By Jim Clanin
Retailers look forward to the holidays because it is the largest shopping season of the year and can often set the tone for what to expect with sales in the New Year. There is a lot of competition for shopper’s dollars during the mad rush of the holiday season, and there are few things you can do to prepare and compete for those shoppers on your ecommerce site.
Make sure you show up for each holiday party. That doesn’t mean go to every cocktail party in person and tell people about your site. Instead, make sure you attend all applicable places your buyers are, for example in their email in-boxes, social media, smartphones and search. Think of each marketing avenue as a highly coveted holiday party that you must attend, and in your best cocktail dress or suit. While showing up everywhere won’t guarantee that visitors won’t abandon their shopping cart, you can at least get them to show up. Here are some tips to help you prepare for the 2014 holiday shopping season.
1. Pay Per Click: Put time and energy into Pay Per Click (PPC) research to find the best search term combinations or long tail keywords that show buyers intent to purchase. The more dialed in you get your research and keyword terms, the less you will pay for each customer in the long run. Hopefully, you have a history from holidays past that show segmented search terms that show effective search terms from the holidays to keep costs downs.
2. Email campaigns are locked and loaded: Before the holiday season begins, email lists, email messaging and marketing collateral should be ready to go and scheduled. That way, you can spend your time on last minute tweaks and changes as the holidays arrive instead of conceptualizing in the thick of the shopping rush.
3. Social media calendar: Instead of planning day-by-day or week-by-week with your social media accounts, plan your social media efforts for the buying season ahead of time. November and December should be a time for quick and last minute changes, and not planning. Discount announcements, campaigns, urgent offers and follower rewards and spiffs should be planned and scheduled ahead of time.
4. Get your servers ready: You will experience a spike in your website traffic, and nothing deters a shopper like a 404, 502 or any other annoying error page. Just like you spend time attracting visitors to your ecommerce site, make sure you spend time with your IT department to make sure they are preparing your site for an influx of traffic or ask assistance from Website Support Services.
5. Think of each marketing channel as a different theme party: Make sure that the messaging of each channel, i.e. PPC, email marketing or social media, leads people to a page on your site with consistent messaging. Don’t use the same messaging for each channel either, because each visitor will react to different messaging on the different media. Avoid using the same landing page for ads, email campaigns, and social media spiffs. The landing pages need to tie into each media’s campaign and message the visitors first noticed.
6. Mobile visitors are different: Change your landing pages, so they are custom to mobile phone users and consistent with your mobile campaigns. Smartphone visitors want to easily compare prices and view store locations. Mobile phone and smart tablet shoppers require fast and easy shopping experiences.
Because the holidays are so important for online retailers to attract new customers, retain existing ones and make a splash for the New Year, it is important to plan your holiday ecommerce strategy far before November arrives. However, if you are just starting to think about it, consider these tips, ad take note of what works this year so that next year you can start planning earlier. If you want help, call DoubleDome Digital Marketing for help with your Pay Per Click, Ecommerce and SEO campaigns for your holiday shoppers 888-799-6067.
