Improve Your Online Holiday Sales

More homes are expected to shop online this Christmas season, usually to evade the long lines, the hassles, and higher costs of fuel. Online businesses should grab this opportunity and check out the following.

Define your strategy – Determine whether your business would cater to your existing clientele or trying to encourage new customers to visit your site or perhaps both. Aside from which, look into the possibilities of providing discounts (both in your product/ service or at shipping/ handling) or setting-up a deadline in your special offers (inciting a level of urgency in your customer).

E-mail your customers – Even though electronic inboxes nowadays are littered with spam, viruses, and scams, e-mail remains your best bet for driving existing clients to your site. Better yet, creating a personalized well-formatted or designed e-mail—mass mailing if you have to—detailing the specials available for your customers such as discount codes. Give your customers a perceived value of exclusivity.

Display your specials prominently – Placing links of your holiday specials to prominent sections of your main page can be a good marketing strategy. You can even highlight the value or add-ons that can be obtained in taking advantage of your holiday offers. Put up a well-designed Flash or graphic design ad about the offer, adding a sense of enhanced coherence and giving your customer a sense that the business is current and assuring them that the offer is valid.

Optimize – One of the main reasons people use the Internet is to search. Capitalize on this behavior by investing on pay-per-click advertising and or apply search engine optimization. Pay-per-click advertising are small image or text ads displayed at a relevant website (including those whom you are directly competitive with), while search engine optimization is the use of certain techniques that will make your site prominent in every search engine (such as Google or Yahoo!). Good use of keywords and proper adoption of search engine optimization go a long way in bringing new customers to your site. For instance, many online businesses suffer at search engines because their sites are dynamically designed and not static files waiting to be crawled by a search engine. To solve this problem, accompany your site with a good static HTML sitemap as well as static versions of your site's key areas.

Provide payment options – There are a variety of payment options that you can offer to your customers such as “buy now,” “installment payment,” or “online credit.” Online businesses have been criticized for resorting the customers to spend immediately, which usually hinders some customers to make an impulse of purchasing.

Assure security to your customers – With the threat of identity theft and credit card scams more pertinent than ever, it never hurts to reassure your customers of the security measures placed on your site. Among the security programs that you can apply to your site are encryption, SSL, and Hacker-Safe verifications.

Run your site under stress – Like in the malls, sites can undergo heavy traffic during the holiday shopping season. But unlike stores where people can wait in line patiently, online stores with slow-loading pages (a sign of heavy traffic) would often result to your customers typing in the address of your competitor. Traffic is expected to rise suddenly once the holiday shopping begins, so consider running your online store in a bigger bandwidth to avoid slow page loads or, worse, complete site crashes.