Five Tips for Maximizing Your Sales This Holiday Season

With Halloween come and gone, this year's holiday shopping season is just around the corner. Findings by Forrester Research suggest that online holiday sales in 2005 are likely to be 25% higher than in 2004, reaching an amazing $18 billion! Hot online shopping categories this year will include women's apparel, toys, and consumer electronics.

While good organic search engine optimization (SEO) takes time to deliver results, this doesn't mean that you should neglect organic SEO. In addition, there are a few other tricks that you can use to boost your holiday season sales. Make sure 2006 ends on a high note for you!

1. Promote your holiday offers on your site and in your advertising.
   Your customers will love any special offers during the holiday season, especially deals like free shipping, free gift-wrapping, freebies with purchases, discounts, or charitable donations of part of the sales proceeds. Make sure your offers are highly visible throughout your site, and most of all on those pages where customers put items in your shopping cart and proceed to the checkout. The same offers can also attract more people to your website in the first place, so it's a good idea to use them in any external advertising you do.
   
   
2. Make it easy for your customers to find the brands you sell.
   If you are selling popular brands, make sure your customers can find them easily from any entry point of your website. And again, mentioning brands in external advertising helps to attract more targeted customers to your website.
   
   
3. Emphasize convenience.
   Men hate shopping - even more so when gas prices are soaring and shopping malls are overcrowded. This means males are a prime target for your marketing messages focusing on the convenience of shopping online at your website. Free shipping offers will really help to reinforce this message!
   
   
4. Prepare your customer service team.
   When traffic to your site increases, your customer service team will also be busy with more enquiries from your website. You might have to expand your customer service team temporarily to ensure you can deliver the high standard of customer service your customers are used to. Especially with new staff, it is critical that they are well trained on the special holiday offers that are available, and are able to close a sale effectively.
   
   
5. Plan ahead for your post-holiday sales.
   Before you head off and enjoy the holiday break yourself, prepare a plan to remove or update holiday content from your site and finalize your campaigns to attract post-holiday bargain hunters. Any external advertising, like pay-per-click advertising campaigns, should be coordinated to tie in with the content of your site, so update or create new landing pages or promotions. Depending on your type of business, you might even want to start thinking about Valentine’s Day!

Posted by Nancy Hackett at 2:38 AM GMT