Tag: holiday plan

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Digital Marketing

Holiday E-Commerce Tips: How to Prepare Your Site for Shopping Season

There are several holiday e-commerce tips to consider this year. Successful holiday e-commerce strategies involve optimizing a website for mobile users, creating holiday-themed content, and offering special promotions. Implementing a robust email marketing campaign to highlight deals and gift ideas is crucial. Enhancing customer service with chat support and clear shipping policies can improve the shopping experience. Additionally, utilizing social media for holiday campaigns increases engagement and drives traffic.

Getting your website ready for the holidays takes a lot of preparation. The servers that support your site, the onsite search technology you are using, and the keywords you’re using to target new people during the holidays all have to be in the best shape to make sure you get the most out of the shopping.

Here are a few holiday e-commerce tips to help you increase the chances of getting conversions during the holiday season.

Make Sure Your Site is Secure

As the holiday season approaches, there is an increased risk of falling victim to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These site outages are always bad, but they are highly damaging when you’re dealing with high volumes of traffic and transactions.

Make sure your site can tell the difference between the influx of new visitors and malicious calls made to your site. Use a service like Cloudflare to help you block the bad calls while still allowing legitimate visitors to come through.

At this point, you should have invested in converting your site to https, but if you haven’t, you should create a plan to do that because of the redirects involved. If you don’t, you’ll lose a lot of organic traffic in the process.

Visitors may receive warnings about your site if you haven’t converted to https, which can cause your conversions to suffer.

Review Your Keywords

Take a look at last year’s organic search terms, and improve their experience on the landing page for the most transaction-oriented terms. This way, the terms people use the most during the holidays will lead them to pages that you’ve carefully designed to convert them into customers.

Related: 11 Essential SEO Tips for Ecommerce Sites

Check Your On-Site Search

When you have new visitors to your site, you’ll have more people who need a bit of help finding what they need. It helps yo have a solid navigation system to make finding things easier. Even still, there will be people who rely on your on-site search to find what they need. As such, you need to make sure your internal search engine serves relevant results to everyone.

Setup on-site search tracking if you haven’t already done so. After your tracking establishes what the top searched terms are, you can use them to improve the on-site search experience.

Check for Errors

If you use Google Analytics, create a report that focuses on 404 error URLs so you can fix them before you start seeing an increase in traffic.

If you’re also using Google Search Console, export a report of errors GSC detects and then look for the sources of the errors so you can fix them.

If you have a number of top URLs people try to reach but don’t exist, you can create redirects to get them to the right place.

Optimize Site Campaigns

Holiday traffic boosts are short-lived, so you need to optimize site campaigns to create a sense of urgency so people act. Consider adding deals that expire, timed offers on holiday bundles, and advertising limited stock.

Using the scarcity principle can do wonders to convert that holiday traffic.

Get Your Promotions Calendar Ready

The content that promotes your product bundles, your Google Ads search terms, and landing pages, the email promotions you send to your list – these are all things that need to be timed and executed perfectly to make the most of your sales opportunities.

As such, you’ll need a project management tool like Trello, or something like Google Sheets and Google Calendar to keep your teams working together. This way, it’s easy for everyone to find out what is launching next, how to escalate when there’s an issue, and whom to contact when something needs to be pushed backed or canceled.

Someone needs to be in charge of your marketing automation efforts, and they need to be in contact with the web team that anticipates the traffic from that effort.

Your PPC specialists need to work with the people managing the website to make sure the messaging is aligned.

You can’t afford for both your website’s pages and shopping cart to be down so the team that deploys any code for enhancement on the site also needs to be in contact with the people who are managing the campaigns. This way, you ensure nothing is affected by upgrades or maintenance projects that may be running on the site.

When the stakes are high it is a good idea to have a master calendar to run everything.

Up Your Shipping Game

For certain shoppers, it won’t matter how much they like your deals if they don’t understand how your shipping works.

A 2018 retail holiday survey found that free shipping is one of the most appealing promotions to customers, second only to discount prices.

If you offer free shipping for certain deals, make sure that it is clear two visitors. Don’t hide it in areas where it will look like an ad.

Be clear about your shipping thresholds because it’s better to have messaging like free shipping on orders above $150 rather than hiding those details and saying free shipping and handling click here for more details.

Free shipping will generally win over fast shipping even for Holiday Shoppers. However, if you can follow through on your promise to ship fast, messaging on how quickly you can deliver the customer’s order needs to be featured prominently to help differentiate you from your competitors.

Improve Your Site Speed

Your site speed is always important. During the holidays, however, it is even more crucial. You’ll have an influx of new visitors who are more likely to spend their money now than at any other point during the year. If you have back burner projects geared toward improving your page load time, now is the time to implement those plans.

Your holiday site preparations can take a toll on your overall page size if you’re not careful. You must use well design and optimize images that look good even on the largest laptop screens. This can impact the total size of all the elements your page needs to load which can slow down the load time.

Pairing this with higher than usual visitor counts can overload your servers which brings your site to a crawl.

Use these tips to help you:

  • Make sure you’re using a Content Delivery Network.
  • Use Scrset to deliver the correct optimize images for different devices so your images are responsive.
  • Minify your JavaScript to avoid any unnecessary site slowdowns.
  • Determine whether your site uses asynchronous scripts so the important elements are loaded first

Have a Retargeting Budget

While you want to ensure that your checkout experience is as Stellar as it can possibly be, no matter how great it is, a portion of your audience will leave items in their cart and not push all the way through to purchase. Cart abandonment is just as much a part of online marketing as conversions.

Save a portion of your holiday ad spending for retargeting rather than just spending it on PPC or other avenues that bring additional visitors in. Plan how you’ll remind visitors to come back to their car when they see your ad and then sure they can go back to where they left off rather than having them start over.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Creating a Digital Marketing Plan for the Holidays

What’s that, you say?

It’s only September?

Marketers, let’s take the “only” out of there – it’s putting your holiday campaigns at risk. The bare truth of the matter is this: if you haven’t started planning your holiday marketing campaigns yet, you are officially behind schedule.

Stores started putting out back-to-school gear in July and Halloween supplies in August. Before you know it, the aisles (and the internet) will be filled with holiday decor. Meanwhile, those of you who haven’t started preparing yet are left to scramble to get noticed at the last minute.

You can avoid all of this scrambling and haste by starting to prepare right now. You need to have your digital marketing campaigns up as soon as possible so that you can end out the year strong, pleasing shareholders and consumers alike.

So, how exactly can you do that? Let’s walk through the basics of creating a digital marketing plan for the holidays. Better late than never!

Map Out the Dates

It helps to have a clear idea of what holidays you are going to target and the dates. The dates aren’t just the actual holiday dates, but the days and weeks leading up to them – the time where the real magic happens.

You might offer specials that focus on being “thankful” before Thanksgiving. This is a wise idea, but the majority of your marketing plan for the holidays will be focused on the days immediately after. Knowing which dates have the most impact for your audience is critical and essential to your success.

Which holidays you target will depend on your business. That said, these dates are the most common you need to be aware of:

  • Thanksgiving – November 22
  • Black Friday – November 23rd
  • Small Business Saturday – November 24th
  • Cyber Monday – November 26th
  • All December Holiday Dates
  • New Year – January 1st

Those are just the most popular post-Thanksgiving shopping days. You can alter the rest of the month of November and December based on your preferences.

Don’t feel limited to a specific set of holidays, either. Often, businesses love running 12 Days of Christmas campaigns that span a two-week period to keep people paying attention for longer periods. Others prefer to stick to general holiday campaigns or may incorporate aspects of Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and other holidays, while still others diversify with “less official” dates. The decision depends on how your target audience will respond.

It’s Not Just About Sales

While your holiday marketing plan will obviously have sales goals, you’ll want to make sure you are focused on the long-term effects it may have. For example, what are your lead generation goals? How many new email sign-ups do you want to obtain before the holidays? Strategize to determine how you can meet these goals with your efforts.

Don’t forget to capitalize on the “premium VIP” phenomenon. Entice your audience with campaigns that ensure they are the first to know about holiday specials and deals or the first to know when your new holiday shopping app launches. This makes your audience feel special, building loyalty and long-term relationships.

Does your organization support a specific charity or cause? Your holiday marketing campaigns can (and should) align with those goals as well. Portions of your sales may be donated to your cause of choice, or you may give someone who supports your cause a special discount as a thank-you.

Define Your Goals

Goals don’t always have to be sales. What are your actual goals for your business? Would you like to simply increase your brand awareness, or is your desired outcome to increase website traffic over time? Perhaps you’re hoping to have more people create links back to your website or mention you on social media instead. These are all admirable, worthy goals – you just need to be aware of them fully before you start to meet them.

Knowing what type of engagement you’d really like to get will help you to build the right type of campaign. No matter what, all of your goals need to be attainable, measurable, and time-bound. Be realistic about what you try to target. You don’t need to become as famous as Google as of end of year, but bringing on 10,000 new Facebook “likes” is totally possible.

Come Up With an “Offer”

Even if you aren’t a B2B or retail business, you can still create a holiday-centered offer that benefits your audience. Discounts on your ebooks, white papers, templates, and online courses are great offers. Discounted or free (limited time) consultations are also enticing.

Ultimately, holiday offers need to be balanced between providing the customer with something of value and achieving your business goals. Focus on what you have to offer that will help your audience jumpstart their goals and take them into the next year.

Do the Research

An important component of your 2018 campaign will be the research you do in terms of the results of your 2017 and previous campaigns. Here’s a few questions to help guide you in the right direction:

  • What did last year’s campaigns look like?
  • Did you reach your goals?
  • What were your successes?
  • What were your failures?
  • What would you change?

Next, further define with these additional questions:

  • Did you give yourself enough time to plan, create, and implement your campaign?
  • Are there metrics you didn’t track last year that you need to track this year?
  • Did your audience respond glowingly or negatively to your campaign?
  • What kind of responses did you receive (e.g., comments)?

Don’t forget to spend some time looking at your audience. Has it changed over the past year? If so, you may need to readjust your targets to reflect the newer audience. It isn’t helpful to target the same audience you went after last year if they are no longer interested.

Voice Is Important and Ever-Changing

Next, let’s spend a minute talking about voice. Year after year, the way we approach marketing changes – including the “voice” we use. Social trends and even politics can make certain approaches inappropriate, preferred, or even completely unacceptable in just a few short months. We’ve seen this before with holiday PR disaster flops like this one, where AT&T posted an opportunistic image of the twin towers in New York on 9/11 in 2013.

Ultimately, you need to have a clear idea of what motivates your audience, what social channels they use most often, and what really excites them in order to really nail down this “voice.” The biggest mistake you can make is assuming that your long-term audience doesn’t change over time. Voice is all about meeting people where they are and relating to them, even as they evolve or change over time, and that requires thoughtfulness and deep demographics.

Update Your Social Media Profiles

A strong campaign depends on the message getting out to consumers. Update your social media profiles to match your current theme, but make sure you have the tools in place for a smooth transition. Build an eye-catching landing page specifically for your offer. Or, build different versions of your landing page so you can better track the responses from different platforms with solid A/B testing.

Don’t Neglect Your Blog During the Holidays

Have a plan in place for regular blog updates that support your goals, too. Plan a series of blogs that support your long-term goals while also taking part in the spirit of the holidays. Don’t be afraid to be spirited, a little bit lighthearted, or even heartwarming; just keep it professional at the same time. Think “costume day” at the office, not “Jim’s Christmas drinking party after work.”

Just make sure you are including the appropriate call-to-action at the end of each blog post, whether that’s a link to your landing page or to an email sign-up form. Tell them what you want them to do, whether it’s to sign up for the newsletter or “Purchase Today to get 50% OFF!”

Automate Where You Can

Listen, manual marketing efforts can be frustrating. Especially in the middle of Black Friday madness or Christmas holiday shopping, when it feels like you have a tenacious hold on your business in the first place. You’re already worried about letting go of even a single variable, causing a domino effect when everything just spins out of control.

That said, you can and should automate what you can, when you can. Send email campaigns through programs like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Aweber, or your favorite newsletter provider and lighten the load. This approach also lets you design and schedule releases so you can “set it and forget it,” focusing on adjustments and improvements along the way rather than little technicalities.

Launching giveaways or contests? Heyo, Gleam.io, and other platforms are great for tracking entries. Hootsuite, Buffer, and a myriad of other tools will also make it easier to schedule social posts and get the ball rolling in the social sphere. Airtable and Asana make it easier to plan your campaigns and keep everyone on your team on the same page as to what is needed.

The holidays are a fun and exciting time for any business. All it takes to create a strong marketing campaign is a little bit of planning, and that’s the stage you should be well into right now. Gather your team, start brainstorming, and get to work. The momentum you build during the holiday season will carry you well into the new year!

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