10 tests most likely to help you improve sales throughout the holiday season

[mandy]

1) Test landing-page merchandising. There is nothing more important on a retail landing page than the merchandising. What you show, how many items, which photographs, the quality and quantity of copy, all benefit from aggressive testing and optimization.

2) Test percentage off vs. dollar savings. Often customers respond differently depending on how a promotion is framed, even if the effective price is the same (say, 10% off a $100 purchase vs. $10 off a $100 purchase).

3) Encourage customers to act now. Test different scarcity messaging such as “Limited Time Only” vs. “While Supplies Last” vs. “Offer expires Nov. 31.”

4) Reflect paid-search content, Test customized landing pages for your five top-performing keywords. Make sure that the landing-page content obviously relates to the search terms. Try repeating the phrase verbatim or reorganizing your content to narrow the focus of the page...

full article: http://multichannelmerchant.com/webchann..._11062006/

[BellisimaJ.]

TY, Mandy--good info!!

9) Increase trust during checkout. Test placing confidence-building information (return policy, privacy policy, customer service number, recent awards) and security “trustmarks” (TrustE, VeriSign, HackerSafe) above the fold and in combination with each other.

All 10 are excellent suggestions, but I think this one is perhaps the most important.