In today's AuctionBytes "Vendor Monday" column, Marketworks Chief Marketing Officer Paul Lundy shares three multi-channel ecommerce strategies for eBay and online sellers. Each week, AuctionBytes.com runs an article submitted by a vendor or marketplace in the online-auction industry about a topic helpful to online sellers. Story submissions are welcome by emailing the editor.

Now that the holiday shopping hangover is wearing off, it's time to start thinking about how you'll drive sales all year long. While it's estimated that 85 percent of Americans overlook work when making their New Year's resolutions, this is an excellent time of year to start thinking about how to improve your multi-channel ecommerce success in the coming year.

Although many may not get to run that marathon or fit into those old jeans this year, anybody can improve their ecommerce business by starting with the following three areas:

• Leverage Shopping Comparison Sites to List Your Inventory in Front of More Potential Customers
• Create a Marketing Calendar and Capitalize on the Other Holidays and Events Throughout the Year with Email Marketing Promotions
• Track and Measure Your Results so You'll Have the Data You Need to Focus Your Resources on the Areas of Greatest Potential

List to Shopping Comparison Sites
More than 59 percent of online shoppers start at aggregator sites like Shopping.com or NexTag. Furthermore, shopping-specific search engines like Google's free Froogle service can help you reach more potential customers with less effort.

Aggregator sites specifically target shoppers based on what they are looking to buy, rather than searchers looking just for information. For obvious reasons, the more you can position your products in front of customers that want to buy them, the greater your potential for sales will be.

My company's average customer lists close to 1,000 inventory items in shopping comparison sites. Customers Sellers like Adam Hersh Auctions (http://www.adamhersh.com), one of the largest poster retailers in both eBay and Amazon marketplaces, rely heavily on shopping comparison sites to help him reach the greatest number of customers.

Getting started with shopping comparison sites through an ecommerce platform that enables these kind of product feeds, or by going direct to the sites themselves, is easier than most sellers might think and well worth the effort to increase sales and profits.

Create a Marketing Calendar and Capitalize on Seasonal Buying Patterns
While the Christmas and Chanukah holiday shopping season is the strongest sales period during the year, there are 10 other months during the year that represent annual and seasonal opportunities to sell more products to your customers.

Consider how your products could fit into specific events and timeframes and develop email marketing promotions for your customers during these times to drive more sales. Here are some examples of the most popular holidays and seasons that customers experience stronger sales:

• New Years celebrations
• The Super Bowl
• Winter vacations and recreation
• Valentine's Day
• St. Patrick's Day
• Easter
• Mothers Day and Fathers Day
• Independence Day
• Summer vacations and recreation
• Back-to-school shopping
• Halloween
• Thanksgiving

Holiday and seasonal tie-ins are only one way to develop promotions for customers. The key is figuring out what works best for the products you sell and the customers you serve. For example, RocknRocks (http://www.rocknrocks.com), a seller of gemstone beads and merchandise, does alphabet promotions for their customers - where they'll send an email with all gemstones beginning with the letters a, b, or c. They'll do a different set of letters each month and have consistently grown sales as a result of their efforts.

An important point about RocknRocks is that they've been able to cultivate customer relationships that began through their eBay sales and now sell more on their storefront than in marketplaces. As a result, they've not only consistently grown revenues, but profits as well.

Track and Measure Results and Conversion Rates
The more you know about the performance of your marketing activities and where your traffic and sales are coming from, the more you can grow your business and eliminate unnecessary marketing expenses.

Most traffic sources, such as Google, Yahoo, Shopping.com, eBay, and Ask.com all offer reports on a wide-range of data that will help you target your efforts more strategically to drive more sales. Some key metrics to look at on a regular basis include:

• Total number of unique visitors - how many customers are you reaching?
• Referring domains - where is the traffic coming from?
• Search engine traffic - how much traffic is being generated from paid versus organic search traffic?
• Keyword traffic - what terms and phrases are driving the most customers to your site?
• Visitor geography - what parts of the country are your customers coming from? Is there a connection between what you sell and those areas with the largest customer concentrations?

Of course, measuring traffic data is only one piece of the equation. More important is to monitor your conversion of traffic to sales across each area. To hone in on where your sales are the strongest, you'll want to monitor data like:

• Entry pages - where do customers enter your site from or first find your product listings?
• Category pages - what product categories are most popular among your customers?
• Landing pages - what landing pages get the most traffic? Why do these pages perform better than others? Answer this question and repeat your strategy to improve the performance of less-effective pages.

Online retailers that do the best job looking at their data and continuously making improvements in the keywords and search terms they use reap the greatest rewards. You can't just launch your site and let it sit there. When you launch an ecommerce business, it's the equivalent of planting plants in a garden - you have to keep watering, pruning and weeding to get the best results.

Conclusion
In today's multi-channel ecommerce environment, there are an endless range of strategies and tactics you can use to reach more customers and sell more products. The key to long-term success is continuously expanding the range of channels and strategies you use to reach customers and to find the ones that perform best for you.

A multi-channel ecommerce vendor can help you accelerate your efficiency and effectiveness managing all the different variables, but most sellers can learn through trying new things, looking at the results, and continuously tweaking their approach to improve month-after-month, and year-after-year.
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Paul Lundy is Chief Marketing Officer of Marketworks, a multi-channel ecommerce software solutions provider. Paul's experience acquiring and managing customer and partner relationships provides Marketworks with key leadership in the area of sales and marketing. Paul spent much of his career with McCann-Erickson Advertising on The Coca-Cola Company account in the U.S., France and London, England and Asia. For more information on Marketworks, visit http://ww2.marketworks.com.