One 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