Well here we are, Thanksgiving. Is it me, or does Thanksgiving come around faster every year? Retailers everywhere are facing this holiday with a blend of excitement, anxiety, exhaustion, and adrenaline as they await the holiday shopping deluge. For the retailer this means final floor-sets, operations run-through such as Best Buys store rehearsals, and getting schedules in-place. Everyone’s business is different, but the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas will make or break most retailers. It will typically account for somewhere between 20-35% of sales for the year, and a much higher percent of margin and profit. This is a can’t miss time of year. For the eCommerce site it in many ways is a very similar set of activities, but obviously with a twist. Here is a run-down on many of the key things you can do right now to make sure you maximize your holiday sales.

Ten things to do right now:


1 - Create a gift category focused on the holidays - critical for the spear-fishing shopper [me!] to quickly find unique gifts. Here is a good example from eddiebauer.com with gifts for all their key categories. Notice also how the navigation highlights the gift category and how the overall site design reflects the holidays. When merchandising put yourself in a customers shoes, how can you help them find your products easily through good categorization. Are there various scenarios that you need to think about? [BTW - this is a golden rule, not just this time of year.]


2 - Does your homepage and navigation address key customer needs and outcomes? Key items featured, promotions clear, shipping deadlines clear? Customers short attention spans will amplify with the long lists and short time frames. Make sure they can quickly and easily find you info. Lands End are pros at this. A nice blend of holiday messaging, imagery, products, categories, and quick-links to key information.


3 - Search - Are your key products indexed on Google, Yahoo, and Live Search? If not, what can you do right now to fix that? What about Search marketing? Spend some money on your key products or categories. Depending on what you sell this might be a lot, so if you can’t rank top 5, it may not be worth it. What about your store name, can people find you? Are your competitors bidding on your name [if so , you can make them stop]? Here is a great example - need a lunch-lady action figure? Archie McPhee, Seattle legend for stocking stuffers makes sure they show up first in the results. Notice Amazon is doing some SEM on these long-tail terms, nice.


4 - Product Content - its not too late to make sure your key products have great product information. Make sure your customers can make well informed purchase decisions from your product detail page. Not only will this drive sales and conversions, it will reduce returns later. The gold-standard? Amazon. See their product page for the iPod Touch. Now is a also a good time for a once-again content audit to make sure you don’t having any missing images or other content you can take quick action on.


5 - Accessories - a good time to focus on cross sells and accessories. What is that something extra that will really round out the gift and say “I really thought about this” for your customers when they give that gift? Best Buy does a good job of serving up relevant accessories and service plans, though they can improve making this easier from the cart.


6 - Shipping options, deadlines, and gift-wrap policies - What ever they are, make sure they are really clear and that customers can find them easily. This includes from the homepage, product detail pages, checkout, and customer service & FAQ pages. I think the Lands End example above is a good one.


7 - Staff the phones and email contacts - Make sure you have coverage for the customer service issues that are going to come up as panicked customers limit their credit cards, your site has a blip [see #10], they got their sister’s address wrong, and so on. The urgency is going to ramp as the deadlines approach. If you have retail stores, make sure your associates know what to do if they get a call or someone comes in with a problem.


8 - Gift Cards - If you have them, market ‘em. These have really come into play as an increasingly popular alternative for the gift giver. And when those shipping deadlines hit, if you can crank these out, create a virtual representation, and get these into envelopes, offer free shipping and away you go.


9 - Email Marketing - Don’t forget to get those key email messages out this time of year. Its a good time of year to double down on your email frequency, communicating shipping deadlines, promotions, product specials, unique gift items, and those gift cards! And if you are segmenting, remember this is a time of year people cross category segments and are looking for gifts.


10 - Staffing for support and quick site updates - Make sure you have coverage on the site operations, site development, merchandising, and content functions. Have a schedule of when people are “on-call” and have all the various ways you need to reach them identified - personal email, IM, mobile phone, home phone, and the phone of Aunt Mildred’s where they are having Thanksgiving. Make sure your critical staff have their lap-tops with them when they are out. I have always just used a simple spreadsheet. A Google-doc may be a good way to go for this, allowing collaboration and a single source.


OK, but aren’t there a few things missing? YES!, but honestly it is too late to worry about these now. I will cover planning for next year in a week or so, when the turkey and sweet-potato hang-over wears off and I recover from the touch-football...

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Enjoy your friends and family, and give thanks for life, opportunity, and the inevitable challenges we all face - remember we can always get better.

Now, onto my pies.

- Brian