1) Create a Street Team: While the term "viral marketing" is all the rage these days, it seems like few companies really know how to do it. Obviously, viral marketing (friends telling friends) occurs naturally among your customers. However, the challenge is motivating your customers to more proactively tell their friends and family about your products or services. One way to do this is to create a voluntary Street Team or some other membership club. Bands have used street teams for years as an easy avenue for allowing their fans to spread the word about their music. With my current company, we created a street team that provides free branded content such as screensavers, wallpapers, flyers, email templates, banners, and more. Additionally, we provide an incentive for our street team members to spread the word about our products by offering them a 10% referral credit for anyone they send to the site that makes a purchase. Not all street teams need to be this multifaceted; however it is to your advantage to at least provide some good free content or some motivation to spread the word.

2) Develop a Gift Finder Service: Gift finders are becoming progressively more popular, especially during holiday seasons. Too often we assume that customers come to a website knowing exactly what they are looking for. Quite often, especially during the Christmas season, customers are looking for suggestions on what gifts to give. One advantage that brick and mortar stores have over online stores is the ability for a knowledgeable sales associate to suggest gift items matching the customer's requirements. The goal of a gift finder should be to simulate this process as much as possible. For example, the gift finder can ask the shopper the gender of the person they are shopping for, the age range, the price range of the gift, and more. The more detailed the gift finder's search options are, the more likely they are to find that perfect gift.

3) Email Customers Who Abandon Their Shopping Carts: One easy way to increase conversion rates is to checkup on those people who never complete the checkout process. My current company, C28 Christian Gifts, we send a friendly email to these customers telling them that we are currently trying to improve our checkout process, and apologizes if anything was confusing. In addition, we give them a coupon code as an additional incentive for bringing them back. Overall, shoppers greatly appreciate the emails, and it has proven to identify some otherwise unknown problems in the checkout process. In addition, the coupon code serves to bring in additional orders that we would not otherwise have received.

In the end, the innovators will be the winners. Because most companies are not implementing strategies such as these, there remains a huge opportunity for those who do. As your website evolves, the improvements will create value in the shopper's mind, which will bring them back to you again and again.

About the Author

JT Palmer is the Website Administrator and Marketing director for C28. C28 offers a large selection of unique Christian gift ideas. and Not of This World Clothing. C28's fast growing website offers faith based apparel, accessories, and an online Christian Music Store. Justin can be reached at justin@c28.com.