In fact the search for perfection might just be more detrimental to your website than anything else.

That homepage that your designer has been tweaking for weeks, stop fiddling and make it live. That ebook you’re still perfecting, launch it now. If you have doubts, test it.

In the web world we are lucky to have a friend: instant feedback. Feedback in the form of customers, analytics, surveys, etc. If you were developing a tangible product or print material, you don’t have this luxury. You have to get it right the first time. There is no excuse for a typo on the front of your catalog or a defect on your product. But a website is a living, breathing, evolving creature. Problems can be fixed. Inefficiencies can be optimized.

This isn’t an excuse for sloppiness, but rather a call for constant forward motion. As Seth Godin would say, just ship it. Nothing is more discouraging or counter productive then a long, drawn out website redesign process or new feature project.

Don’t sacrifice progress on the alter of perfection.

1. The belief that visitors always enter your website through the homepage
2. You send all of your traffic PPC, SEO, or Ad traffic to the homepage
3. Promoting products, content, email newsletters, or promotions only on the homepage
4. The belief that the “wow factor” is the most important impression to a customer, so you make your homepage do a flash based song-and-dance
5. A disproportionately large amount of your web design budget goes to redesigning it obsessively

The truth is that visitor behavior has changed drastically. Homepages don’t matter as much as they used too. First-time visitors enter deep into the site courtesy of Google’s more accurate search results. Repeat visitors enter through landing pages from email campaigns or bookmarks to specific pages that interested them. If you take a look at your analytics, I bet you’ll be shocked out how many of your visitors never even pass through the homepage.

Instead of obsessing over the homepage, take a look at other pages that are a required part of your conversion funnel (in other words, buyers must pass through these pages). Look at your  product category pages, the product detail pages, shopping cart, and checkout pages. Odds are, there’s some low-hanging fruit there.

Are you treating every page on your site like a homepage, or just one?

Odds are you have these pages on your website. Last week I raised a question about the value of site if your products disappeared. But here’s another consideration, what if the above pages disappeared?

If your About Us page was gone, would customers still be able to learn about your company, your beliefs, your values, your unique offering, throughout your site? Or is the About Page the only place you communicate who you really are.

What about an FAQ page? Is this the only place you answer common questions? If they’re really so “common”, why not answer them in context instead? In other words, it doesn’t make sense to answer common questions about your shipping policy on an entirely separate page, it makes sense to answer them with a popup box or mouseover in your shopping cart when people are actually choosing their shipping option.

Or consider your Customer Service page. You can probably figure out the common points of confusion on your website. Shouldn’t your contact info be right there, plain and simple, when and where it’s needed?

I’m not suggesting you delete these pages. I am suggesting you to think differently about how customers flow through your site. The pages above can be crutches. We assume customers will navigate to them when they’re needed. But will they?

Don’t we want that first time visitor, who might only see one page, to intuitively understand our unique value proposition, our mission, how to contact us, answers to common questions… without going anywhere else? How can we better structure our sites and write our copy in a way that avoids unnecessarily detours?

What detours have you seen on websites that can be eliminated?

Any at given moment, we’re bombarded with internet marketing and website optimization advice. We’re told to simultaneously be marketing on Facebook, Twitter, email and more. We know we need to be testing and optimizing our sites to the max.

These are all worthy endeavors. But I’m going to suggest that they aren’t always the most fruitful pursuits. I think we often bypass more obvious quick-wins in favor of sexier projects that we get excited about.

I was recently reminded of this at C28. For years, customers have been telling us to show the pictures of clothing on real people, rather than mannequins. For years we ignored the advice due to the impractical task of always having models on standby when new products arrived. So instead we optimized the heck out of everything we knew how. We overhauled the design of the site. We built a new and improved shopping cart. We ran incessant split tests on our marketing emails. But we started hitting a point of diminishing returns. All those a/b tests weren’t as effective as they used to be.

Then we decided to do the obvious. We actually listened to our customers and starting photographing all products on models. And the results? Let’s just say it was the single most effective optimization project we have ever done to the website. It wasn’t technical. It didn’t take an online marketing specialist, just a bit of old-fashioned listening to the customer.

You and me are online marketing junkies. We eat, sleep, and breathe conversion rates, CTRs, SEO, and SMO. Yet are we missing the obvious? What are the roadblocks preventing you from growing your business? You can have a flawless checkout process and fastest loading pages in the world, but if your basic product information is lacking, what’s the point?

Before you begin that next optimization project, take some time and revsit the fundamentals of your business.

1. Stop relying on discounts: Pretend that for the next year your business had to survive selling only full price products or services. Would you survive? What does your answer say about the health of your brand? Kevin Hillstrom reminds us that “discounts and promotions are taxes placed on brands for being unremarkable”. What truly sets your business apart? Why would a customer choose you over a competitor? If you’ve been overly reliant on deals during last year’s economic debacle, ask yourself when enough is enough. The sooner you start weaning customers off discounts, the sooner you’ll begin cultivating healthy, long-term business.
2. Stop relying on “best practices”: Internet business is maturing. It’s not good enough anymore to simply follow the wisdom of the crowd. We all know we need fast loading pages and easy to use shopping carts.  Now is the time to start testing bigger and bolder ideas. It’s ok to imitate for so long, but you can’t always play follow the leader. This year, be the one who makes best practices instead of the one who follows them.
3. Stop relying on “more”: When sales are slumping, the most appealing solution is often “do more”. That means more emails, more promotions, more ads, whatever. But more is a slippery slope, and only digs you into a hole for next year. What if your marketing budget was cut in half this year? How would you adjust? Start obsessing about doing better, not just more.
4. Stop drinking the feedback Kool-aid: Many businesses think they’re getting good feedback from their customers. The problem is the people who are most likely to give feedback (your best customers) are the ones you need it from the least. Start thinking about how to get the painful, yet necessary feedback from ex-customers or non-customers. Why have they not considered you or stopped shopping altogether? This year, do everything it takes to reach the people you really need feedback from.
5. Stop the analytics overload: Dozens of advanced web analytics tools have sprung up over the last few years. Yet we seem to be drowning in data and thirsting for meaning at the same time. How can we make sense of this paralyzing analytics overload?  For many etailers, it really all boils down to a few metrics worth tracking: visits, conversion rate, and average order size. Start with these 3 fundamental KPIs and move backwards, asking yourself what the root problems are preventing these metrics from improving. Take your top ideas and start testing now.

Have you made any new years anti-resolutions for your online business? Share them below.

Tappers and Listeners

Consider this fascinating study, highlighted in the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath.

A group of people are divided in half. The first group, the tappers, are assigned with the task of tapping the rhythm of a well known song, such as Happy Birthday to You or The Star Spangled Banner, on a table. The listeners are assigned with the task of identifying the song that is being tapped out by the tappers, based on the rhythm.

The experiment resulted in only 2% of the listeners being able to identify the song correctly. Upon learning this, the tappers we’re shocked that the listeners couldn’t recognize the tunes. After all, they thought, these were common tunes, and they were tapped skillfully. The problem, of course, is that the tune was already in the head of the tappers, but not the listeners. (try this sometime with someone, you’ll be surprised how hard it is to recognize a well-known rhythm)

The Curse of Knowledge

Much like the tappers, we’re cursed by knowledge, which makes us incapable of acting as if we didn’t have that knowledge. In our head, the rhythm of our song plays out nicely. We tap this rhythm on our landing pages and product pages, listing the features that impress us the most, the ones we’ve worked hardest on. Of course we’re convinced of the value of our products, because we already own them. Of course we know how to complete the checkout process on our site, because we  built it. But what do potential customers (those without our knowledge) think?

Defeat the Curse by Listening to your Pre-customers

Unfortunately, we can’t unlearn what we already know. For that reason, we must seek the feedback of those with far less industry experience than ourselves.

Don’t rely too heavily on customer feedback. This may sound counter-intuitive, but it’s really the non-customers you need to hear from. After all, the return customers who are already giving you feedback are affected by the curse as well, since they already understand the value of your products and how to use your website. Do whatever possible to get an outside perspective from those who aren’t yet interested in your product. Learn about the barriers that you’ve taken for granted while under the curse of knowledge.

You can never unlearn everything on your website, but with the right perspective, you can begin thinking like a pre-customer again.

The Website Redesign Cycle

1. Company creates website
2. Company grows tired of website, and realizes it doesn’t meet all of their needs
3. Company redesigns website, addresses some of the weaknesses, but damages features that worked perfectly, annoying customers accustomed to the old site
4. Repeat (endlessly)

Website Redesign = Admission of Failure

The sad fact is, when a complete website overhaul is necessary, someone has been asleep at the wheel. Someone hasn’t been extracting actionable information from analytics reports. Someone wasn’t testing pages, headers, and buttons. If someone was, small, gradual changes could have precluded a redesign in the first place.

Who Are You Redesigning For?

If you aren’t designing with your customers in mind, the project is bound to fail. You can’t design for your CEO, because he’s not using your website. But don’t customers get sick of the same website? Not really. Come to think of it, most people don’t like change at all. The truth is, your company cares more about the look of your site than your customer ever will. Customers don’t know that your site hasn’t been redesigned in a year, as long as they can complete their objective.

Evolve, Don’t Re-Invent

Drastic is dangerous. By evolving your site, little by little, based on true customer feedback and testing, you’ll slowly but surely build a truly remarkable website. No, it’s not as exciting as a redesign, but it works.

I’ve recently been reflecting on lessons I’ve learned through this exciting but tumultuous experience. What follows is a list of 6 lessons I’ve learned, often the hard way. I hope these lessons are helpful to your business as well.

Lesson #1: Serve your Customers Offensively

All businesses give lip service to good customer service, and yet few are known for the truly remarkable kind. I believe this is due to a defensive rather than an offensive approach to customer care. Too much emphasis is placed on serving customers who initiate contact with the company rather than the company initiating contact with them. Would you be considered a good friend if you never called? Probably not. Your customers aren’t impressed that you answer the phone with a friendly voice, that’s an expectation. Do the unexpected. Call or email them first. Actually listen and respond to all feedback. Publicity recognize them. You can’t win in sports if you’re always on the defense. Neither will you win the hearts of your customers if you never go on the offense.

Lesson #2: Don’t Listen to Your Best Customers

Hear me out on this one. Over the last few years, I’ve succumbed to complacency in areas of our business because I believed the feedback I was getting. We sent out surveys. We brought customers in-house for testing. Everybody loved the website. Customers gave nothing but praise. The problem was in who we were getting our feedback from. When you poll your customers for feedback, understand that your best customers will respond. These are the ones you need the feedback from the least. They already love you, and probably don’t want anything to change. And yet growth necessitates change. Seek out the kind of feedback that is painful, but necessary.

Lesson #3: Redesign for Customer Needs, not Internal Ones

One of the most dangerous temptations in web business is to constantly be redesigning a website. Rather than driven by customer needs, these incessant redesigns are usually motivated by the company getting tired of their existing design. Website overhauls that are driven by anything but customer needs are a colossal waste of time and money. Trust me, we’ve done extensive overhauls that took months, and yet customers barely noticed, and conversion didn’t change.

Lesson #4: Deploy when you’re 80% finished

I don’t believe in perfection, especially when it comes to web development. While you’re busy getting to perfect, your competitors are stealing market share. There is no such thing as a perfect launch, so the sooner you discover the problems the better. If you launch your website improvements and new features when they’re 80% ready, and you’ll instantly gain priceless feedback your development team would never have encountered in testing.

Lesson #5 Create a Flexible Development Culture

I’ve been blessed to work with a group of incredibly gifted developers and designers who can adapt to any situation and meet any deadline. A flexible developer will realize that meeting a deadline is more important than 100% fully complaint code. (I’ve actually not hired incredibly gifted designers because they told me they couldn’t put out a page that wasn’t 100% standards compliant.) A flexible attitude is key. When you run an idea by your development team, are they excited for the challenge or give you a million reasons why it can’t be done or it will take too long?

Lesson #6: Don’t sell the product

The sooner you realize it’s not the product you’re selling, the better. C28 doesn’t sell clothing, but rather a way for its customers to express deeply held faith beliefs through clothing. When you address the ultimate need, your customers will see you as more than a business, but part of their lives. Sell the experience. Sell the meaning. Just don’t sell the product, that’s what your competitors do.

What are your top lessons you’ve learned the hard way?

So now you’ve committed to testing your website. Where do you start? What do you test? While you’ll ultimately have to answer these questions for yourself, below are 7 Do’s and Don’ts to help guide a successful testing strategy.

1. Do Test Properly: So you tweaked your homepage and sales shot up 50% from the prior week. Success? Not really. There’s too many moving parts here to consider. Did you run a sale during the same period, or send an email? In order to determine whether a new version of a page outperforms an old one, you must run both pages at the same time under the same conditions, and split test them using software such as Google free website optimizer. Before you advance any further with your testing strategy, get acquainted with Google’s powerful testing tool.
2. Don’t Be Afraid to Fail: In testing & optimization, failure is success. Although you may be disappointed that the new landing page you created underperformed against the old one, had you not tested it, you would have caused unknown damage to your sales.
3. Do Be Patient: Let your test run until you have a statistically significant winner. It’s tempting to end a test early when your favored version is winning, but fight the urge. Once your test has started, set it and forget it.
4. Do Use Testing to Settle Disagreements: Testing is the ultimate equalizer of opinion’s, especially those of the HiPPO’s. Rather than argue endlessly with clients or managers about what route is best, offer an unbiased test of each option. I can’t overemphasize the value of this approach. Eventually, you will reprogram the thinking of your company from “let’s do it!” to “let’s test it!”
5. Do Prioritize What You Test: When determining what to test, prioritization is crucial. Focus on the highest traffic pages first, those which are higher up in the conversion funnel. Bryan Eisenberg of GrokDotCom suggests testing the following pages first:
   • Your Top 5 High Bounce Rate Pages
   • Your Top 5 High Exit Rate Pages
   • Your Top 5 Lowest Time Spent Pages
   • Your Top 5 key pages (i.e., checkout, cart, registration, top product)
6. Don’t Test Too Many Variations: While you can run a multi-variant test that allows you to test dozens of different versions of a page at once, such a test will require too much time to determine a statistically significant winner. Only test variations that you have reason to believe will impact the bottom line.
7. Do Project out Benefits: After you’ve found a clear winner in a test, estimate the value of that change over a future time period in order to justify testing to management. Like other marketing activities, you’ll need to prove the ROI of your testing activities. Suppose a change to your site navigation increase your conversion rate by 10%. Calculate what that means for your business over a period of a year, and communicate your success to stakeholders.

Optimization testing separates good websites from great websites. Following the tips above will help you attain your testing goals. Have your own testing advice? Leave a comment below.

Second 1 – Impressions: First impressions are forming. What loads first? Your header logo? Your navigation? Ads? As your page finishes loading, your visitor is already unconsciously judging your site based on the quality of your website design. Though average visitors know nothing about web design best practices, they are quite good at identifying poorly designed sites, and abandoning them for lack of trust. After all, if your site design sucks, what does that say about your products or services? The first impression is often the last.

Second 2 – Definition: Here comes the big question, “Who are you and what do you do?” At this point the visitor needs to know the purpose of your site and what sets you apart. Your landing page must communicate unique value, not just what you sell. Keep in mind visitors come in from all directions, so don’t ignore the backdoors such as product and category pages. Does your website header (viewable on all pages) have a unique value offering or only your homepage?

Second 3 – Relevance: Relevance is key at this at this moment. Can your visitor continue to follow the “scent” of what they were looking for after arriving on your page? However they got to your site, whether by Google or a link on another page, your visitor is learning whether or not you keep your promises. For example, if they arrived from a Google search for “gourmet coffee”, can they find a reference or picture that matches this phrase?

Second 4 – The Hook: They’re starting to get it. Now what’s the hook? Based on personality type, the hook is different for many. Some are looking for the deal. “Free shipping” or “10% today only” might resonate with this crowd. Others are hungry for an emotional connection. These folks vicariously envision themselves enjoying your product through your lifestyle and contextual images. And still others are looking for solutions, fast, easy, and painless. They need reassurance that you understand their needs.

Second 5 – Action: Your visitor is now asking “what do I do now?” You’ve kept their attention for this long (ok, only 4 seconds) but now you need to solicit action. Strong calls to action are critical in this moment. The MIA (most important action) needs to be painfully obvious. There should be no question what you want them to do.

The good news is they’ve made it this far, the bad news is everything repeats on the next page – relevance > hook > action.

Do you doubt that visitors make decisions this quickly? Try it for yourself using StumbleUpon (the equivalent of Channel surfing for the internet). You’ll be surprised to see how quickly you judge and abandon a website.

Will you only get 5 seconds from all your first time visitors? Of course not, each visitor is different, and this is only a speculative scenario. But all visitors have one thing in common: they have no desire to have their time wasted by unconvincing websites. They have better things to do.

We rarely think of it this way, but every button, every subject line, every headline on our website is a promise. Whether or not that promise is kept determines whether we win the trust of our visitors, or lose them for good.

To illustrate, let’s take a look at a fictional shopping scenario, not unlike an experience that happened to me recently.

1. Customer receives an email from electronics retailer with subject line “HDTV’s Starting at $700″
2. Customer opens email and finds a graphic showing only 1 TV and no details. BROKEN PROMISE: Subject line promised an HDTV for $700, but email contains no support for this theme
3. Customer clicks on Button that says “Shop HDTV’s”, and is taken to the website’s homepage, which differs completely in the look and feel of the email creative. BROKEN PROMISE: Button claimed to let visitors begin shopping the TV models, instead they’re left stranded on a seemingly unrelated page
4. Visitor reaches HDTV category page displaying dozens of HDTV models. The $700 model is the last item on page 5. BROKEN PROMISE: This retailer made it very difficult find the $700 TV model promised in the subject line
5. Once on product page, customer clicks “Add to Cart”
6. Customer lands on a page upselling the extended warranty. BROKEN PROMISE: Customer received no confirmation that item has been added to cart

Here’s some other common examples of broken promises:

• Homepage gets SEO’d for a specific product, and ranks. Yet when a Google searcher lands on this page, they must again navigate to a category page in order to find what they were searching for
• Shopping Cart total changes when shipping & tax charges are added late in the checkout process
• Item is shown to be out of stock after added to the shopping cart, yet product page did not indicate a stockout
• Customer opt-ins to email list, and doesn’t receive follow up for weeks

Keeping your promises requires staying consistent. So what elements must be kept consistent in order to ensure a smooth transition from page to page? Here’s 4 to keep in mind:

1. Consistent Design: Even the design of a web page makes a promise, that is, it implies a specific theme will be kept constant during the experience. Colors, graphics, fonts all need to stay constant in order to make the visitor feel safe and secure.
2. Consistent Voice: Your visitors will notice, maybe subconsciously, if the writing style changes from page to page, or step to step. Keep it consistent by having one writer do everything.
3. Consistent Messaging: Don’t call your promo a “48 Hour Closeout Sale” in your email and a “2 Day Clearance Event” on your landing page.
4. Create Logical Flow: Create a logical flow by setting expectations for the next page. One way to do this is ensuring that the call to action text on first page equals header on the subsequent page. For example, if the button on your email reads “Compare HDTV’s”, the header of the landing page should read the same. This ensures continuity, lessening the chance that a visitor will feel they landed on the wrong page.

There’s a fine line between making big promises and setting the bar too high. Take a fresh look at your site today through the eyes of a promise maker. Are you keeping them?

In other words, the people most likely to give feedback are the people who spend the most money. So what’s the problem with this? Simply put, these are the people who’ll give you the least helpful advice. Let me explain…

Here’s the 2 types of people that volunteer feedback:

1. the first time customer, who is excited about your products/services
2. the long time customer, who has an ongoing relationship with your business

Here’s the problem: if we only receive feedback from the paying customers, what is everyone else thinking? After all, if your products suck, or your website is broken, people leave, they don’t hang around to give input.

Here’s 3 types of people you’ll never get feedback from:

1. The bouncers: These are the people who hit your site and leave immediately.
2. The lost and confused: These folks are interested, but they can’t figure out your site. Many people in this group adopt a “it’s probably my fault” mentality rather than blaming your website for being confusing. Because they blame themselves, they’ll never tell you when something is wrong.
3. The unmotivated: This group is somewhat interested, however they need extra motivation to act. Because they are only casual visitors, they probably won’t leave feedback.
   

The sad truth is that most businesses never truly get the right type of feedback. In other words, they hear only what they want to hear. That’s not to say that they never receive criticism through standard feedback channels, they just never really get a full picture of experiences with their brand.

Here’s the million dollar question: how can you get feedback from people who, well, don’t exactly want to give feedback? How can you possibly listen to those who aren’t talking? Here’s 4 ideas:

1. Watch your bounce rates: High bounce rates just might be the only feedback you’ll ever get. This is usually a sign of lack of continuity between your ads and landing pages. For example, your ad may over-promise or your landing page may not carry through the theme of your ad.
2. Preempt visitors with a survey: It can be annoying when you’re greeted with a survey the first time you visit a site, but at times its worth the risk to get priceless feedback. My survey tool of choice is 4Q by Avinash Kaushik and iPerceptions.
3. Email your inactive customers: You know those customers who haven’t bought from you in ages? Why not email them and ask why they stopped buying? With this group you have nothing to lose.
4. Put a Feedback Button…everywhere: Don’t just bury your feedback button in the footer of your site, place it in every possible area of confusion. Ask for feedback everywhere, early, and often. For general website feedback, I like Kamplye.

Feedback is the grease that keeps your business moving. More importantly, feedback from the right people is the grease that keeps your business growing. Take some time today to ensure that you’re not just getting one-sided input from your customers.

Too many websites have identity issues. That is, it’s too hard to figure out what the heck the site does, or what sets them apart from the crowd. Simply put, if prospects can’t understand what your business does within a few seconds of arriving on your page, you’ve lost them for good.

Identity issues are more problematic when visitors arrive through certain types of traffic than others. For example, a Google searcher who lands on Amazon.com after searching for “online bookstore” is much less likely to need assurance about what Amazon does. (even though the homepage does not explicitly say anything about selling books)

On the other hand, suppose a friend forwards a link to another friend with a vague message such as “check out this site, I think you’ll like it!.” Unless your site clearly identifies your purpose, you’ll never get the full effect of this word of mouth marketing.

So how can you easily explain your business and unique value to first time visitors? Here’s 7 easy ways:

• Use a 1 line identity slogan near your brand logo: Having a one sentence definition below or beside the brand logo in your site header is priceless. The Recylced Retriever sums up their purpose with the short statement “eco-friendliness for pet lovers.” Fugitive Toys declares themselves to be “an urban vinyl toy store.” It may be hard to sum up your business in a few words, but there is tremendous value in these succinct identity statements.
• Have an Easy to Scan About Us page: Visitors who are interested in digging deeper will likely seek out your about us page. Going into your company history on your about page is great, but make sure you succinctly define who you at the top of the page. Also, don’t get too creative with what you call your About page. If you don’t want to call it “about us”, stick with something like “Who We Are” or “What We Do”. Here’s some more tips for creating a powerful About us page.
• Explain How it Works: If your business model is particularly unique, a “How It Works” page may be necessarily. Here’s a great example from Fashion Hire, which lets customer rent, rather than buy, expensive designer handbags.
• Use a Short, Informational Video: A short (1 minute or less) video explaining your business and unique value proposition can engage customers who are otherwise too lazy to browse around your site to find information. Lulu, which offers on demand print content, clearly explains their business model with a short demonstration video.
• Show your stuff: If you sell a physical product, show contextual product photographs (products in use, rather than just on display) on your most frequently trafficked landing pages. Remember that customers are always entering your website through side and back doors via search engines, so make sure you optimize your top landing pages with first time visitors in mind.
• Create a Carefully Crafted Title tag: In addition to SEO value, your title tag is an effective way to communicate your purpose. Don’t waste this important page element by only filling it with only your brand name.
• Integrate identity into your brand: If you’re still brainstorming on what to call your business, consider integrating your purpose into your brand name. Knituition communicates their purpose (they sell knitted products) through their domain name.

It all comes down to not making the costly assumption that your website is as intuitive as you think it is. Always remember a good percentage of your visitors are there for the first time, so assume only one thing – they know absolutely nothing.

Once you’ve answered who you are, the next step is to communicate why you’re different. The world doesn’t need another widget shop, so explain why you build a better mousetrap.

Offer Bounce Back Discounts: Your site will be flooded with traffic this holiday season. How can you harness that traffic to create year long business? Consider offering a good discount incentive for customers to come back and shop in January. You can automatically email them a coupon after each order, or send one along with the package. Don’t forget to email and remind customers to come back and use their discounts.

Loosen Up & Emphasize Your Return Policy: While a 30 day return policy is commonplace for the rest of the year, it may scare off early shoppers during the holidays. Make it clear to your visitors that you will accept returns and exchanges on all Christmas gift purchases. Be sure to let visitors know early and often about your policy, such as on product pages and the shopping cart.

Review Past Failures & Successes: Try this as you plan your busy holiday season. Take a look at you and your competitor’s website’s through the lens of the Wayback machine. What worked and didn’t work last year? What can you improve upon?

Communicate with Fulfillment & Customer Service: Don’t surprise your customer service and fulfillment staff with a unplanned for 24 hour blowout sale. (I’m talking from experience ). Taking 10,000 orders in a day is great, but if your warehouse can only ship 1,000, you’re in trouble. Work with your operations team in order to smooth out the volume spikes. One company I work for emails promotional offers to their customers by region, over a 2 week time period. This ensures that not everyone gets the offer at once, resulting in too many orders to fulfill in too short of time.

Use a Website Monitoring Service: Odds are, your website will go down at least once during the busy holiday season. If you’re not big enough to have a 24 hour IT department monitoring your server, signup for a website monitoring service such as Alertsite, who will email or text message you if your site goes down.

Put All New Web Development on Hold: December is not the time to be re-coding your shopping cart. Send your developer on a much needed vacation. Well, not really, but do put a temporary hiatus on all major web development projects. The 4th quarter is the time to optimize, not innovate.

Post Shipping Cut-off Dates Prominently: This is quite possibly the most important information to communicate to customers during the holidays. Check with your shipping carriers to determine what the cutoff days are for the various methods of shipping. As you get closer to Christmas, consider offering discounted priority shipping services to extend your selling period.

Do a Security Once-Over: Hackers don’t take time off for the holidays, in fact they probably work even harder. For this reason, have a professional audit your website for security flaws. Services like McAfee’s Scan Alert do a good job at detecting most eCommerce vulnerabilities.

Monitor those 404 and 500 Errors: Talk with your webmaster and ask him to setup a script that notifies him every time a 404 (page not found) or 500 (internal server error) occurs on your site. You might be surprised how often errors occur. When we set this up for one of my clients, they received over 1,000 errors in one day. These errors can be costly, especially at Christmas time.

Allow Gift Receipts: Gift givers hate revealing how much they spent on a gift. Make sure you allow customers to click a Gift receipt option that will hide the prices on the packing list from the recipient.

Allow Gift Messages: Let your customers add a personal message to their gift. For simplicity, you can have the message appear on the packing list which will already be included in the box.

Holiday Graphical Themes: Show some holiday spirit and redesign some of the artwork on your site with a holiday theme. Hopefully, this will get visitors in a buying mood.

Get Creative with your Creative: Every email blast you send doesn’t have to offer a discount or promotion. Consider sending out a gift guide or a Top 10 gift lists.

Promote your Wish List Feature: Start promoting your wish list feature, encouraging customers to share these wish list’s with family and friends.

Increase Server Capacity: Talk with your web host about how you can increase your server performance during the holiday rush. You don’t want to end up like Walmart or Amazon on  cyber Monday. Here’s a sad, but funny example of Macy’s servers getting overloaded.

Checkup on your Domain, Web hosting, SSL and Merchant Accounts: Letting your domain name expire mid-December will create a Christmas you’ll never forget. It’s not a bad idea to double check that your web hosting, SSL certificates, domains, and merchant account to ensure everything is all in order.

Audit Your Product Catalog: Have a detail oriented person visit each of your product pages to ensure accuracy. Check for typos, broken images, and bad hyperlinks. Small problems turn into big problems in the chaos of a busy Christmas season.

Seasonal SEO and PPC Landing Pages: Don’t forget to optimize your SEO and PPC campaigns for seasonal keywords. Visitors searching habits change around the holidays, so your marketing strategy should as well. Also, don’t fall into the trap of bidding wars, or allowing your ads to fall too low on the page.

Offer Online Gift Certificates: If your site doesn’t offer online gift certificates, and your visitors don’t find that perfect gift, they will just leave. Gift certificates make great last minute gifts. In addition, they’re a great way to drive sales at the beginning of next year.

Suggest Gifts by Person: Product category based navigation does little to help a frustrated gift giver find an idea for that hard to shop for person on their list. To help generate gift ideas, organize gifts intended for different people groups such as kids, teens, parents, grandparents, etc.

Suggest Gifts by Price: In addition, organize gifts for budget conscience customers by price range. For example, highlight gifts under $10, 25, 50, 100 or whatever price points are appropriate for your business. Be sure to highlight low cost products that would make good stocking stuffers. These can be a great way to increase your average order value.

Bundle Products: Gift selection is much easier when related items are grouped together in some sort of gift basket or bundle. You can add value to your customer’s experience by simplifying the gift buying process through product bundling.

Offer Gift Wrapping: Many don’t like the idea of sending gifts to friends or family wrapped in nothing but bubble wrap or Styrofoam popcorn. If you can, offer gift wrapping services to your online customers. Be sure to charge enough to cover the labor and material costs for this additional service.

Emphasize Urgency: Let your customers know it’s not safe to wait until the last minute. To prevent shipping issues or product stock outs, encourage your customers to shop early.

Mystery Shop your Site: Ask a friend to mystery shop your site or hire a professional service. Mystery shopping should include ordering, contacting customer service, and returning the product back to you. You might be surprised to learn about a few problems.

Need an outside perspective on how you can maximize your site’s holiday sales? Here’s one final self promotional tip Checkout Palmer Web Marketing’s 3 Things or MySitePlan website review services.

You have plenty of other blog posts to read or emails in your inbox beckoning for your attention. Even if you commit to reading this you may be distracted by a ringing cellphone or a text message. Or maybe your brain will suddenly remember that proposal you had promised to send out 3 hours ago. Just as you may abandon this post, at this very moment, dozens of visitors may be leaving your website for similar reasons.

When optimizing our websites, we often focus (and rightly so) on elements such as web forms, buttons, product pages, shopping carts, etc. It’s easy to forget the countless external factors that affect the attention of our customers.

Preventing Controllable Distractions

Many distractions, such as calls from customers or bosses can’t be prevented, but some are within our control, such as:

• Ads on your website. If you’re currently using ads to supplement your income on a e-commerce site, seriously consider the professionalism and effectiveness of this tactic, as ads offer one more needless distraction.
• Cluttered checkout. This could include not removing navigation during the checkout process, or showing too many upsells/crossells too late in the checkout process.
• Make Your Site Design Good, but Not Too Good. Web design can be a double-edged sword. Professional, attractive, and usable design will put the focus where it belongs, on the products. On the other hand, overly animated or creative design can be a distraction, focusing too much attention on the website rather than what’s being sold.
• Too many fields, too little time. Do your web forms stay on a need to know basis, or are you quizzing your customers for information you’ll never use?
  

Are You Stressing Urgency?

Does your website give visitors any sense of urgency to complete a transaction? If you’re running a sale, do you clearly communicate the end date? If you’re offering merchandise at a permanent mark-down price, have you reminded customers this item will not be re-stocked? Customers assume there’s safety in later. It’s our job to refute that idea, and close the sale now.

Have a Killer UVP

If visitors feel your product is a commodity, you have already lost the battle for their attention. From the moment a prospect lands on your website, you must differentiate the heck out of their experience.  If your unique value proposition (e.g. free shipping on returns, 110% price guarantee, 10% of sales donated to charity, etc.) is not clearly communicated as early as possible, then customers are prone to choose another option, namely your competitor with a lower price. While you can never prevent interruptions, the best you can do is convince a customer that what they are currently doing (shopping on your site) is more important than that pressing distraction.

Does your Site Have An Express Lane?

Try this experiment: Time yourself on how quickly you can complete a transaction on your website. Better yet, ask someone unfamiliar with your site to place an order as fast as they can. If its not humanly possible to complete a transaction in a short period of time (say 3 minutes), then the odds of your visitors abandoning their effort due to distractions greatly increases.

Re-capturing Lost Opportunities

Of course there is no foolproof way to prevent external distractions, but there are some effective tactics for re-capturing lost prospects. One of my clients sends personalized emails to every customer who abandons their shopping cart, asking if there was a problem preventing them from completing their purchase. One of the more typical responses, not surprisingly, goes something like this, “There’s nothing wrong with your website, I just got distracted and didn’t finish my purchase.” In addition to sending cart reminders, make it a priority to capture email addresses. Personally, I will subscribe to a website that I find interesting at the moment, but I’m too busy to buy or dig deeper. Another tactic would be encouraging bookmarks, whether browser based or through a social bookmarking service such as Delicious.

Quite possibly, this very blog post is an interruption in your day, maybe distracting you from accomplishing something more important. But since I kept your attention this long, hopefully you’ll take away a practical tidbit from this article, or will leave a comment with your own input.

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