5 Easy And Effective Tactics To Improve Holiday Sales

Five Easy And Effective Tactics How A Speaking Character Helps

1.Engage customers with a memorable holiday greeting
2.Make your promotions come across loud via a SPOKEN message
3.Use an interactive FAQ to save time for your customers
4.Persuade customers to take action
5.Reinforce special deals in the shopping cart and up-sell


Limited-Time Holiday Promotion
Sign up for a 15 day free trial of SitePal before Dec. 18th and get two holiday outfits for all of your models! Sign up now!

SitePal Is Easy!
With SitePal, creating and publishing your own speaking character is as easy as 1,2,3. Using our online editor, you can easily customize any character to your liking, and add your audio message by using our Text-to-Speech or Record-by-Phone feature. The process is automated, no technical experience is required.

Improve holiday sales with a speaking character

'Tis time of the year for giving! According to a market forecast by TNS retail, online sales in Q4 2007 will reach $42B driven by a strong holiday retail sales in November and December. A consumer survey done by eTail group reveals that 90% of respondents are planning to spend over $100 over the holiday period with 47% willing to spend over $500.

As great as the opportunity may sound, the competition is also intense. Almost every online merchant including the giants like Wal-Mart are gearing up to ride on the biggest shopping spree of the year with increased marketing budget, special promotions and so on.

So how can you compete with Wal-Mart? You have limited resources and need a cost effective way to entice people to open their wallets on YOUR site, not on your competitors? One key to maximize your site effectiveness is to create a differentiated and efficient shopping experience. Speaking characters are a perfect tool to make your site stand out during the holiday season.

Here are 5 easy and smart ways how a speaking character can help:

1.Engage customers with a memorable holiday greeting
2.Make your holiday promotions come across loud via a SPOKEN message
3.Use an interactive FAQ to save time for your customers
4.Persuade customers to take action
5.Reinforce special deals in the shopping cart and up-sell

Reveal:
5 tips for increasing conversions with a speaking character

1. Engage your customers with a memorable holiday greeting

Have your speaking character welcome your visitors on the homepage with a warm holiday greeting. You can reinforce the festive atmosphere by using a SitePal holiday characters or add holiday accessories, outfits or backgrounds to your existing character. Trivial as it may sound, the friendly seasonal gesture will definitely grab your visitors' attention, ignite their interest in your website and make your website memorable.

2. Make your holiday promotions come across loud via a SPOKEN message

Use a speaking character to take advantage of the deal-driven mentality of holiday shoppers. If you have a special holiday promotions, have your speaking character highlight it clearly and loudly as soon as your visitors land on your site. A SPOKEN message will ensure that your special offers are found and heard by your customers. Add a speaking character to your product page as well to draw customers' attention to any special items on sale.

3. Use an interactive FAQ to save the time for your customers

The eTail survey also revealed that 68% of holiday shoppers chose “time saving” as one of their top 3 priorities. If you anticipate any questions or concerns from your customers, why not address them in advance so your customers don't have to spend time finding the answers on your site? Using SitePal's FAQ feature, you can easily program your speaking character to answer to most frequently asked questions from gift ideas to on-time delivery guarantee in an engaging and time-saving manner. You may want to call brand her as a virtual shopping guide!

4. Persuade customers to take action

Another big merit of a speaking character is its power to engage people to respond to a call to action. Make sure you include a clear and specific call to action in the audio message (e.g. click the "buy now" button below to add the item for a 15% discounted price!) A recent AB test done by Anita Campbell, CEO of Small Business Trends.com, proved that a SitePal character-enabled website had a 144% higher conversion rate than a text only site due to its power to persuade people to take action.

5. Reinforce special deals in the shopping cart and up-sell

Place a speaking character in your shopping cart to remind your customers of any missed deal and up-sell. For example, if you offer "free shipping" during your holiday period, make your speaking character reiterate it in the shopping cart. Now your customer may want to add even more items to her cart to take advantage of the free shipping offer!

Sign up for your speaking character today!

About SitePal
SitePal is easy-to-use, industry-leading speaking character solution developed by Oddcast. With its ability to engage customers, reinforce marketing messages and persuade customers to take action, SitePal has helped thousands of small businesses improve their business results from increasing conversions to enhancing customer loyalty.

Increasing conversion by SitePal's Talking Characters

Most website visitors leave a site within a few seconds after landing on it. If you can't make them stay a little longer, you will lose them. What's worse is they'll leave your site for your competitors'. Make your web visitors stay a little longer, and increase your chance of generating leads.

Many people believe they need more website visitors to increase leads. But, if you have a steady stream of visitors, you won't need more website visitors to close your sales or generate leads online. According to a study, less than 4% of website visitors actually buy your products or invest in your services. This is called the conversion rate. Most website conversion rates are actually somewhere between 0% to 4%. If you have less than 1.5% it is wiser to spend more time improving your conversion rate than trying to increase number of visitors.

A Study showed that a SitePal-integrated site performs better.

SitePal is an Internet-based subscription service that allows you to create a wide-array of animated speaking characters, which can be added to your website for a variety of professional and personal applications. According to Dr. Ralph F. Wilson's article Engaging Site Visitors with SitePal Animated Speaking Characters, a SitePal-integrated website increases the website visitors' average time on the site by 33%. The article also shows that website visitors for a SitePal-integrated website views 17% more of a page than a non-SitePal-integrated website.

What can SitePal do?
A SitePal avatar can deliver your message. Unlike other web streaming audio you can deliver your message in a friendlier way since SitePal is a human-like talking character. It moves its eyes as you move your mouse on a website as if somebody on the page is watching you. The avatar can also answer visitor's questions by speaking, or it can introduce benefits of some of your best selling products. A live voice is friendlier and more powerful than text on a webpage.

Some SitePal integrated websites.

Think Big Real Estate
In a very competitive marketplace, Think Big Real Estate.com needed to stand above the rest of the competition. With statistics showing that over 75% of homebuyers search for a new property by using the Internet, Think Big executives wanted to be sure to grab the attention of every potential client that visited their website.

Goldfish Software, LLC
Goldfish Software implemented SitePal to provide customers with more consultative information about its products. As a result, the company has experienced an increase in conversion at a rate of 33% since the launch of the SitePal character.

How to integrate SitePal to your website

You first design the avatar's appearance such as gender, hair style, accessories and so on. You can do this through SitePal's web-based admin page. Then record audio file. (There are several ways to do this) Then you will get a few lines of Javascript code which you need to put into your web page's code.

Having a SitePal character in your website will certainly help you stand out among your competition's websites.

Grab now SitePal for your site!.

Have you been to one of those websites that has an animated talking avatar? There is no doubt, the Sitepal buddies are all the rage now and they are COOL! They will soon be all over MySpace I am sure.

Welcoming someone to your site with just text and pictures is a trick few websites master. That's where the Sitepal buddies come in. These talking animated avatars are there to serve as anything you want them to. You might use them to greet your customers, tell them about special deals, tell them what your site is about, explain your companies return policies, ....anything you can dream of. These little animated buddies aren't as good as real salesmen, but they sure give your site a cool vibe.

There are no downloads and any site owner should be able to use Sitepal quite easily as very little technical skill is required to get you up and running. You can personalize your character by choosing through hairstyles, face models, facial hair, shirts, and accessories. You can also choose between background settings or use your own.

The Sitepal buddies are available in 14 languages now and over 60 voices. The truly fun part is their text to speech option where the avatar speaks whatever you type in. It is IMPOSSIBLE to not play around with that for at least a couple of minutes!

All sorts of people are starting to use this technology now including MySpace subsribers, Ebay auctions, and tons of online businesses. This is the wave of the future as I see it and if you haven't stumbled into a site using the Sitepal buddies yet you soon will!!