Hanukkah or Christmas? That’s the question on the mind of many of your shoppers this time of year. FedEx, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service have posted holiday shipping guidelines on their sites. It is important that you review these guidelines early, use them to create your own internal shipping deadline calendar, make it easy for customers to find and update your site regularly in order to keep your shoppers informed.

Day 10: Schedule Rating and Product Review Requests

Let’s face it: online shoppers love reading reviews. The two reviews that matter the most are reviews of your store and reviews of particular products purchased from your store.

To get more reviews of your store (the kind of reviews that show up in Google next to your site’s listing), schedule e-mails to go out to your recent shoppers after their merchandise has arrived and ask them for reviews. Give them a direct link to your page on several sites that collect reviews for you, such as BizRate and PriceGrabber.

To get more product reviews (the type of reviews that will show up on your website), pre-schedule an e-mail to holiday shoppers that they will receive on the afternoon of December 25 or sometime on December 26.

Day 11: Update Your Return Policy

Many shoppers have disciplined themselves not to buy from an online store that doesn’t have a clear return policy. Make your return policy easy to understand, and include all of the specific information that shoppers will need if they decide to return merchandise after the holiday.

Day 12: Build Your Q1 Strategy

It sounds counter-intuitive to spend a lot of time thinking about Q1 of next year while you are in the middle of this year’s busiest shopping season, and I agree with that sentiment. That said, it would be a mistake to ignore Q1 all together. January, February and March are big months for many online retailers. Think about how you can convert Q4 customers into Q1 customers, and how the lessons you are learning this holiday season can be applied to next year’s big holidays that fall early in the year.