Cover Story: The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

5 Steps to Optimizing Your Site for the Holiday Rush

For many retailers, Christmas begins in July with preparations for major site traffic events like Cyber Monday. Will your company's site be ready? The time to find out is now, not when your web servers are overloaded, incoming orders have stopped, and frustrated visitors are abandoning their filled shopping carts and rushing to a competitor's site to buy their gifts.

Retailers hoping for a strong holiday season must maximize online sales under both normal and peak traffic loads. If you're still in the throes of preparing your website for the upcoming online holiday season, here are five suggested areas of focus to make the most of this year's peak shopping season:

1. Early and thorough planning is critical to online success. Load testing is often an afterthought; project plans fail to include performance requirements, and the Q&A phase doesn't include appropriate time and effort to define and execute an effective load test. The end result is either that the load testing doesn't happen at all or the testing is rushed, ineffective or incomplete.

2. Key business and IT drivers must be considered in the plan. Load testing, by definition, is testing to ensure your site can handle the expected peak volumes of web traffic and beyond that level. An effective load test plan, therefore, must consider the capacity of the current environment, the load that's expected, what constitutes acceptable performance levels under normal and peak loads, and how real visitors use the site.

3. Ensuring effective web performance is a business and IT responsibility. Companies need to understand that no one group is responsible for delivering a high-performance website for their users. Companies that have a strong partnership are most likely to recognize that web performance isn't a business or IT problem — it belongs to both. They're more likely to ensure the right groups are participating, each group understands its role, and it delivers the input and drivers for which it's responsible.

4. Protect your customers from the mistakes of third-party contributors. Fortunately, more and more companies are realizing it's in their best interest to work closely with third-party providers to ensure the components of the site they provide are performing as required. It's imperative that your test plan, test tools and test team include your third parties. After all, if a third party fails to do the right thing, it's your brand and business results that are affected, not theirs.

5. Geography, browsers and devices — you must include them all. Your test plan should be written from the end-user perspective. Users will expect the same level of performance regardless of the time of day or system being used. Therefore, your test plan needs to consider all of these scenarios.

At the end of the day, happy customers translate into a successful business. Planning early and thoroughly, being sure to include the right stakeholders and drivers, and considering the way your visitors use your site creates a recipe for effective load testing.

Mark Eshelby is the senior product manager at Compuware APM, a provider of a new generation of application performance management. Mark can be reached at mark.eshelby@compuware.com.

A Retail Social Commerce Strategy for the Holidays

2012 was another year of massive change for social commerce. Pinterest was the darling of retail last year, as product curation and social discovery has become a primary vehicle to drive social commerce. In parallel, Facebook has been transforming itself from a social website into a marketing platform, and is now the platform for social identity and marketing scale. Instagram is also trending because it combines mobile and photo sharing, both of which are significant to retailers because they enable not only omnichannel engagement but product discovery as well.

In 2013, most retailers are still concentrating on growing social network communities and brand awareness using branded content supplemented with Facebook Ads to get Likes. As in years past, the results of these activities will drive little customer insight or significant return on investment. The new retail social commerce strategy is to create user experiences that motivate consumers to generate content around a retailer's products, then monetize this word-of-mouth advice.

Pinterest's "Pin to Win" and Instagram's "hashtagged" photo contests are the most popular examples of these social campaigns happening today. The leaders in social commerce are going further to create their own tools to foster user product sharing and social discovery on their own sites — think Fab.com. Functionality to create personal collections and activity feeds are appearing on e-commerce sites daily … and just in time. Just as Facebook has rules that don't allow direct use of its platform to deliver rewards, contests and sweepstakes, Pinterest recently announced more restrictive rules that prohibit the majority of the "Pin to Win" campaigns being run today. Social commerce best practices are rapidly evolving; here are some to keep in mind as you plan your holiday strategy:

1. Engage: Host product sharing, social discovery, contests and rewards on your e-commerce website with earned media shared back to the social networks for referral. Start with a simple "Want it to Win it" contest hosted on your site with Facebook, Pinterest and/or Instagram integration. There's plenty of time to launch this capability for the holidays with the right partner. Once you do, you'll have the start of social commerce functionality.

2. Learn: Collect the social profile and product intent information supplied by the above activity and from the integration to social platforms. This data will lead to deep customer insights and product intent.

3. Amplify: Use friend-to-friend sponsored stories, including action-specific targeting, to amplify referral traffic.

4. Scale: Select your best customers and create Facebook Custom Audiences. Begin testing Facebook's Lookalike targeting to be ready to scale social marketing for the holidays.

Jon Kubo is the chief product officer at 8thBridge, a company that offers technology and expertise to help retailers and brands monetize social media. Jon can be reached at jkubo@8thbridge.com.

Prepping Your Warehouse for the Holiday Rush

We're five months away from Christmas. That means it's time for retailers to start thinking about the holiday rush.

For many retailers, the holiday season can be bittersweet. Sales are up, but so is the stress. And while it's almost inevitable that retailers will hit a few snags along the way, the sooner you start preparing, the lower your blood pressure will be and the less likely that those snags will cause you to lose sales.

Here are some things that retailers can be doing now to start preparing their distribution centers for the holidays:

1. Stock up. In the past, the online holiday shopping season has unofficially commenced with Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving. While Cyber Monday is still a huge day for online retailers, consumers are getting started earlier each year, which means retailers should too.

One of the most important items to check off your holiday prep list is beefing up your supplies. This includes not only your inventory, but also packaging, tape, filler, labels and everything else you need to fill orders and keep your business running smoothly. Now is a good time to analyze your holiday sales from last year, reaffirm any issues you may have had with inventory shortages, and start reaching out to suppliers to place your holiday stock orders.

2. Plan for seasonal staff. One of the biggest benefits of outsourcing order fulfillment is scalability. Part of which means that, as your order volume fluctuates, it's the fulfillment provider's job to adjust its staffing needs while your cost per order remains fairly consistent.

For online retailers that handle their own fulfillment, however, warehouse staffing is often a significant issue to address during the holiday season. Now is a good time to review your sales and staffing changes from last year and, based on your sales so far this year along with any product changes and/or holiday promotions planned, try to project your sales and staffing needs for this holiday season.

As you're considering how best to plan for seasonal staff, consider overtime vs. temporary employees. While overtime pay can be costly, so too is training new hires. The lower order output from those new hires should also be factored in.

3. Evaluate technology. Technology is the backbone of logistics. As order volume increases, technology is often put to the test, which means now is also the time to identify any software or equipment deficiencies, as well as to test how your existing technology handles a significantly greater load.

In general, but especially during the holiday season, it's important to have backup systems and equipment in place should something go wrong. It's also a good idea to evaluate technology projects that are currently in the works. For any that won't be done in the near future, think about holding off on completion until next year.

As an online retailer, there's a lot to consider and do before the holiday season. Make things a little easier on yourself and start planning for Christmas in July!

Steve Bulger is the marketing manager of eFulfillment Service, an order fulfillment service provider. Steve can be reached at bulger.s@efulfillmentservice.com.

5 Tips for Preparing Your Customer Service Team for the Holidays

Setting your customer service team up for success this holiday season with thoughtful planning and clear, consistent and knowledgeable communications should be a priority.

First, consider this recent observation from STELLAService agents attempting to contact Walmart.com via live chat. The retailer's help page had the following information:

Chat hours are listed below.

Monday - Thursday: Closed

Friday: 1 am - 1:01 am CDT

Saturday - Sunday: Closed

You read that correctly. According to the site, chat is only available at 1 a.m. on Friday, and for one minute only.

Hey, typos happen, but with a potentially big holiday season for online retailers on the horizon, now is the time to make sure your site and customer service team are fully prepped. Here are five tips to help you with that process:

1. Re-examine contact channel touches. Take inventory of how each channel greets customers normally, and where improvements can be made during the holiday season. Also, make sure any email auto acknowledgement realistically manages customers’ expectations. Don't just say, "A representative will reply within 24 hours."

For social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, be prepared for high-volume traffic. Ignoring these channels could invite public criticism, so make sure your social team is trained and staffed appropriately. We've talked to retailers like 1-800-Flowers.com, which devotes as many as 30 agents to social media during the busiest days of the year.

2. Ensure your policy information is consistent. It's not uncommon for STELLAService analysts to discover packing slips with inconsistent information. For example, a major apparel retailer's packing slip mentioned a $5 restocking fee that wasn't listed on the company's website. Make sure all of your communications, everything from your website to confirmation emails to your in-order materials, contain the same information. If a customer is confused, they'll either leave or require additional help from your team.

3. Set your CSRs up for success. Uninformed agents can lead to inefficiency, creating lengthy call queues and frustration on both sides of an interaction. Make sure your agents are proficient in both product and policy knowledge, and that they're up to date on any marketing efforts. Are you having any special promotions? Are they consistent for both online and in-store shoppers? Has usability for a particular section of your site changed? Educate your agents and arm them with complete responses to all possible scenarios.

4. Know your business. Forecasting how many customers you plan to serve at one time is crucial. Estimate contact-center volume by considering historical data, current operational forecast and any potential usability issues that could slow down your operation.

Also, know your contact rate by channel. Consider your total number of contacts vs. total orders shipped. This magic number can help anticipate future trends. Pull historical order volume for the past few years and sync with your warehouses to make sure they're prepared.

5. Expect the worst, hope for the best. Now is the time to tighten the bolts of your operation. Contingency planning is a must. Prepare any call recordings you may need to play when phones go down. Expect your site to fail. Prepare agents on how to handle those worst-case scenarios.

Chris Vodola is a client development manager at STELLAService, which measures and rates the customer service performance of online retailers. Chris can be reached at chris@stellaservice.com.

Santa Email Marketing Strategies: Understanding Your Naughty List

Summer may be in full swing, but as the song goes, "You better watch out!," the holidays will be jingle belling at full blast before you know it. So think like Santa and get a head start on making your naughty and nice lists. Your subscribers have had time to show you whether they've been good or they deserve a lump of coal.

Some of your subscribers were just born bad, but that doesn't mean they'll always be rotten brats. Use the summer months to identify who is naughty and ways you can get them to be sweet, well-behaved subscribers on the nice list by the holidays. This means finding, keeping and focusing on the "nice list" of engaged, profitable subscribers while also working on the "naughty list" of disengaged, unresponsive and/or phony subscribers to take notice and start buying from you. And those who remain on the naughty list? Well, it may be time to cut them loose. Santa doesn't waste time delivering gifts to the naughty list, and neither should you.

The location for subscriber acquisition can group some of your nice subscribers with naughty ones. There are two significant acquisition channels that result in poor data quality and increased risks for blocking and other deliverability issues, which have the potential to destroy your holiday revenue goals. Understanding and improving these subscriber sources before the holidays start, and then monitoring them throughout the holiday season, will help improve data quality and decrease the risks of encountering blocks or a spike in spam complaints.

Point-of-sale (POS) acquisition: Your POS email subscriber acquisition is probably a mix of keyed entry or manually written email addresses, which can result in a blizzard of bad data. Customers can give false email addresses if they feel forced to provide one. Cashiers can either not hear the address correctly or not key the address properly, or may enter a random email address to avoid asking the customer for the information. When it comes to improving data quality, changing human behavior isn't practical; however, you can improve the processes that handle that data once it's recorded. Segregate new subscribers acquired at POS to their own list, welcome series and potentially sending IPs. Anticipate poor delivery, high unsubscribe rates and spam complaints, as well as low clicks, opens and conversions. Once the naughty addresses have been weeded out, you'll have a better view of who could earn their spot on the nice list.

Sweepstakes and contests: Everyone wants to be a winner. We've all swapped our contact information and personal data for a chance to win a gadget, gizmo or getaway. The value proposition for these sweepstakes and contests is usually the prize and not the stellar email program that will be sent weekly to entrants (who opted in when they entered, of course). Like POS, segregating this population to determine who will actually engage with your marketing efforts will help you to identify the naughty dead weight that just wanted to win your prize. Before the holidays begin, review your past sweepstakes’ lists to see how they've been performing. Ask yourself if the promotion provided long-term, engaged customers or just added dead weight to your list. Consider how this group may receive your increased holiday email volume. They may just ignore your emails now, but once you start sending more, they may start flagging your emails as spam, which could result in deliverability issues.

Finding ways to decrease deliverability risks and maximize emails to your best subscribers will not only help your sales numbers, but it will also ensure your customers have a positive experience shopping with your brand.

Jim Davidson is the manager of marketing research at Bronto Software, a cloud-based marketing platform provider. Jim can be reached at jim.davidson@bronto.com.