It was a wicked sense of déjà vu. The feeling was strong. I lost concentration driving on I-40 during rush hour (not a good idea). For a moment, I was channeling a former life. September is the quiet before the storm for e-commerce B2C retailers. September is the last time “quiet” can be safely used until about March. As a Director of Ecommerce, I didn’t sleep much between September and Christmas. Sweating and pacing I remember, sleeping not so much (lol).
We don’t want you to sweat and pace so much this fall. This post shares ways Atlantic BT can help your website make more money this holiday selling season. E-commerce is so sensitive. Business-to-consumer (B2C) Ecommerce websites can be tuned at this time of year. A tiny tweak here and there NOW makes more money over the next 12 weeks.
Five Ways Atlantic BT Can Help B2C Customers Today
Here are 5 B2C audits I would hire Atlantic BT to help with if I were still a Director of E-commerce.
Email Campaign Audit
Most e-retailers have a schedule for their email campaigns already on paper. Some have campaigns waiting in a tool such as Constant Contact, Bronto or Responsys. Campaign creative and segmentation are queued and ready to fire on a schedule. When I was a Director of E-commerce, Email was our most profitable channel. Email marketing consistently produced profit margins greater than 30%, much higher than the next most profitable channel. Ask these questions to increase results from your email marketing this holiday season:
- Is your marketing segmented and using personas?
- Are you sending relevant creative to your segments? (Hope you aren’t blasting same offer to everyone, a very BAD idea now.)
- Do your emails tell a story?
- Do your emails curate valuable social content?
- Do your emails look good on mobile devices?
If YES is the answer to all of these questions, you should be good to go. But it never hurts to have another set of experienced Internet marketing eyes reviewing your email campaign strategy and testing your assumptions. A tiny tune here or there can make a BIG difference in email marketing results.
Related article: Email Marketing is Live Ammunition
Post Panda and Penguin SEO Audit
Google’s Panda and Penguin updates are creating sudden and dramatic changes to the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Even if you’ve come through fine until now, Google algorithm changes continue. Don’t wait until there is a problem. Hire Atlantic BT (or someone) to check SEO basics. Search Engine Optimization is an area where tiny tweaks can keep you on page one or banish your website to the cheap seats, forcing your website to earn its way back (been there, done that; trust me, you NEVER want to have to live through a Google reset).
Landing Page Audit, PPC Review & PPI
Do you have special landing pages for the holidays? We organized gifts for him and her with special search result pages, links, copy and graphics. We also increased our PPC and drove to specific landing pages on hot products or unique merchandise bundles. Landing pages are as much art as science. If you’ve tested and tested and tested all summer and are ready to use the winners from those tests, good. But even after a summer of testing, a quick landing page and PPC review can come up with small suggestions that may double conversions. Such a look over your shoulder is especially important if you don’t have a testing culture (take our Testing Culture Quiz).
Google is offering Pay Per Inclusion, PPI, for the first time this year. PPI functions similar to a shopping comparison site such as PriceGrabber.com. You load a feed and BUY your way into the “organic” index. If you’ve never purchased PPI, GET HELP. We bought PPI from Yahoo back when Google said PPI was original sin and I was a Director of Ecommerce. If you can’t work your way into your most important organic terms in this lifetime, PPI may be a good answer for presence on key terms. PPI is NOT intuitive and only as good as your feed, so get help unless you are a shopping comparison engine pro.
WebSite Audit
It never ceased to amaze me when our customers saw our website better than we did. Customers don’t have what the Heath brothers call, “the curse of knowledge” in one of my favorite books, Made To Stick. When you look at a website each day, you don’t see it anymore. Since 20% of your pages will capture 80% of your holiday revenue, hire an external resource to review those pages. Have someone audit those “mission critical” pages with a fine tooth comb. Grammar and spelling matter, image size matters to site speed, and too much javascript in your <head></head> hurts SEO. Get another trained pair of eyes or two to review your most critical pages, and make sure they look behind the curtain at code.
Mobile Audit
Holiday 2012 will be the first MOBILE holiday. Mobile commerce is coming, but mobile curation is here. If your website or emails don’t look good on mobile devices, you will lose sales and traffic. Mobile is used to curate communication. Mobile is easy to use to delete or ignore groups of emails. If your website doesn’t look good on mobile, if it is slow or if your emails aren’t optimized for mobile devices, you will lose sales and damage your brand. There are technical things Atlantic BT’s team can do to help your website and emails look better and sell more on mobile devices this holiday season. If you are uneasy about mobile, ask Atlantic BT for a Mobile Audit.
Monday Tips For B2B
There are other ways we can help, other audits that would provide value, such as a Google Analytics Audit or a Social Media Marketing Audit. We can discuss the other ways we can help if you have questions or concerns. Conducting one or several of these B2C e-commerce audits will help you sell more this holiday season. Need help conducting those audits?
Call us at: 919.518.0670
Email Mike.McTaggart(at)Atlanticbt(dot)com (Head of Consulting Services)
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