Fat Bearded Man Required for Year Round Deliveries

Many online retailers, big and small, rely on the festive panic to provide them with the income needed for year round sustainability. Unless you predominantly sell Santa suits or those “reindeer dropping” chocolates then it’s likely that you’re missing out on opportunities to attract sales year round.

Understand who Next Year’s Customers are Now!

In a moment we’re going to look at the ways in which you can use the information from the traffic on your website this Christmas to prepare for the year ahead.

First of all you need to get in place the tools to measure and report on your traffic. Do you have a Google Analytics account? If you’ve not done this already, get signed up and start measuring your traffic. Going into the new year, you’re going to be using this information to make sure your website is as slick and attractive to your customers as possible.

Now that the measures are in place we can look at making the most of your traffic this Christmas. Make it your objective to understand more about each customer as they pass through your online checkout this Christmas. You need to build a clear understanding of your customer demographic, how they use (and don’t use) your website and how to use this to speak to them personally during the course of the year. Email address? Male or female (or other)? Important dates and anniversaries? Interests and hobbies? Likes and dislikes?

As you can appreciate, most of us shopping online this Christmas are unlikely to remember where all the great bargains were found, who provided you with great customer care and speedy delivery. Although you send nice order confirmation emails to your customers, these are likely to be binned or lost among the raft of last minute email offers. Online, the January sales usually start around 18th December when most companies stop guaranteeing delivery in time for Christmas. Make it your new year’s resolution to get back in touch with your customers, to say hello and to provide them with an incentive for visiting your site. Generally, the mention of a sale or price reductions will be enough to encourage people back into your site.

Once the festive rush is over you should have at least a reasonable amount of personal customer data to work with. You need to start planning your calendar, looking for events during the year that match with your customer interests and hobbies. Take spring for example. If you have customers interested in outdoor activites, think about the products and services you supply (or could supply) to those customers. You need to prepare for this in advance. Think about how you’ll target your customers, what hooks you’ll use to get them into your site and what methods you’ll use to get them to convert on your site.

Say It With An Email

There are a number of approaches you could take. The most personal approach is an email. Email marketing, if done well, can be a very powerful way of driving qualified traffic into your website. You know your customer, their interests and your products. Tie these together in a way that speaks to the individual, that speaks to them personally, targets their interests and what you know they’re likely to need in the near future.

If you have a database of customer birthdays, make sure you use this to send them a little something on their big day. It could be something as little as an eCard pointing them to your site or something more grand like a discount voucher especially for them. Dates are a great way to make communication personal. Expand this a little and allow your customers to create lists or hints that they can send to their family and friends. All the while you’ll be building up more and more data to target your customers.

Organic Results – Prepare for Success

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a tool that you should be using continually. Now that you know which of your products match which dates in the calendar you can begin building your credibility organically. Create pages on your site that deal with e.g. Easter, spring, summer, food events and sports events. Create content that discusses these events and showcase the products you offer. Do this well now and it’ll pay dividends later. Best of all, you’ll be creating a format that you can use time and again. You’ll need to put in a little effort now but these specific offerings will be indexed early and you can continually market them through social channels to build your credibility and inbound links.

Product Blogging – Shout About It

Rather than integrating an expensive community into your website that’s not guaranteed to work, use other tools to promote and shout about your products. You need to cast your net wider and encourage others to talk about you and your products too. Create a simple blog and link to it from your website. You don’t have to create huge articles, just use it as an outlet to speak about your new products. Use social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon to advertise your blog posts. Couple this content with a Twitter and a Facebook account and build up a community that way. Invite your friends and customers to join/follow you and provide them with ways to share your product information with eachother. Word of mouth (even the virtual kind) is a very powerful medium. This kind of community building is building quality traffic. Those who follow these communities are interested in your products and are more likely to turn from visitors into customers when they visit your site.

Adwords (PPC) – First Position Guaranteed, Now!

Once you’re sorted with your SEO then you can consider the benefits of Pay per Click (PPC) advertising. PPC offers you the opportunity to realise quick results providing you have the budget. While you can specify a budget with PPC, a meagre budget bidding on competitive keywords could see you hidden for the majority of the day. Make sure you investigate your keywords well and continually monitor what is working and what’s not. Remember, this is about achieving a return on your investment. Careful monitoring, a degree of suck it and see, will quickly show you where the wins are.

Know What Doesn’t Work and Fix It

Of course, there’s a lot to understand here. Google Analytics is a great free tool to measure your website performance. Even if you know how many visitors you receive each day and how many sales that results in, there is so much more to understand. With Google Analytics, you can quickly understand how a customer found your website and what they done within your site. It’s equally important to known what does work as doesn’t work. Knowing what doesn’t work tells you what you need to fix. Knowing what does work provides you with useful information to use when fixing the broken bits. Couple this information and you can begin to create a great user experience and your conversion rate. It’s also worth bearing in mind that if you’re pulling in a lot of sales, a small percentage increase in conversion can equate to a lot of money.

Act Now

So now is the time to get your house in order for the new year. Put in place the tools to begin measuring your traffic and understanding your customers. Look at your products and know which can be specific to important dates throughout the year. Create content for specific dates in the calendar and start your organic growth now. Most importantly, start planning now, cast your net as wide as possible and make sure everyday is Christmas day in your online world.

There’s a lot to take in. Once you’ve digested this, give Mancala a call and we’ll happily discuss how these are relative to your business. Better still, pop in for a coffee and a chat.

View our contact details here