On the Web: An E-Commerce Holiday Checklist, Part 2

In the July/August issue of Retail Online Integration, I discussed how important merchandising, strong navigation, instigated chat and customer reviews will be to achieving online selling success this holiday season. Here are five more things you should consider doing with your e-commerce site before it's too late:

Thrust Emails
Seed your list. Set up five mailboxes to 10 mailboxes at Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and anywhere else you can. Don't open the seed emails (i.e., the ones you send to yourself). This tactic will give you a good indication as to where your emails are being delivered — inbox, spam folder or trash. Do this in-house; don't ask your provider to do it for you.

Test pop-up ads to capture email addresses. The Golf Warehouse frequently uses a sweepstakes pop-up ad to acquire email addresses. Birkenstock Central often gives away a free gift (e.g., socks) in exchange for an email address. Test offers, sweepstakes, a deal-of-the-day or even just ubercompelling creative to see what helps consumers want to give you their email address. Pop-ups will work. If they don't, it's likely because your bias against them is keeping you from developing killer creative.

Make sure your customer service reps (CSRs) are collecting email addresses (to the tune of 85 percent at a minimum) and mobile phone numbers. Yes, you really should try to obtain mobile phone numbers, even if you don't know what to do with them right now. It's also a great time to train your CSRs on upsell items that your web customers are most likely to buy.

Trigger Emails
A trigger email program should be the most successful program in your marketing arsenal. Don't have a trigger email program? Start one with order confirmation and abandoned cart emails.

An abandoned cart program is made up of a series of three emails to five emails. Keep the emails simple. They shouldn't look like your regular thrust emails. Personalize them, include the item or items that the consumer has abandoned and make sure there are lots of clear action directives (e.g., return to cart now).

For consumers who have abandoned a cart but return to your site at a later time, test midis or catfishes on entrance. Remind them that they've left something in their cart and/or take them right to the cart when they come back. You should also consider internal remarketing banners, plugs (i.e., nonanimated banners) and outbound telemarketing.

Your order confirmation program should also be made up of a series of emails. If you're able to test your confirmation, try testing your standard thank-you email vs. an immediate customized thank-you letter that you can use to upsell anything the visitor should have purchased but didn't. It may take you a while to figure out this formula — i.e., what shoppers will want to add to their orders — but once you do it can add a whopping 15 percent to 30 percent to your average order value, depending on your order size. You'll also want to send out a shipping confirmation email, as well as "you have your order, now is the time to order more" and "please rate and review your purchase" emails. A lot of times companies use generic, written-by-IT emails for order confirmations. Order confirmations — and any other kind of thank-you emails — are great opportunities to sell more stuff. Use them wisely.

If you've mastered both order confirmation and abandoned cart emails, take a look at emails based on past purchases and reactivation. The holiday season is the ideal time to reactive old customers and inquiries. Again, these should be personalized triggers.

If you have time to do it now, you may also want to look at email change of address, e-append (adds email addresses to your snail-mail names) and reverse append (adds snail-mail addresses to your email names) solutions. All of these programs will work as long as you stick to the best practices that your email service provider recommends. They really do know what works best in these types of situations.

External Remarketing Banners
The holiday season is a great chance to test remarketing banners. Your success with banner ads will be largely dependent on your creative, so test a bunch of versions before you roll out your program. Test a version of a banner where you add the picture of the last item the user abandoned. These remarketing banners with items are typically the most successful by a large percentage.

Outbound Telemarketing
Does your site experience a large percentage of abandoned carts? Test calling folks who have abandoned carts with the highest average orders. You only need to call a few of these people to know if this program will work for you. (Hint: Chances are it will work like gangbusters.)

Analytics
For many, the holiday season is an extremely busy one — both personally and professionally. Make your life easier by developing some read-and-react reporting. This 
one-page report should include only the essentials you need to run your e-commerce business, and should be a brief overview so you can look at it at a glance and then delve deeper into areas where you see problems.

Separate iPad and tablet traffic from feature phone and smartphone traffic. Tablets/iPads make great shopping devices. Retailers often see twice their regular conversion rate on them. You don't want those results to influence what might be happening on your other mobile sites. Also, try adding a package like Bango to help you with your mobile data; it's not always well interpreted by some of the other analytics providers.

Amy Africa is chief imagination officer at e-commerce marketing solutions firm Eight by Eight. Amy can be reached at amy@amyafrica.com.