Archive for November, 2009
Holiday Consumer Acquisition
Friday, November 13th, 2009One of the most pivotal times of the year for online retailers is the holiday season. A strong Q4 holiday surge can make or break their financial success for the entire year. Although overall retail sales are expected to show no gain this holiday shopping season, online retail sales in the U.S. will reach $44.7 billion during the holiday season, an eight percent increase over last year, according to a new report by Forrester Research. That same report surveyed more than 4,000 U.S. Consumers and found that 94 percent of those who made a purchase online within the past three months plan to continue to buy line this holiday season.
The process to engage and capture consumer’s attention is vital to driving revenue during the holiday season. So how can retailers drive as much traffic to their sites and gain profits? Here are three easy ways for retailers to help win the battle.
1.) Co-registration: Co-registration is the easiest and most cost effective way to build a targeted permission based email list. With the ability to gather thousands of “hand-raisers” or consumers interested in promotions and savings, co-registrations provides retails an incredibly easy way to communicate with their audience. One of the most important factors to running a successful co-registration campaign is having a strong call to action, an example of this could be, “FREE SHIPPING when you sign up for the Overstock.com newsletter!.” By including a call to action that promotes savings retailers increase their opt-in and open rates incredibly over other campaigns that simply state, “Click here to find out more and join our newsletter.”
The second step to having a successful campaign is the media placement. Advertisers need to promote their campaigns on sites that are in line with their audience. If client A knows that their target audience are 25-45 year old females that are housewives and do not work, then they must ensure their campaign is running on female only sites targeted towards stay at home moms or wives. By advertising on the most targeted sites you increase your chances of open rates to your email marketing follow-up.
2.) Email Marketing: Probably the most popular way of advertising during the holiday is a large email push. This should always follow a co-registration campaign as quickly as possible either by an auto-responder or by a standalone email blast to a list being produced. It is important to follow up as quickly as possible to maintain the attention of your consumer. Remember, they just actively checked a box that asked the client to send them savings via email, so acting open this as quickly as possible is vital. Secondly, it is important again to have strong copy and creative, keep it simple and to the point. The main goal of the email is for the consumer to click through to the portal and hopefully make a purchase so there is no need to drag out this process or make it complicated for the consumer.
3.) Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate Marketing can give retailers a tremendous boost in holiday sales. The upside is that you are locked into a fix cost per acquisition, while the downside is that it can be very costly to re-market or re-engage the consumers if they don’t buy.
by Mike Gerpe
mike@ifficient.com
Zero Cost Online Lead Generation
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009Have you ever gone to get your oil changed and looked up at the prices above the counter only to realize the prices were higher for the leading oil brands? It made me think (which can be painful), “Why is generic oil less expensive?” After all isn’t oil all the same? Then I realized; all oil isn’t the same. The more expensive oils prevent sludge, don’t breakdown as easily, and are produced through different processes.
Online lead generation (OLG) like oil varies in price. OLG networks differ based on quantity and quality. Typically, higher volume networks tend to charge a lower cost per lead. This is because users (leads) are incented to sign-up for an advertisement. The higher cost per lead networks use content-based sites that are contextually relevant towards an advertisers campaign, essentially being produced differently.
Most online marketers understand the value and return on investment associated with OLG, but fail to have the long-term visual, and budget to pull off a successful strategy. Like protecting your cars engine against sludge, it is important to protect your database against attrition. By not protecting your marketing database you are essentially allowing your organizations most coveted marketing asset to breakdown.
We at Ifficient don’t believe any organization should allow the lifeline of their organization to breakdown, so we created a zero cost per lead online program for all online sites.
How does it work?
Simple. We send you a snippet of code to add to your online sign-up page/registration page (which you probably aren’t monetizing anyway) to display advertisements that reward your users for becoming a member of your site or newsletter. The ad revenue is tracked in real-time via a publisher log-in page we create especially for you. Once the code is placed on your site, you start to earn revenue in which we reinvest into your own OLG campaign.
By Sean McCormick
sean@ifficient.com