Holiday 2007 Countdown

No, we're not suggesting that you break out the Christmas decorations and deck the halls just yet. But if the fourth quarter is your make-or-break season, now is the time to start planning for it.  We asked experts in all areas of multichannel commerce — marketing, print production, Web development, circulation, customer service, fulfillment — for help in avoiding preventable last-minute snafus and in learning from the past seasons' errors. n And even if you're not a consumer merchant with a big holiday business, you can benefit from their advice: Whenever your peak season is, they'll help you be prepared for it.

A cataloger for 17 years, Michael Stopka remembers when analyzing results and making plans “was so nice and clean.”

But with the growth of e-commerce, Stopka, the owner of Design Toscano, an Elk Grove Village, IL-based multichannel merchant specializing in home decor and garden accessories, has found it increasingly difficult to plan ahead.

“It's less scientific. It's more art now,” he says. Besides affecting his marketing budget, the unpredictable nature of e-commerce wreaks havoc on inventory planning. “Who knows how to order inventory any more?” Stopka says. “It's more of a retail model than cataloging.”

Nonetheless, planning ahead remains a must for Stopka and other multichannel merchants. And for consumer marketers that count on the fourth quarter to push their business into the black for the year, planning ahead for the holiday season is critical.

In fact, if you're a fourth-quarter business, you should already have started gearing up for holiday 2007. Even if you're just buckling down now, however, you should easily be able to catch up and implement strategies and improvements to help boost your revenue and profits this coming season.

Skeptical? You won't be after you read our month-by-month countdown guide to getting ready for holiday 2007.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY (OR NOW)

January and February were the prime months for analyzing your 2006 results, with a particular eye for unexpected gains or losses. But if you haven't conducted your analysis yet, you still have time. “Your purpose is to try to find opportunities to expand sales for next year,” says Larry Kavanagh, chief executive of DMinSite, a Cincinnati-based provider of e-commerce services. Some ways to do so:

• Conduct catalog matchbacks. “Your analysis should be channel agnostic,” Kavanagh says. “A marketing event in one channel will trigger a purchase in another channel.” When you analyze paid-search keywords, for instance, the searches may be coming from prospects who received a catalog in recent weeks. “You need to come up with some rule that acknowledges that your demand channel may be translating into a different channel online,” he says.

  Analyze matchbacks by segments to compare house file response with that of prospects and to see which channels each group is buying from, suggests Tanya Hansel, catalog consultant at Hansel Group Marketing in Austin, TX. “The matchback usually finds twice as many [catalog] orders as we see in the reports. They're all coming unallocated, without a source code,” she says. “The catalog may be looking okay [in terms of performance], but once you get that matchback, it looks much stronger.”

• Compare sales trends by channel. “Look at the top 20 items purchased online vs. offline and whether there's a difference,” Kavanagh says. Then see if you can appropriate any selling tools from the stronger channel for use in the weaker one. For instance, if an item that sold much better in the catalog than online was accompanied by a customer testimonial in the catalog, try including the testimonial on the Web product page.

• Examine whether each channel performed to expectations. For example, what was the checkout rate at your Website? “Look at the people who actually clicked on ‘proceed to checkout,’ and pay attention to where they got stuck,” Kavanagh says. By fixing glitches that are preventing interested prospects from placing orders, you stand to gain substantially.

  Also, look at the landing pages with the greatest number of visitors and the pages with the highest rates of conversions to purchases. “That can show you nice opportunities to improve,” Kavanagh says.

• Review your customer service performance. Doing so may lead you to consider handling some functions, such as customer complaint lines, manually rather than via automation, says Debra Ellis, president of Wilson & Ellis Consulting in Barnardsville, NC. “They're calling you to file a complaint, so you know they're not happy to begin with. What happens when they're sitting there punching numbers? By the time they actually get to a person, they're ready to blow their stack.”

  Ellis also advises searching your records for customers who placed complaints a year ago to see if they ordered again. “If they didn't, then you lost that customer because you didn't handle the call well,” she says, and you should make improving your service a priority.

  While you're at it, review your telephony reports to determine how long callers are kept on hold and how many calls are lost in the process. “A lot of times companies put in cost-cutting controls but never go back and measure the effect on customer retention or future sales,” Ellis notes.

• If you want to overhaul your Website, start brainstorming now. Allow six months from brainstorming to launch, says William Swartwood, president of Chicago-based Swartwerk Media Design, a Website design and consulting firm. “It always takes longer than people imagine. So many more things come up than you ever thought.”

  MARCH · Hold a strategy meeting to discuss improvements to your print catalog, suggests Glenda Shasho Jones, president of New York-based consultancy Shasho Jones Direct. For example, based on your square-inch analysis, will you be moving to a denser look? Determine how many pages and how many items the catalog will include. Will you be adding a new category of merchandise, such as apparel in a hard-goods catalog? Consider ways to strengthen the brand through creative, as well as changes to typeface or font size, headline style, and the like. By meeting before your creative team starts working on the fall and holiday books, you can avoid having to redesign layouts later.

  When planning strategically, consider what's going on in the entire catalog business, or even the economy as a whole, and how that might affect your business, Hansel adds. For instance, are other merchants making changes to pricing? Keep an eye on your main competitors throughout the year, and make adjustments accordingly.

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