Your eCommerce website should be ready and rolling for the holiday season and online Christmas sales. Whether you believe your site is ready or not, review the following Holiday Season 2009 eCommerce Sales & Marketing Checklist. If you find anything below that you haven’t already addressed, now is the time to make it happen!

1. Take advantage of your home page primary banner and ad spaces to present strong and attractive holiday imagery and feature your holiday season best sellers.
2. Make sure your best selling products are also featured in the top positions of your department category pages. Make it as easy as possible for your visitors to find what they want and buy from you.
3. Optimize your content for the holiday season. Make sure you’re using the right keywords on your pages for both visitors and the search engines to let them know about your holiday offers.
4. Use strong calls to action with an emphasis for your customers to buy now. Experiment with limited-time offers (“Three days only!”) and other variations (“While supplies last – order now!”).
5. Make sure product images and product page content are rich and enticing.
6. Maximize cross selling opportunities by suggesting the most relevant items related to each product right on that product’s page.
7. Ensure that your email marketing campaigns have a strong focus on your offerings and present your brand in the best light. Make sure to include “forward to a friend” links to capitalize on viral marketing.
8. Make the most of your site’s ad positions. Ensure that all ads on your site only feature your best selling holiday products or offers positioned as giftable. This is not the time to promote lower converting merchandise.
9. Don’t skimp on promotions. People are actively searching for special offers online during the holidays such as free or discounted shipping, percentage or dollar amount discounts, special offer promotion codes via email and affiliate programs, and cross promotions (buy one get one free).
10. If you have membership or club groups, create specials that are designed just for them and make sure you let them know with email marketing pieces that make it clear that these special offers are only available to them to add perceived value to their previous purchase and keep them coming back to buy more.
11. Review your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and work at updating your most important pages for the holidays.
12. Make sure all of your pay-per-click (PPC) ads, such as Google AdWords ads, are using the best keywords for the season and that you’re also applying negative keywords to reduce wasted clicks and ad budgets.
13. Ensure affiliate ad materials for your affiliate networks are enticing and up to date with your most important and most likely to convert holiday offers. Think in terms of click-through and conversion.
14. Publish new online articles, content pages, and blog posts, optimized for the search engines, for your most important holiday product or service offerings.
15. Get social. Make sure to let those who follow your blog posts, tweets on Twitter, or other social media efforts know about your special holiday offers and give them an incentive to click through to your site and buy.

How many of the above items have you already implemented to maximize your online sales for the 2009 online holiday shopping season? It’s not too late! Optimize for the holidays and convert more with your seasonal promotions.

In a previous post, Common Reasons for eCommerce Shopping Cart Abandonment, we pointed out that shopping cart abandonment averages as high 78 percent. However, a recent study by McAfee has found that nearly two-thirds (65%) of online shoppers who abandon their carts come back within a day or more to complete the purchase.

McAfee’s study of more than 150 million online transactions indentified the following reasons why online shoppers often delay purchases after placing items in their shopping carts:

• Brand Recognition: Well-known brands experience shorter purchase delays than lesser-known brands since shoppers will often research lesser-known brands before making a purchase.
• Competition: If items being sold are in a highly competitive market, it will take more time for shoppers to come back and complete the purchase since they want to shop around before finalizing their order. On the other hand, items that are unique or harder to find will experience quicker order completions.
• Information Gathering: Online shoppers often add items to the shopping cart so they can easily purchase them later if they want and also to find out what’s required from them in the checkout process.
• Price: Higher priced items will usually take longer to lead to a completed order since shoppers will often want to think more before committing to making an expensive online purchase.

Although the information found by McAfee is highly insightful, online retailers should study their own abandonment and conversion numbers very closely – and not simply hope shoppers that abandon their carts will come back. In other words, you should always be looking for improvements to your site’s content and offerings to reduce your cart abandonment rate.

When was the last time you analyzed your site’s cart abandonment and conversion rates? With the holiday shopping season literally around the corner, this is information you should be looking at and taking action on immediately.

Email marketing is one of the best ways to promote an eCommerce website. Since fans of a site and its product offerings are likely to want to receive promotional offers and news. Think about it, do you receive email marketing from companies you’ve done business with that you like to receive, such as those from your favorite specialty store or big box retailer? For most people, the answer is an overwhelming yes!

Is your company actively using email marketing to grow your brand and increase sales? If not, consider the following numbers recently published by eMarketer.

• 94% of marketing emails were delivered in Q1 2009
• 22% of these emails were opened
• 6% were clicked through

Now stop and think about these numbers for a moment (seriously). Of all marketing emails delivered in Q1 2009, 22% were opened and 6% produced clicks directly resulting in website traffic and potential sales.

There is no question that email continues to be an effective marketing tool that drives results. How effectively is your company using email marketing to grow your business?

Share your thoughts by commenting below.