Online retailers of these products can expect to see a large increase in website traffic in the week leading up to Mother’s Day compared to any other week of the year. A recent survey by PriceGrab­ber, a part of Experian, reported that 52% of people planned to buy their Mother’s Day gifts online this year – help make it easy for them to buy, and attract new customers who are ready to spend!

These 15 tips will help you to optimize your site to take advantage of Mother’s Day and to be more prominent in the search engine results, ultimately maximizing your online revenues.

1. Review metrics from the same time last year - Take a look at your analytics data from last year. What were your top referring sites and keywords? Which were the best converting? Which pages performed well (bounce rate, conversions, etc.)? Which performed poorly? Use this knowledge to target marketing messages and/or prioritize what parts of your site to tackle first.

2. Fix the Obvious - Do a crawl of your site or use webmaster tools to check for 404 errors and bro­ken links. Fix them. Make sure that you’re ready for 404 errors to happen by having a good 404 page.

3. Tailor Your Value Proposition– PriceGrabber’s survey reports that the respondents’ reasons for shopping online include free shipping (53%), price cuts (43%) and coupons (35%). Shopping online also lets your customers save time, save gas, avoid the parking lot, avoid lines, find hard-to-find items, use gift finders, wish lists, and guided selling. Incorporate this type of messaging into your site, and make it prominent.

4. Promote “Desire Paths” - Most people want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possi­ble. Help get them there by using promotional areas devoted to Mother’s Day features and/or develop a special Mother’s Day navigation menu. The example below shows 1–800-Flower’s home page with 5 navigational elements to get to the Mother’s Day Gift Guide.

 

 

 

 

 

5. Personalization - If you have personalization capabilities, use them! Target customers based on whether they’re new or returning, what they’ve purchased previously, where they live, and anything else you know about them.

6. Service Messaging - Online shoppers are naturally risk averse — they want to make sure they’re making the right decision. Help them answer their service questions by including easy and obvious content about or links to payment options, return policies, shipping policies, and inven­tory updates. More importantly, make sure that they can get help if they need it. Live chat and/or obvi­ous contact phone numbers should be available on every single page of your site.

7. Clicks to Bricks - If you have bricks-and-mortar locations, make your store finder obvious. And if you have ship-to-store capabilities, make sure that customers know that’s an option.

8. Product Badging - Help customers identify new items, sale items, great gift ideas (“Great for Mom!”), popular items, free shipping items, and top rated items by using product badging.

9. The Clock is Ticking - Include time-based messaging so that customers know when the cut-off date is for shipping and when specific deals or promos expire.

10. Promote Gift Cards – Pricegrabber reports that 22% of consumers plan to purchase gift cards for Mother’s Day this year. Use a promotional area to make it obvious to customers that they can eas­ily purchase and send gift cards.

11. Add Mother’s Day Messaging to Your Meta Data - Update your title tags and meta descrip­tions to include Mother’s Day messaging. This can help you stand out in search results and poten­tially rank better for Mother’s Day-related search terms.

12. Take Advantage of All Sales Channels - If you’re not using Google Product Search, Bing Shop­ping, Amazon Marketplace, Nextag, and so on, now might be a good time to check out those shop­ping feeds. If you are using them already, make sure that your feeds are updated daily with the latest product information.

13. Optimize Your Checkout Process - There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing the number of people who abandon their cart halfway through the checkout process. Reduce the risk involved by ensuring that they’ve been exposed to clear messaging about pricing throughout the process, includ­ing price guarantees, shipping and return policies, taxes and fees etc.

See Mediative’s Cheat Sheet “9 Tips for Optimizing your eCommerce Shopping Cart” for more tips to reduce shopping cart abandonment.

14. Check Your Mobile Experience – The National Retail Federation reports that 25.4% of people surveyed who owned a smartphone planned on using it to research products or compare prices, and 12.4% planned on purchasing products. Is your mobile experience ready for that?

15. Test! - Run some A/B tests. You can try Mother’s Day vs. regular messaging, specific promos on different pages/ site sections, time-based messaging, geotargeting, specific customer segments, and so much more to see what gets you the best ROI.

 

 

Biography / Resume : Ian is the Manager of User Experience & Research at Mediative, helping clients optimize the online experience for their potential customers. He manages several key accounts and leads the company’s ongoing research projects to better understand search, buyer behaviour, mobile, and user experience. With a background in neuroscience, web design and eye tracking, Ian brings an invaluable knowledge of human behaviour and human-computer interaction to his position at Mediative. He plays a key role in many of the company’s SEO projects and lends his expertise to the strategy development of both PPC and display advertising projects. Ultimately, Ian believes that success in digital marketing comes down to two things: being found and being good. So he works with clients to make sure they tick both boxes and establish a successful and lasting presence online.