Ecommerce Holiday Marketing Guide

This post is a companion to today’s Webinar “12 Things Retailers Must Learn From Christmas ’07” and points to Get Elastic posts and other websites mentioned in the session, along with some additional resources you might find helpful.

Whether you caught the presentation or not you'll find this a handy reference for your holiday marketing planning.

Planning

• Full Holiday 2007 post-mortem from MarketingCharts.com
• Marketing Experiments has a great merchandising calendar that you can download.

Choosing the right promotions

• Valentine's marketing ideas that can be applied to any holiday.
• Offering free shipping to Canada? How to optimize your site for it.

Off-site messaging

• Examples of Facebook marketing creative and landing pages.

On-site messaging

• Future Now's 2007 Retail Customer Experience Survey results.
• Examples of Christmas home page designs.
• Palmer Web Marketing's post on saving stockout sales.
• Trigger email tip for recovering abandoned shopping carts with email, you can use this for low-stocked items sitting in an abandoned cart.
• Detailed post on shipping cutoff dates.
• Store locator usability examples and tips.

Building trust

• User Reviews: The Power of Social Commerce webinar replay and summary blog post.

Returns

• Example of the word-of-mouth effect that Zappos-type return shipping policies can have.

Essential email

• 12 Can't Miss Email Strategies for Online Retailers
webinar replay and summary blog post.
• Net-A-Porter's example of emailing your wishlist.
• If you're looking for inspiration on a particular season, check out RetailEmail.Blogspot's seasonal archive. From Breast Cancer Awareness Month to Earth Day, you can see screenshots of email campaigns and scan subject lines.

Masterful merchandising

• Cross-selling dos and don'ts with examples from top online retailers.

Capturing last minute shoppers

We have several posts on this:

• Last-minute holiday marketing tactics for online retailers
• Optimizing your store for last minute shoppers
• Tips for converting last minute shoppers
• In-store pickup usability tips

• Upresent.com is the service that allows you to add gift notification services to your e-store.

You'll also enjoy our Webinar with Melissa Burdon of Future Now: 7 Simple Ways to Boost Your Holiday Conversion Rate.

Happy holiday marketing!