Let’s face it, we all love Christmas. It’s a great time of year where we reflect on the year just gone, eat mince pies, watch the Queen’s speech, listen to The Pogues on the wireless (oops DAB Digital Radio) and laugh at Grandad as he drops his false teeth in the dog’s food bowl and farts as he bends over to pick them up.

However, the build up to this festive event (Christmas, not Grandad’s farting), is a frenzy of activity for retailers as they fight for customers both on and off the high street.

Christmas shopping online is becoming a growing trend. I for one plan on buying most of my presents online from the comfort of my own warm home, away from the crazed masses on the wet and blustery high street. But with so much choice online, how am I supposed to choose one e-tailer over another?

Here’s a few tips to help online retailers stand out from the crowd and get those all important extra sales.

1. Display Ads

Broaden your festive reach with highly targeted display advertising. Google have released a variety of Christmas themed display ad templates. Don’t forget your messaging continuity, the promises you make in the ads should be reflected on your website.

2. PPC - Stock & Festive Keywords

I’ve already expressed how competitive Christmas is, so it’s important to keep a vigilant eye on your PPC account. The last thing you want is for an item to go out of stock, but you continue to send PPC traffic through to that specific product page, as you’ll waste valuable marketing budget and those paid visitors are likely to bounce straight away and buy from a competitor. Well this is actually standard practice all year round, but you need to be aware of its significance even more so at Christmas time as retail search traffic ramps up.

If you run PPC in-house or through an agency make sure that the communication channels are active and clear at all times. Depending on your niche, you may find it beneficial to bid on specific Christmas related search terms and gain that all important targeted traffic that your competitors are missing out on.

3. Christmas Theme

Once visitors have landed on your site, reassure them that they’re in the right place for their Christmas shopping needs.

Include some simple festive touches, nothing too drastic. Here are some ideas:

• Add some snow or a santa hat to your logo
• Give promotional boxes a festive sprinkle

• Snowflakes in the background

4. Delivery Times

Getting presents delivered in time for the big day is a must for all e-tailers or you’ll feel the wrath of multiple negative reviews because you ruined little Timmy’s Christmas.

Solution: Make it clear when the last day for guaranteed delivery is.

Promote this everywhere you can:

• In the header or sidebar across your entire website, like Amazon UK have already employed:

• PPC ads – “Order now in time for Xmas”, “Guaranteed Christmas Delivery” etc
• Email – all marketing efforts & employee signatures
• Meta Descriptions – make the most of your natural search listings especially if you’re not in the number 1 spot.

In the coming weeks if there’s an impending postal strike, it is imperative to reassure the visitors that you’ve made alternative arrangements and their order will be unaffected by the strikes.

5. Promotional Offers and AOV

One of the biggest KPI’s for any online marketing manager is to increase the Average Order Value (AOV). In the offline world supermarkets are amazing at this. Around every corner of their stores is a promotional offer of some sort like 3 for 2 on bottles of wine. This is a great stock clearing tactic but also encourages the customer to spend twice as much as they perhaps intended, but they don’t feel hard done by because they’re getting a bottle for free.

The same methods can be employed online, to encourage customers to spend more. Think about cross-sell promotions for example, like Amazon’s successful use of “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”.

6. Smooth Checkout Process

Okay, so the searchers visited your site and now they’ve decided that they want to buy from you, don’t lose them in the checkout process.

With an increasing number of “silver surfers” and people new to the internet, you want to make their buying experience as simple and pain-free as possible.

Time is of the essence, there are a lot of other presents that they need to buy:

• Make each step simple and easy to complete with clear guidance on how to proceed
• Remove any unnecessary input fields
• Provide the option to pay without registering. The chances are that these will be one off purchases

7. Consider Conversion Rates

Conversion optimisation can have a huge impact on revenues, especially at this time of year. Just imagine what would happen to your bottom line if you managed to increased your conversion rate from 2% to 4% for example! Even the smallest changes can have a positive impact.

Here are a couple of conversion related top tip blog posts from recent months, which might help to give you further inspiration during this crucial time of year:

• How to kill conversions with your landing page!
• What do mind bending tricks have to do with conversion rates?

So there you have it, a few essentials to boost your online marketing in the run up to Christmas. All that’s left to do is look out for Grandma… It appears that she is just as bad as Grandad when it comes to Christmas flatulence: www.youtube.com/watch?v=peJkxSqtITQ