Just two months 'til Christmas Eve!

So what can you do now to get the most of the Christmas sales?

Delivery - Let everyone know the cut off dates for Christmas delivery. Don't feel pressurised to offer free delivery - only a small percentage of your customers will be looking for it. Making it clear where you deliver to and what the cost will be early in the shopping experience (and certainly before the payment page) will result in less abandoned shopping carts and happier shoppers.

Balance marketing needs with customer wants - Don't make people register if they don't have too! And if you can't avoid it, don't ask for reams of data if you're not going to use it for marketing in the future.

Opening Hours - Let your customers know if you will be closed and what customer service support will be in place.

Email marketing - Let existing customers know what your best deals are. Create demand where you know there is interest e.g. you left this in your basket and we've only two left, would you like one?

Gift Cards - The trend for leaving Christmas shopping to the last minute is now happening online and a lot of people will buy last minute gift cards which can be redeemed online.

Affiliates - Affiliates need to plan their Christmas promotions too and they will be inclined to promote the merchants that did well last year. Make sure you let them know as soon as you can what promotions you are running, what stock is coming in, what offline marketing you are doing and keep them supplied with seasonal banners and discount codes.

Blog Action Day - Social Marketing Inaction

The 15th of October was blog action day; the one day in the year when bloggers are encouraged to unite and talk in one voice about one issue for one day. This year the theme was the environment and the official stats are impressive

20,603 Blogs Participated
23,327 Blog Posts (Google Blog Search)
14,631,038 RSS Readers

But the stats don't say how much was raised by people donating one days salary and they don't measure apathy. Hands up (blink if you're lazy) if, like me, you intended to post but didn't get around to it. I started my post, just before I went to see Take That in concert. I watched the £6.5 million production in awe, marvelled at the lighting rig and drove home without a genuine care about the evenings C02 emissions.

On one hand I think, as a social marketing initiative, blog action day was successful, but on the other hand, did it really make a difference?

Visit the blog action day website.