Shoe Carnival, a value-priced footwear and accessories retailer, has announced its ecommerce store – shoecarnival.com. Shoe Carnival offers more than 1500 styles of footwear and accessories from the most coveted brands like Adidas, Nike, and Puma etc.

“We’re creating a distinctive and accessible online shopping experience for our customers by offering an unbelievable product assortment, great brand names and value pricing for the entire family. ShoeCarnival.com represents another opportunity for new and existing customers to shop and interact with Shoe Carnival, and we believe it will be a strong contributor to the continued growth and success of the Shoe Carnival brand.” said Mark Lemond, President and CEO of Shoe Carnival.

Shoe Carnival has more than 320 stores located across United States, with its headquarters in Evansville, IN.

According to a recent study, ecommerce will deliver 23% of the global retail sales by 2015. This was revealed at the World Retail Congress, where a poll was conducted among the Senior Executives of the top 100 retailers with at least $1billion turnover.

Only 6% of this group forecast that there would be a decline in the sales. 29% of the responders predict revenues to be static and 10% foresee a surge in the next 3 years.

67% believe that they will have more stores by 2015. 90% of the total respondents believe that their physical outlets will remain as a key way for the shopping. Currently, ecommerce delivers 13% of the retail sales and it will grow by 23% with the current pace across the world.

Clearly retailers need to understand what are the best and most effective methods to consider driving their loyal customers to their site during the holiday season.

SEM and email marketing are some of the ways retailers are trying to hook into visitor intent and cultivate profitable and lasting relationships. This is away from the traditional price-based promotions as a method to cultivate customer loyalty. Holiday season campaigns are measured with metrics that segment and identify customers across demographics to ensure successful sales. Some of strategies one can look at how to implement an effective holiday season are:

Countdown for shoppers

Time-tailored promotions and specials help shoppers count down to the holiday season. Campaigns like ’12 days for Christmas’ helps shoppers start planning and finding the right gift before the season and these early purchases helps retailers plan more repeat buyers’ incentives.

Give shoppers a sense of urgency with taglines like ‘offer of the day. Gone tomorrow’. These prompts the shoppers to make their purchase decision today knowing that tomorrow it might not be the same offer.

Special offers

Most of the consumers definitely would come to your site during the holiday season. but equally inviting would be to throw in some offers like free shipping with a certain amount of purchase, free gifts, or even special repeat buyer discount to fuel repeat purchases from existing customers. These special offers dig your customer loyalty relationships and ensure a consistent flow of new and old customers.

Free shipping is vital as holiday shoppers are bound to purchase more when they know all they buy can be shipped without a cost. Most retailers offer this but marketers should also have legal implications to cover up demographic shipping issues and costs.

Site features

Personalized promotions, suggested items, gift idea center, live chat are some site features retailers use during holiday season promotions. these are used primarily to generate revenue from loyal customers. Most of these features should be personalized with the click stream behavior of the customers to get maximum sales.

Highlight seasonal content, products and categories and put the holiday season front and center so that shoppers can find, choose and buy gifts easily. Taglines like ‘shop for our exclusive gifts’ gets the message across clearly – recipients are unlikely to get these gifts anywhere.