For many of our clients, Christmas is important. It’s the end of the year, targets have to be met, and customers are, well, much more willing to part with their euros. Indeed, Christmas is the most significant event in Ireland’s retail calendar. In the UK in 2006, online sales reached £1 billion a week. So what’s the best way to take advantage of this surge in online sales? Here are a few dos and don’ts:

- Firstly (this especially applies if you have good search engine positions) don’t start putting “Christmas gifts” and other such phrases in your page Titles. Your site is not going to get high rankings for these phrases at just one month’s notice. If you really want to optimise your site to appear for these phrases, you need a longer-term strategy.

- Having a ’splash page’ on your website, which will be seen by all users visiting the site, can be a good idea. You can use this page to get across your fast delivery, great prices, wide selection, or whatever your USP is. Be aware though that this may cause a short-term drop in rankings if Google indexes your site during the Christmas month.

- If you’ve got an email database, the run-up to Xmas is a great time to keep people updated on your products. Send a seasonal email - nothing too tacky - with some special offers or a guarantee of delivery before the post cut-off date

- Now’s a good time to have a look at streamlining your site to make sure that users can do business with you. Trim down any forms that are too long, try to shorten the purchase process, and make sure that the site downloads quickly. Most important of all, aim to have a site that users understand instantly when they arrive. A higher conversion rate will have an obvious impact on your sales.

- Don’t have dancing Santas, a ‘Ho-Ho-Ho’ sound file, or Flash animations of holly trees detracting from the purpose of your site. People know it’s coming up to Christmas, and too much of these gimmicks smacks of superficiality.

Let us know of any ideas you’ve had for bringing in visitors and sales this Christmas.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.