5 Awesome Strategies to Overcome Online Sales Slowdown

Now that summer’s in full swing, many internet marketers experience online stagnation: traffic, conversions and sales are going down.

And it’s quite natural: summertime drives your customers outdoors away from computer screens.

Yet there are certain steps you can take to keep your summer sales from shrinking.

In this post I’ll share some strategies you can use to make the coming August lucrative for your online sales despite the summer slowdown.

1.       Find keywords that generate summer traffic

So it’s a natural thing you get less traffic in summer. If you look closer into your organic traffic, you’ll see that your keywords are a mixed bag: some of them perform equally well throughout the year, others are useless in summer.

To pick SEO keywords that perform better or worse in summer, run your usual keyword list through Google Trends:

In Google Trends, you’ll see that how the search volumes for your keywords change in summer and pick keywords that suffer summer slowdown the least.

If your site has been around for a while, make use of last summer’s traffic stats. Go to your 2012 traffic stats and pick up keywords that performed best last summer.

Make sure that traffic changes were really seasonal, and not simply effected by the changes in rankings – you can compare the changes in keyword traffic and rankings on Rank Tracker‘s graphs:

This way you’ll have a list of SEO keywords to focus on for the stagnation period left. You can either focus on them for your SEO or PPC activities.

2. Revise your paid advertising budge

In summer, you might want to cut down on banner ads that don’t bring you enough revenue?

How do you calculate that?

Let’s say you’ve been running a banner ad at some partner site in June and July 2013. Now you want to see if it’s worth paying for the banner in August.

First, calculate cost per visit:

Cost per visit = Monthly banner price/ monthly visits it brings

Compare the Cost per visit you get to your revenue per visit:

Cost per visit = Monthly banner price/ monthly visits it brings

 If the banner placement in question fits Cost per visit < Revenue per visit rule, run it in August. If it doesn’t it might be worth streaming your budget to other marketing activities.

The same rule applies to your PPC advertising. As your revenue per visit has a tendency to change in summer period, revise your current PPC campaign – make sure the bids you pay per click are lower than the revenue per visitor you get.

PPC bids < Revenue per visit  

3. Run a contest to attract people in social media

Summer is best time ever for social media contests. Last year we at Link-Assistant.Com even ran SEO Olympics social media event as it coincided with the Olympic Games in London. The more original and fun it is, the more visitors it’ll bring to your site, so be creative!

Over the low summer season, it’s wiser for you not only to attract new visitors yourself, but encourage your customers spread the word about.

“Bring a friend and get something” campaign can help you keep your traffic throughout the summer. More to that, as summer-mood makes your customers more open and more communicative, you’re likely to get great results.

4. Engage with your potential customers on forums and blogs

In summer, when other marketing activities might be too pricey, work hard on stuff you can do free. In particular, bring over your brand to forums and blogs more actively.

Though it doesn’t cost you a penny, make sure you spend your time wisely and you spread your marketing message to as many boards as possible spending a couple of hours a week.

BuzzBundle will help you here a lot.

Just enter the keyword, related to your brand, and BuzzBundle will find all mentions of this keyword in social media. Make sure you answer any questions your readers ask on forums and blogs:

5. Rise your average client’s spending

Even though fewer people come to your site, there are still some steps you can take to increase your average client’s spending.

Here are some examples of summer campaigns you can run to make your customers spend more:

–          Get 50% off the second item

–          Buy something and get an accompanying good free (e.g. laptop – wireless mouse)

–          Purchase 10 items and get 11^th free

Just think of campaigns that suit your particular business best.

As you can see, there’s really a lot you can do to avoid summer sales slowdown. Get into the right working mood, set goals, be creative and… be positive and open to your customers – people buy more from the people they like!