Editorial Articles

All digital marketers will know the best times in the year for online sales. Significant resource and time is used to plan marketing campaigns that drive as much traffic as possible to a site to capitalise on this period of heightened engagement with the brand. While a stable online presence is desirable all year round, avoiding downtime becomes more important during the busiest times of year for sales. This calls for a traffic management strategy to be put in place that proactively maintains a brand's online presence, even during peak periods.

Recognising busy times

In the run up to Christmas 2009, Comscore claimed that visits to retail sites were up by 18 per cent on average in the first week of November and an increase of 47 per cent in the second week of that month. Other national holidays such as Easter are also likely to attract an increase in the numbers of visitors to sites. While planning for these occasions will be a given for many businesses, each organisation will additionally need to recognise other peak periods that arise as a result of the sector they operate in or the marketing campaigns they run. A charity, for example, will need to make sure it has sufficient online capacity to manage donations during a major fundraising initiative. Similarly, an online florist will need to maintain a steady online presence in the run up to Mothering Sunday and Valentine's Day.

Working with IT

As the digital marketer is planning how to drive traffic and sales online, they should be proactively speaking with IT to ensure the relevant technology is in place to process the additional custom that will come as a result of this activity. Just as a high street retailer would place extra staff on tills to ensure customers aren't kept waiting to make their purchases, an effective IT team will be able to scale up the computing resource available to cope with the online sales rush. Regular communication about major promotions or marketing campaigns should be discussed between the two teams via regular meetings to avoid instances of downtime.

How far to scale up

Keeping on the front foot to avoid unnecessary outages requires the business to predict what kind of traffic levels are expected as a result of major promotional initiatives. Keeping updated on forecasts from management about growth targets during key periods, will help ensure that the infrastructure is scaled up to meet that threshold. Base-line analysis also needs to be reviewed from previous campaigns, so that maximum volume of traffic can be gauged.

Zero delays, zero downtime

If customers visit a bricks and mortar store, they will factor in the time it takes to travel to the high street and are likely to show more willing when they wait in-line at the checkout to make their purchases. The same levels of patience are rarely shown in the digital world. Online customers show zero tolerance towards outages on the web and can easily switch to competitor sites to purchase similar products. This makes maintaining a constant web presence crucial to brands, if they are to retain the customer's business. Failure to do so will not only lose a company that particular sale, but will damage the reputation of the brand online with the customer on a more long term basis. A strategy that plans for peaks in online visitors and suitably manages web traffic will maintain the customer's relationship with the brand on an ongoing basis, allowing them to make purchases unhindered. 

Graham Moore
e-retail specialist, Zeus Technology