Although the Great Recession has officially ended, most consumers don’t yet believe it, and they certainly aren’t seeing any tangible evidence of it.  So it’s understandable that retailers are approaching this holiday season with something like fear and trepidation.  The big news from the 2009 holiday season, however, is that online did really well, and the prediction is online will grow again this year.

So it’s important for every business concerned with sales during the holiday season to leverage online in a big way.

Since it’s getting late, we’ve assembled a three-part series on things you can still do to make the holiday shopping season a big one for your business.

In part one of our series we cover some basics – things you can do this week that will ensure you’ve got a good foundation for all your online holiday promotion and sales efforts.

First: Integrate offline and online.

Make it easy for people to do business with you. All printed promotional materials should, at the very least, include your phone number, email address and website URL.  This includes printed flyers, print publication ads, outdoor ads and any sponsorships of local events, charities or organizations.  If you’re into social media (and you should be), include your Facebook and Twitter URLs, too.  If you’re holding an event – whether virtual or face-to-face – develop a special landing page on your website where people can sign-up and use this URL on all promo materials.

Second: Join the conversation.

Whether you like it or not, people are talking about your company and its products. You can either ignore this conversation or promote it. When the group Msyto & Pizzi did a video to the Geico theme song, rather than ignore it Geico added it to their website.

If you haven’t already, develop a Twitter profile, a Facebook Page, a Google Places page, a YouTube channel, a blog – or even an iPhone or iPad app.

Once you’ve developed your social media presence (make sure you follow all the prompts around adding your contact lists so you develop a good list of followers or friends, also making sure to follow / friend folks in return), reach out to the people already talking about your company. Retweet their tweets, thank them for their contributions, promote their videos, and even ask them the write guest blog posts. You’ll create more buzz – and more sales.  You’ll also help your website’s SEO prospects.

Three: Test, test, test your infrastructure.

In his book, “Slightware: The Next Great Threat to Brands,” Kenneth J. Weiss talks about how poorly branded and badly-executed software-powered applications negatively affect your customers and your brand.  This includes landing pages where the order process is broken (or those e-tailers that make people register before making a purchase – my pet peeve!) or even something “small” like making people call to RSVP for an event versus signing up online.

Once your website and holiday campaign components are in place, test them – and have your family members test them, too, from their clunky home computers and smart phones. What works? What doesn’t? Listen to feedback from your testers and fix the bottlenecks.

Four: Look at last year’s performance.

Check your weblogs or Google Analytics to see where your peak days online were during the last holiday season:

• What sources were the best generators of your traffic last year?
• Look at which pages got the most traffic.
• Note which promotions worked, on which days and why.
• If you had already integrated a blog and other social media components during the last holiday season, understand which of these seem to drive the most traffic and conversions.
• Look at the keywords people most often used to get to your site via both organic and paid search sources.
• Evaluate your landing page performance—see which of your landing pages produced the best conversions. If possible, look at how the traffic to that page got there and learn from that click behavior: what inspired the click; which source generated the click; did a promotion or pricing strategy have any impact.

Learn well from the past and repeat what worked this holiday season.

Five: Implement efficiency measures for the management of your efforts.

Technology is a beautiful thing and many of the marketing, promotion and sales tasks that make up your online holiday effort can be made more efficient and effective with automation.  Businesses are able to reduce labor cost, increase sales, and improve overall operational performance using Web applications like ours and many others.  Don’t let aversion to technology or Web-based applications keep you from trying tools and solutions that can potentially make the difference between an okay holiday season and a blow-out one.

In my next post, I’ll cover strategies you can use to increase traffic and conversions for the holiday season.

If you haven’t already, be sure to download our free e-book, The Link Economy: Why It Matters to Small and Growing Businesses.  In it you’ll learn why integrating your campaigns is important and how our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you manage your search marketing campaigns.

I know, I know: every day it seems you hear news about the dismal sales climate in the US. And it’s true: consumers are sitting on their wallets.

However, with a little strategic planning and creative thinking, you can help ensure that you finish the year with a bang. In this three-part series about prepping for the coming holidays, we’ll cover how you can drive traffic to your site and increase conversions.

And the first step is ensuring your holiday campaign components work – not just in driving traffic but actually work together without glitches and snafus.

Case in point: A few weeks ago I visited Williams-Sonoma at my local mall. While ringing up my purchases, the sales clerk informed me of cooking classes the store was holding – and gave me a flyer listing the class topics and dates.

Cool! I’ve always wanted to learn how to make pasta dough from scratch. However, while in-store cooking events are a great tactic for getting people into the store (and buying things), Williams-Sonoma made a big error: people interested in the classes have to call the store to RSVP. Even worse, the flyer from my store didn’t list the store’s phone number, a URL for online information or an email address.

Many Williams-Sonoma stores across the U.S. are holding these cooking classes – and a quick search showed that people are posting videos to YouTube about them and talking about the company on Twitter – yet W-S doesn’t incorporate these consumer-generated videos on its own YouTube channel or website, and it seems there are at least a couple Twitter feeds: the Santa Monica, CA store has a Twitter feed but is not following its fans; and a corporate Twitter feed that has a few hundred followers, but only follows a few dozen in return, and that has a tweet in August that obliquely refers to cooking classes in the stores this weekend (with no link to calendar listings).

It should be said that I am a HUGE fan of Williams-Sonoma (my kitchen is testimony), and so it gives me no joy to use them as an example of poor marketing integration strategies.  But by not integrating its campaign components, W-S is losing some serious buzz opportunity!

Whether you’re a pure e-tailer or a bricks and mortar business with an online presence, consider the following strategies when planning holiday campaigns:

First: Integrate offline and online – Make it easy for people to do business with you. All printed promotional materials should, at the very least, include your phone number, email address and website URL. If you’re hot into social media, include your Facebook and Twitter URLs.

If you’re holding an event – whether virtual or face-to-face – develop a special landing page where people can sign-up and use this URL on all promo materials.

W-S, for example, does have a Facebook Fan Page but doesn’t list events on it. On top of that, the paper flyer the store gave me lacks any contact info, making it difficult for people like me to register for the cooking classes (now I have to go online, find the store, look up the phone number and call – not convenient).

Second: Join the conversation – Whether you like it or not, people are talking about your company and its products. You can either ignore this conversation or promote it. When the group Msyto & Pizzi did a video to the Geico theme song, rather than ignore it Geico added it to their website.

If you haven’t already, develop a Twitter profile, a Facebook Fan Page, a YouTube channel, a blog – or even an iPhone app. Reserving your profiles now, even if you’re not ready to use them, is important because cyber-squatters are stealing brand names.

Once you’ve developed your social media presence, reach out to the people already talking about your company. Retweet their tweets, thank them for their contributions, promote their videos, and even ask them the write guest blog posts. You’ll create more buzz – and more sales.

Three: Test, test, test – In his book, “Slightware: The Next Great Threat to Brands,” Kenneth J. Weiss talks about how poorly branded and badly-executed software-powered applications negatively affect your customers and your brand.

This includes landing pages where the order process is broken (or those e-tailers that make people register before making a purchase – my pet peeve!) or even something “small” like making people call to RSVP for an event versus signing up online.

Once your campaign components are in place, test them – and have your family members test them, too, from their clunky home computers and smart phones. What works? What doesn’t? Listen to feedback from your testers and fix the bottlenecks.

In my next post, I’ll cover strategies you can use to increase traffic and conversions for the holiday season.

If you haven’t already, be sure to download our free e-book, The Link Economy: Why It Matters to Small and Growing Businesses.  In it you’ll learn why integrating your campaigns is important and how our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you manage your search marketing campaigns.