Must Design

Summer = Make or Break
What are you testing this week? Are you testing design, offers, shopping cart or merchandising now? Here are 5 Summer To Dos to help your sales in the 166 days left to Christmas:

Testing Plan
Your testing plan should be FLAT OUT now. Testing after Halloween should be done with great CARE. This means you eat off the "testing meals" you cook now for 3 of the most important months of the year. Here are things we liked to test in the summer:

1 FREE SHIPPING
This year we STRONGLY recommend offering Free Shipping both ways (out and back) and without any hoops to jump through starting about Halloween (i.e. remove your triggers as they start costing you money right around Halloween or at least they did when we tested). We could never get our DM bosses to thing of free shipping as advertising. Shame since we keep placing print ads long after that tactic was dead man walking (now print by itself is crazy).

When you model Free Shipping both ways now remember you need 3x the same customer visits now you will need in November.. In the summer we ran about 3.2 visits before a purchase. After 11.1 that number dropped to 1.5 and by Black Friday it was damn close to a single visit.

2 Offers & Causes
Use that last paragraph to model great offers at this time of year. If an offer lowers the number of return visits needed BOOK IT for November and December since any summer offer should ROCK 4Q (unless the goods are summer related).

We liked to test cause marketing at this time of year. Our demographics were almost even (men to women). Find brand aligned causes and figure out how to help. If you sell auto stuff for trucks you might contribute to Ducks Unlimited for every sale of Chevy parts.

If you sell books contribute to literacy for every bestselling bought in any form (e-book or hardcover). Your cause doesn't have to be so close to your brand especially if you tie-in to the big 5:

American Red Cross
Goodwill
American Cancer Society
Feed Children
Care fore Pets

3 Create & Test Unique Merchandising Combinations
Great time of year to create unique merchandising. Amazon is going to beat any price you have on products with velocity in segments like books, gifts and media. Your only HOPE is to create unique and branding merchandising.

Be sure to create a NEW page and SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) for your new combinations. Link your new combinations from established pages for best sales results. If you've always sold A, B & C offer a new combination of all 3 and give C away free.

Use your metrics to find natural combinations.

4 Free Gifts
If you have Free Shipping both ways and no competitor is following you don't need a free gift. If you can't get free 2 way shipping approved toss in a free gift. Free gifts can't SUCK.

If can't give a gift aligned with your brand and that will delight and surprise DON'T GIVE A FREE GIFT.

5 Social Mentions & Kudos
By far the LEAST expensive idea on this page is LISTEN, THANK and SHARE content your customers share with you. Follow back well more than 50% of your followers cutting out the spammers. You will be amazed how much traction ACKNOWLEDGEMENT creates.

Every follow back and Retweet wins hearts, minds and loyalty best mined NOW for THEN.