Tips to Increase Online Holiday Sales

About a month ago, I wrote about online marketing tips for the holiday season, now that we are truly in the midst of the holidays, many businesses are getting desperate on how to maximize sales in this tough economy. Multichannel Merchant has a great article called “Three Steps to Increase Online Holiday Sales” which points out some very simple things you can do to help drive conversion after a visitor has landed on your website.

Automate Product Recommendations/Suggestions
For those companies who recommend products, many still organize and choose products manually. This can be an extremely tedious and time consuming task. By investing in automated product recommendations, you will be able to more suggest more relevant product recommendations in much less effort.

If your site does not currently provide product recommendations, I highly suggest you look into it. When people shop for others during the holidays, they may not always know exactly what to buy. By offering a suggestion or mentioning that others who looked at Product A also looked at Product B, you help the prospect choose a gift.

Use Internal Click Data to Market Products/Services
Do you have a search box on your website? If so, analyze that data. What are people searching for? By reviewing internal search data, you get an idea of what your prospects are interested in purchasing. Use this knowledge to specifically promote the products or services people are interested in. This way your prospects will be more likely to convert when they see a special for what they are looking for right when they land on your site.

Multiple-Channel Integration
Group your customers and prospects together by interests. You will be able to more easily cater specific products or services to the group of customers or prospects that are more likely to convert. After this, you can roll out your services to other forms of advertising such as direct mail, telemarketing, etc.

Image Courtesy of kevint

SEO Starter Guide

Google released a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide last week. If you are looking for some basic tips on how to optimize your website for the search engines (Google to be specific), then it is something definitely worth reviewing. Something to note though is that this should just be used as a guide and does not guarantee rankings. There are many more things you can do to optimize your website, but I would say this is a good best practice guide for the beginners out there.

Photo courtesy of dannysullivan

Promo Products Prove More Effective Than TV, Radio, or Print Ads

With the New Year coming up quickly, small business owners are looking to strategize and finalize their marketing plans for 2009. While traditional methods of advertising such as print ads, television, and radio always seem to be in the marketing plan, advertisers might want to put more focus on an alternative form of marketing next year. What might that be? Promotional products, giveaways, swag, freebies, whatever you want to call it, it is simply a product imprinted with your company logo, name, and/or contact information.

The Advertising Specialty Institute just released results from a study focused on the cost analysis of promotional products compared to other advertising media. Surveying 600+ people in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, the ASI team focused on understanding how promotional products influenced consumers to purchase, determine the number of impressions promotional products produced, and to compare the Cost Per Impressions (CPI) of these products compared to other forms of advertising.

Major findings concluded:
• More than 80% remembered a business based off of a product they received
• 42% had a more favorable impression of an advertiser after receiving a promo item
• Nearly 25% felt that they were more likely to do business with an advertiser after receiving a product from them
• Over 50% owned promotional writing instruments, followed by shirts, caps, and bags
• 81% kept promo products because they found them to be useful
• More than three-quarters kept their swag for more than 6 months
• Among wearables, bags were used the most frequently – being used 9 times a month
• Average CPI of a promotional product is $0.004 resulting in an extremely high return on investment from promotional products compared to other forms of marketing

With the small businesses focused on continually driving sales while minimizing their cost, promotional products are the way to go as it yields a more promising ROI than other forms of advertising.

For the small business owners out there, have you had success bringing in customers with promotional products? For the consumer out there, have you ever bought something from an advertiser because of the swag you got from them?

Image Courtesy of peterkaminski

Spend A Little, Make A Lot

We all know the adage, “you gotta spend money to make money.” So why do companies pretend they don’t need to advertise to get customers?

Margie Christman is the owner, designer and creator of a purse company called “Texas Bag Lady.” She serves as a great example as to why advertising a little can help your company a lot. When Margie started out, she promoted her business by including a pen displaying her company name with each purchase. Her husband discouraged her from ordering the pens, saying she couldn’t afford to spend money when she was just starting out.

Within no time, a customer called, proving the husband wrong. The woman told Margie that people kept asking where she got her purse. Though the customer forgot the phone number, she had it on the pen and shared it with everyone she spoke to.

That purse paired with an inexpensive advertising item, helped Margie sell eight more purses.

What could you do with a small increase in your marketing budget? It just might mean the difference between growing slowly or quickly!

Photo Courtesy of Texas Bag Lady