9 ways to ensure that your customers find you this holiday season!

With the holiday season just around the corner, retailers have a lot of options of using the online medium to attract more traffic and get higher conversions.

Here are 9 ways to prepare for the holiday season sales:-

1. If you don’t have a page already, you might want to consider devoting a section on your website to “Holiday sales” and provide prominent links to it from your most popular pages, home page included. You might consider writing an attractive text like “Over 50% discounts on most popular items, free delivery, offer closes ….midnight” etc. The “holiday page” can be designed a bit differently. I recommend that you create a few different designs and test it. You can run a campaign on Google AdWords and Adcenter to test out how these pages perform. You will need to start this soon since there is not much time available for testing. Once you zero in on the page that has the highest conversion. Use the same page on your website. Ensure that your page confirms to SEO best practices.

2. To keep the inflow of visitors you might want to consider short term paid campaigns on Google and Yahoo BING network so that you attract new visitors as well. Google Adwords has introduced Review extensions to their Ads. Advertisers can now add another line to their ad providing reviews that their product has received from their clients. This is a great feature and it will certainly help business owners capture the attention of prospective customers. Here is a link to Google Adwords third party review extensions. With so many options available to showcase their products, retailers are indeed spoilt for choices this season!

3. Adcenter (Yahoo BING network) has detailed information for retailers on how they can use the features of Adcenter to enhance their ads and get more traffic during holiday season.

4. Make the most of the Social Networking sites like Twitter, Google +, Facebook, and Pinterest.

5. Twitter: Don’t forget to tweet about new products, special discounts, free gifts…and link to the relevant section of your website.

6. Facebook: Creating a Facebook page for your business will be quite helpful for your visitors. You may want to use elements from your site that have worked well. Provide information, special discounts, address, contact numbers, as much information as you can. You might want to try out the paid ads on the Facebook news feed page. Here is a link to a report that will show you how to get more visitors and conversion from placing Ads on Facebook.

7. Pinterest: Pinning your interests will be of huge help in this holiday season. The ability of creating boards catering to specific products or however you wish to portray your products is a huge plus with Pinterest. You can put up the images along with information and the price of each item. Searching for similar products, finding out who is interested in those products, following them, getting followers, and people interested in your products is the way to go. Remember to highlight free gifts, special discounts, early bird prizes… in short create a lot of buzz around your products.

8. Google+: Create a page for your business on Google+. You can share photos of your products, announce new product launch, connect with your customers through video chat, get reviews on your products from your customers, and more importantly get your customers’ feedback and reach out to new customers.

9. Remember to update or if you do not have a local listing yet, get your business listed on the local Google and Yahoo! sections; this will help you a lot. Ensure that you have the correct information about the store timings, directions, etc.

I wish you a fantastic holiday season; I hope this will help you get started and running on your online promotional efforts.