Seasonal Online Marketing

Is Christmas a key time for generating business income?

Have you started your plans for your On-Line Christmas marketing? If not maybe you had better get going.

Here are a few tips that may help you to formulate your Christmas campaign, or Mothers day or Easter or any other seasonal marketing opportunity.

Search Engine marketing:
Its probably a little too late to optimise your site for Christmas but if you have created a Christmas page or section make sure that you have included your key search words in the page title and page description. Make sure that your site text includes your search words and that the links (internal and external) include search terms.

Web site preparation
Whilst you will need to think about your on-line marketing on the run up to Christmas you will also need to make sure that the web site landing page or Christmas special is also ready.

Is the call to action for sales going to be different? For example do you need to have a button or link that says “Book now for Christmas” or “Delivery for Christmas guaranteed” etc?

Have you thought about the last delivery dates? Make this quite clear on all of the product pages, better still how about giving your customers a count down to Christmas, for example “Only 15 weeks to Christmas”. This should give a sense of urgency and encourage users to order now before the rush.

Perhaps you could include guarantee statements like “delivery before Christmas for orders placed before 17th Dec”. You really need to talk to your delivery company and check out their terms for Christmas. And talk to your web designer to get these functions in place.

If you are planning any off-line advertising using news media, outdoor posters, leaflet drops or direct mail it is a good idea to create a unique URL for the “call to action” for each advert type so that you can track the results. You may also want to build a special landing page, so please make sure that you brief your web designer now.

Remember that many people are buying gifts and may have less product knowledge than your regular demographic, so keep your promotions simple and to the point, where possible.

Pay Per Click or Ad word marketing:
If you think that you can do well by pay per click advertising for example Google Ad Words campaign. Please do lots of research and check out the competition. Set yourself a daily/weekly/monthly budget and stick to it. Above all monitor the results of your Pay per click advertising daily.

If it’s costing you money and not creating orders stop the advert. On the other hand if the advertisement is costing you a full budget and producing orders worth 10 times the spend, then think about spending more.

Always treat your Ad Word campaign as a Classified Ad. And make sure that you are competing for searches were the user is in the mood to buy. Use the Google key word tool. If you’re not sure where it is then type “key word tool” into Google, it is so important for you to think about the key words being used. They will give you the clue, are they ready to buy or just researching?

An Example

If a searcher is using the key word search term “LCD TV” then you don’t want that user to click on your expensive Pay per Click advertisement. Not yet anyway, chances are that they are researching; as yet they don’t know what they want. Let someone else pay for the research. However if a searcher uses the key words “Sony 40” LCD TV” chances are that they are in the mood to buy. These are far more likely to convert into orders.

Also remember that they user is looking for a “Sony 40” LCD TV” so make sure you repeat the key words in your advert headline. The rest of the advert should read something like, “Delivery before Christmas lowest cost on-line” or something similar.

So your advertisement should look a little like this
Sony 40” LCD Television
Delivery before Christmas, lowest
price. Buy today
Yourdomain.com/SonyTV/Christmas

This advertisement should click through to your “Sony 40” LCD TV” landing page for the Christmas campaign
Please don’t send customers to your home page and make them search again! They won’t do it. Talk to your web design agency to help you with the design of landing pages.

E-Mail Marketing:
Make sure that you let your existing customers know about your Christmas offers.
Arrange for your web developer to create a couple of HTML e-mails and send two or three out before the last order dates. If your web site does not include an e-mail capability then try one of the e-mail campaign systems like I.Contacts.com or Constant contacts.
Google e-mail campaign management system and you’ll find lots to choose from.
The key reason for using this type of e-mail manager rather than outlook is:

1. Each e-mail is sent as a single personalised communication
2. You can track when an e-mail is opened
3. You can track the links that are followed
4. The system will collect the “bounce backs” and hold them for you to investigate.

All of which is excellent marketing information. Finally, these services will provide you with a unsubscribe system which is a legal requirement for business to consumer operations.
Here’s a list of useful links

Ad Word campaigns
http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/ads/
Ad word tutorial
Key word finder

e-mail campaigns
http://www.icontact.com/
http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp
http://www.monito.co.uk/
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/
http://www.webcampaignmanager.com/

Sending newsletters or e-cards to your customers is a great way for them to remember you. You could even offer a voucher or discount code to past customers to tempt them to return. These are relatively easy to produce in most CMS shopping cart systems.