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2.
Consider the demographics of the gift giver – Comet comments that if
you’ve only been targeting the primary demographic of your typical buyer, you
may want to expand that to include the demographics of potential gift givers.
Keep in mind that even though a particular paid search engine might not be
profitable during the non-holiday period, your gift givers might hang out there
for most of their searches. Your prior years’ analytics can really help show
how the search engines performed for you during the holidays.
3.
Monitor the buzz – Cupid believes that it’s important to
discover the latest hot topics by visiting social content websites such as
technorati.com, digg.com and del.icio.us.
See if you can find ways to weave this information into your
promotions or products.
4.
Don’t
Stop Testing –
Donner points out that even though it’s holiday season, it’s still a good
idea to test. That doesn’t mean you need to risk your entire holiday
season revenues, but selective testing can give you powerful information
that’ll really come in handy during the holiday season in 2007.
5. Recognize the life-time value of
your customer – Blitzen makes
the case that obtaining a new customer always costs more than selling to an
existing customer and during the holiday season this may be even more so. Learn
about how much money repeat customers are worth to you and factor that into how
much you can profitably afford to spend on new customer acquisition. The key here is to understand that your
goal is likely long term revenue generation.
Be sure to have loyalty and
promotional plans
in place to quickly convert these new customers to repeat buyers.
The
3 Reindeer who have become experts in pay-per-click marketing suggest the
following:
6.
Include holiday-related keywords - Dasher
reminds us to not forget to expand our keyword listing with holiday references such as "gift", "holiday", and
"presents" in your ad title. Also, take this opportunity to
review your negative keyword list - you don't want to be spending your precious
holiday marketing budget on unqualified visitors.
7.
Ensure consistency between your holiday keywords, ad title and ad creative
- Dancer suggests that as you add new holiday keywords, be sure your ad title
and ad descriptions are also in-synch with those keywords. Setup separate
AdGroups for this new subset of keywords so you can tailor your ads specifically
to these new keywords.
In
addition, look at last year's ad performance reports for clues on what creative
returned the highest profit on your click charges.
8.
Create landing pages that flow from your ad creative
- Prancer wants us to be sure to create unique landing pages for the new
holiday-themed keywords we're bidding on. And remember that these
visitors may be looking to buy gifts for others and therefore less product
savvy than your typical buyer.
It's important to recognize that, in general,
broader search terms, like "digital cameras" suggest the visitor may
be in the information gathering mode, while specific keyword phrases such as,
"Canon PowerShot A620" are more likely to reflect a visitor who's
further along in the buying cycle. For best conversion, tailor your
landing pages based on where you believe the visitor is in the buying cycle.
And,
our Holiday expert, Rudolph, is very passionate about our last tip:
9
. Take advantage of cross-sell opportunities – Rudolph wants us to remember that many times when your customer buys 1 product
from you, they can be easily swayed into buying additional products at the same
time. Make it easy for the customer
by promoting these cross-sells at checkout time. If your web analytics has a
merchandising functionality, you’ll be able to see which of your products tend
to sell well together. Rudolph
goes on to suggest that by analyzing your web analytics report that
details cross-sell activity - the percentage of visitors who purchased
product A and also purchased product B during the same visit -
you'll have key information to easily and quickly be able to increase
your average order size.
Examine this report for additional patterns of cross purchase behavior,
so you can
determine which products you should be cross-promoting on your site, in your emails
and throughout your other marketing initiatives. |
