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Is your site optimized for holiday traffic? If it isn’t, you risk sending visitors clicking away — resulting in lost sales, a weakened brand image and an overall poor impression of your business.   This holiday season, make sure customers stick around when they visit your site by incorporating holiday-centric navigation. Make it easy for visitors to see your special sales, gift guides, top-rated products and other information that will enhance their shopping experience.   Here are some quick and easy ways to leverage your site’s content and create user-friendly navigation that highlights your site’s “gifting” opportunities. Your navigation should include some or all of the following:   A “gifts” section. Include a link from your home page to your gift center. Use color and seasonal imagery to draw users’ eyes toward the link. “Shop for/by” links. Create links to gifts for moms, dads, significant others, kids and other demographic groups as appropriate to your brand. Gifts under $20, under $50 and over $75. Some visitors want inexpensive gifts for coworkers, while others are seeking high-price-point items. Don’t leave out either group in your navigation. Top sellers. Feature your top-rated products in one area to help visitors narrow their choices and buy with confidence. Spotlight users’ reviews and testimonials with each product. Our picks. Select your team’s favorites, and highlight them in one area. Include reviews with each product description to give your site some personality.   There’s more than just navigation to consider for your Website, however. If you find that your visitors aren’t sticking around when they visit your site, then Experian’s new Website Review services are precisely what you need to fix what’s not currently working.   Whether you have a well-established online presence or a brand-new Website preparing for launch, we’ll walk you through the steps needed to:   Improve SEO performance Enhance usability and functionality Convert browsers into buyers and boost sales Ensure browser compatibility Advance your search engine rankings   Ready to ramp up your site’s performance? Just tell us which services you need, and we’ll generate a customized report to help you optimize your site and meet your holiday sales goals. Get started here.      

Small Business Guide to Social Media Interview with Michael Stelzner

Direct Mail marketing is very effective tool that small-medium businesses can leverage to prospect and acquire customers. It is both an art and a science that requires giving a serious thought to every direct marketing campaign and improving it over time by testing and incorporating the learning. And even when you have mastered the above mentioned approach, it is possible that your arduous efforts might not yield the expected results, if you don’t take the following factors into consideration – Do’s: Test and change: The success of Direct mail marketing relies heavily on testing. Segmenting your customer base, trying different Ad copies, experimenting with different offers and even changing marketing collateral every time could yield varying results. Proof read your copy: Make sure your messaging is thoroughly proof read for grammatical mistakes and that the sentences are easy to read. The message should be clear, crisp and precise to stick with the reader. Leverage existing studies: Scour the internet and Direct Marketing resource for case studies that might be relevant to your campaign and capture key insights from those studies. Not only will they help you manage your expectations from the campaign, but also provide you with best practices to incorporate in your own campaign. Plan ahead: Think ahead and plan what you want to do with the response for your campaign. For example, if your campaign is geared towards driving users to a website, plan the flow that you would expect a user to follow. Do you want them to fill out a questionnaire or do you want them to register, or perhaps you want to learn more about their demographics. Think through these aspects before you send your mailing. Don’ts: Confusing call to Action: Don’t make it difficult for the prospect to figure out what you want him to do. He should be able to quickly understand the action that the mail piece wants him to perform. Bloated/Hyped content: If your mail piece has extensive content or you mention something that is hard to believe, chances are that the prospect will immediately lose interest and get rid of your mail piece. Unattractive headline: The headline of your mail piece says it all to the prospect and he is immediately going to decide whether to read further or not. Don’t write a cliché headline or something that is not going to get noticed. Marketing piece design: Don’t use design and themes that have no relevance to your product/service or for that matter your core message. Make sure the art, graphics and pictures etc. strengthen the underlying theme of your campaign.

For small businesses on a tight budget this article provides some resources for crowdsourcing. http://smallbiztechnology.com/archive/2011/11/can-crowdsourcing-help-your-small-business.html/