Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

Here is the first tip... and for us digital marketers the one we push (in the interests of self preservation). You may consider these tips for your own site or if you are on the agency side, then for your clients.

1. Using Search Marketing. Hopefully your site (or clients) is already search engine optimized (SEO), so customers can easily find you. But to boost traffic to your site during the holiday season, consider pay-per-click advertising (e.g., Baidu, Google). While not free, pay-per-click advertising provides at reasonable cost the ability to promote online shoppers to your site. Bonus tip: When picking key words, try adding some common mis-spellings.

2. Offer holiday/ festive specials. People love getting a deal. This is an emotional thing where it makes you feel good. You needn't put your whole inventory on sale but offering a few, choice holiday-related items at a reduced price, right on your home page and/or key landing pages, is a great way to lure customers.

3. Run a holiday promotion. Position is everything. Make sure that the majority of your web traffic will see this offer and can take advantage of it. SinoTech Group recently did a promotion for Accor Hotels for winning a trip to Sydney and not only did that kind of promotion increase traffic, it increases sales and expanded their e-mail list of prospective customers.

4. Use e-mail and mobile marketing. Don't forget about existing customers, who tend to shop at your store in good times and in bad. Let them know about holiday sales, specials and/or promotions with e-mails and/or micro-blogging platforms (like Twitter or Fanfou). Also consider offering existing customers coupons and/or discounts on purchases above a certain amount.

5. A/B Testing. Getting the promotion right is critical, so use variations of ad's and landing pages. Then with splitting the traffic between these variations you can determine the combination that is converting. Most people just use a single landing page with a couple of creative, this will work but you could be missing a whole lot of people who just don't respond to that message.

6. Don't just be Christmas- and/or Chinese New Year-focused. Keep your campaigns fresh. Everyone does (should) be running campaigns that offer 'something special' during the festival periods. Use these as the key campaign but try and run campaigns that butt onto them. So for example, the periods after Chinese Year is dead for travel. This should be where the greatest offers are used to lessen this impact or for a online clothing company trying to move out of season stock.

7. Offer free gift wrapping or a big bow. By offering customers free gift wrapping (or free with a minimum purchase), including a gift card, you are fulfilling customers' expectations and needs. Never underestimate what people will do for convenience. A customer of mine once said that the success of his Christmas campaign was simply adding a "bow" A simple (and cheap) way to be remembered when the product arrived at the door.

8. Offer free shipping. One key concern of online consumers is the high cost of shipping. Consider, offering free shipping or discounted shipping on purchases over a certain value.

9. Provide exceptional customer service. Be prepared when your customers ask for or need help. Make sure you have a contact number and customer service e-mail address right on your home page, as well as on all your landing/product pages and at checkout. If possible, use a live help via a chat window.

10. Wish lists and recommend gifts. Efficiency and speed are high priorities for today's online shoppers. And wish lists and a list of recommended gifts (based on age or gender or previous purchases) definitely help shoppers save time by getting the right gift(s) quickly.

11. Build Loyalty. Customers love free samples — and free things...  coupons are great.  We ran a offer for Esquires Coffee here in Beijing where people could go to their site and print of a 2:1 coffee offer. This offer was time/date stamped so they only had 24 hours to claim the second coffee but it built great customer loyalty (and return rates to the web site)

12. Viral Marketing. Use "add this" buttons where people can forward your offer page to their contacts. Nothing works better than a simple click to send a great offer page to your renren or facebook friends.

And here is a bonus tip......

13. Use widgets. Add a widget that can be used on affiliate sites. Maybe a price comparison or 'hottest' product widget but these are welcomed by affiliates as they tend to be great for attracting traffic to their site (and increasing time on page metrics).

Well I hope you got some ideas from these simple but effective tips. Not all of these can be used by every online company but at the very least may get you thinking about your current or future campaigns. If you have any more tips then please post below in the comments section (you need to be logged in to see these comments)