By Kristyn Levine, Solution Strategist

Preparing for the holiday shopping season is an annual ritual that can’t be ignored by most retailers. To maximize results during this critical period, plans (and contingency plans) should be in place to ensure a positive user experience and financially beneficial interaction with each customer. Retailers should leverage what’s worked in the past while taking into account important shifts in online customer behavior.

In my new whitepaper "Preparing for the 2010 Holiday Season", I give you 10 critical things to consider to help you prepare for the 2010 holidays. This guide shares key considerations and actionable ideas to help you increase your opportunities for success in the 2010 holiday shopping season. Some are new and some are time-proven. You likely already have the foundation and infra-structure in place to implement most of them. A few may require additional up-front time and resources, but they will lay the foundation for important long-term gains.

This paper also identifies key Demandware functionality you can leverage to prepare for this key selling period. The key is to start preparing now.

How is your team preparing for the 2010 holiday shopping season?

By Michelle Guzzo, Solution Strategist

Email Marketing is one of the longest standing online marketing mediums and continues to evolve to meet the ever changing demands of today’s customer. Now more than ever, customers have strong control over the way they research and purchase products online. Today’s customers want what they want, when they want it. And they now have on-demand tools to have their demands met. If your business is not there to provide them with the product or service they are looking for, they can quickly find a competitor of yours who can.

Email Marketing is a great way to build relationships with your customers so that they continue to come back time and time again. However, with your customers receiving 100s to 1,000s of emails a day, you need to find a niche where your message stands out among the crowd.

There are a number of easy, effective practices to put into place that will drive improved results for you almost immediately. Here are three quick tips you can implement today:

• Your email subject line is the simplest variable to test and make changes where applicable. This should be an on-going initiative that strives for continuous improvement. 

• Grow your subscription base through easy techniques such as adding opt-in information to the last slide of all your presentations, old-fashioned networking and word of mouth, and even promoting your e-newsletter in your email signature.

• Make sure your unsubscribe option is in a clear, easy-to-find location in your emails. Hyperlink the word “unsubscribe” directly to your opt-out form. As important as it is to make it easy for your customers to subscribe to your emails, it is equally important to allow an uninterested customer to unsubscribe.

For more tips on how to Reinvigorate Your Email Marketing Campaign, click here to download our Email Marketing Best Practice whitepaper today!

By Jamus Driscoll, Demandware Marketing

In the course of working with our clients, Demandware is regularly asked for its perspective on best practices in user experience. As part of our business model, where we goal ourselves on helping our clients grow revenue, we gladly provide them, most often in the course of the implementation and post-launch support. But CPO Commerce has taken it a step further, and actually provided content to their customers highlighting how the user experience has been improved. What's better, each featured enhancement comes with a bold "Tell us what you think!" button to gather actually, honest-to-goodness customer feedback.

What's better, CPO then explains each enhancement in detail...

And then added a bold "Tell us what you think!" button to gather actually, honest-to-goodness customer feedback.

Kudos to the team at CPO! 

By Julian Chu, Demandware Client Success

We've all seen the headlines: Just as the retail sector overall is hemorrhaging, even growth in the ecommerce market has come to a standstill. According to the latest statistics from comScore, growth slowed considerably this summer and dropped to just 1% year-over-year in October. Many are predicting even worse for the remainder of the season.

But it's in times like these that leaders emerge, take market share and set themselves up for future success. In Demandware's own client base, we see more than a few companies continuing to post strong growth even up through last week. In a no-growth environment, every site visit is critical, each ad placement a precious investment. So the question for today is, are you prepared to engage in close-quarters, site-to-site combat for consumer market share this holiday season?

Now, more than ever, online retailers need a comprehensive competitive strategy and detailed tactical plan that focuses on retaining existing customers and winning new ones from competitors. The strategy part starts by understanding:

• Who are our target consumers and where/how do they shop?
  
• What is our share of wallet among these customers, in relevant product categories?
  
• Who are our leading competitors? Why would these customers spend their money with these competitors and not with us?

Tactically, retailers need a plan going into the holidays that anticipates and prepares them to respond to the marketing tactics (e.g., campaigns, offers, promotions) of their competitors. Not just planning what campaigns you will launch, but also:

• What will the key competitors do?
  
• How might they respond to our tactics?
  
• How should we respond in turn?

This is all about "war-gaming," thinking through different scenarios and being prepared to launch new campaigns and offers on a daily basis. Pulling this off successfully requires work to be done before the holidays begin, to strategize and develop a tactical plan for key dates in the season. It requires you to have processes and tools in place to monitor what competitors are doing in the marketplace, and to measure how you're faring in comparison.

And, importantly, it requires that you have a flexible technology infrastructure that allows you to prepare different campaigns, offers and promotions ahead of time, and then launch them on a moment's notice when and where needed.

Is your organization prepared to engage in site-to-site combat this year?

If you missed part one of our Countdown to the Holidays series, be sure to check out Part I: Getting the Basics Right.

By Julian Chu, Demandware Client Success

As we approach the beginning of the holiday season, it surely would be wise—if you haven't already—to review your ecommerce site experience and take care of those "good hygiene" issues that you've been meaning to take care of all year.

I've recently written a white paper and a couple of articles (The Ultimate Online Shopping Experience, Part 1: Strategy & Design and Part 2: Features & Functionality) that explore the essentials of designing superior online shopping experiences—the key things that online retailers should and should not do. Have a look at these more detailed articles, but here's also a brief summary:

First, while crafting the customer experience strategy (i.e., deciding what to change), keep in mind the following important steps:

• Articulate your top brand, business and customer experience goals
• Define the customer experience around personas
• Review the shopping experience end to end
• Build the strategy using multiple perspectives
• Keep things simple
• Test your assumptions by observing real customers
• Consider analytics and tracking requirements as part of the design process

Of course, at this time of year most companies don't have time for a detailed site redesign. But even a high-level review of key aspects of the online shopping experience can help identify some easy-to-implement changes that could result in that crucial extra 25 to 50 basis points in conversion. Do some test shops on your site (or better yet, ask a ‘fresh set of eyes' to do this), paying attention to the following:

• Will a customer feel safe shopping on this site?
• Is there anything important "below the fold"?
• How else can we save the customer time and effort?
• Are all the tasks or workflow processes on our site clearly explained and easy to follow?
• Do we offer multiple ways of viewing or sorting information on the site to suit a given customer's personal preferences?
• Are product recommendations presented in a way that motivates browse and purchase?
• Does the site provide explicit feedback in response to customer actions?
• Is the checkout process as efficient and easy-to-use as possible?
• Does the site provide clear, detailed and context-relevant "help" wherever needed?
• Are the toll-free number and/or live chat options prominently displayed throughout the site?

In today's market environment, it's more critical than ever to maximize the return on all the hard work and money spent driving traffic to the site. You must ensure that the online shopping experience on your site is easy, enjoyable and efficient.

For more on delivering superior online shopping experiences, download the "Designing Superior Online Shopping Experiences" best practices guide authored by Julian Chu. 

By Julian Chu, Demandware Client Success

SEO is a hot topic these days. As the PPC channel gets more competitive and costs increase, more online retailers are focusing on SEO as a means of driving traffic to their sites. By increasing their rankings for high-value keywords, merchants can build a foundation for attracting new customers over time without having to pay for every click-through. What’s more, the investments that drive improved natural search traffic are usually good steps to take to improve the customer shopping experience in general.

But online merchants have plenty to worry about already, and it’s important to spend your time wisely.  So first, we’d like to share our “top 10” list of the most essential SEO tasks. If you do nothing else, periodically assess your site in the following areas and address any major gaps.

SEO “Must Do’s”

Robust SEO functionality within the ecommerce platform can help retailers perform many of the above tasks efficiently, so their teams can focus on other valued-adding activities. For example, Demandware offers the following capabilities in this regard:

True SEO excellence requires dedicated focus on competitive analysis, optimizing site content, and building external linking relationships. Thus, it’s important to choose an ecommerce platform that takes care of the SEO basics, so your team can devote their attention to things that will really differentiate your site and improve business results.