With Cyber Monday less than a week around the corner, many online and retail companies are preparing their ads for this huge online shopping event. The pervasive question that comes to mind for every business owner during the holiday season is, “How can I entice shoppers to buy from me during this busy season?” A quick answer to that question is to make sure your online store is easy for users to navigate and to designate items for sale that people actually want to purchase as a gift.

According to the National Retail Federation, about half of holiday shopping and research for gifts will be done online this year. Along with that, about 47 percent of shoppers are looking for free shipping promotions when making their final purchase decision.

The following Cyber Monday digital marketing tips will allow your online store to stand out from the rest and increase sales:

Have a Dedicated Cyber Monday Landing Page with Product Promotions

One of the first things to do (by now you should already have this) is specify which products and special offers will be available for Cyber Monday. The best way to do this is to have a dedicated landing page on your website for Cyber Monday Deals.

Dedicated Pay Per Click Campaigns

Now that you have a landing page with all of your deals, promotion needs to take place. A combination of ad platforms would be the best way to promote your deals. This includes ads for Facebook, Google Adwords Search and Google Adwords Display.

Having Facebook retargeting ads enabled will also be a great way to get the attention of existing clients and followers who are already interested in your products.

Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns

Since this is the season for deals, consumers are looking at their emails more to find out who has the best offers. Now’s the time to create a dedicated email marketing campaign that promotes your Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Personalize these emails as much as possible to entice users to click on your message by segmenting out your email lists. Having dedicated lists for existing customers, shopping cart abandoned users, and past holiday customers will help you develop personalized subject lines.

Be Extra Social

Social media can be a great way to get your deals to potential and existing customers. Participating in Cyber Monday giveaways with a dedicated hashtag strategy will help promote your brand, as well as increase Cyber Monday sales. The great thing about giveaways is that everyone loves free stuff and has no problem sharing it with their friends.

Offer Free Shipping

Now is not the time to be stingy when it comes to sending your products to the customer. Consumers are looking specifically for free shipping offers this season. If the product they want to buy doesn’t qualify for free shipping, you could lose out on the sale, especially if a competitor is offering the same product with no shipping charges.

Create Exclusive Coupon Codes

Another way to promote your Cyber Monday deals is to have exclusive coupon codes for different campaigns in progress, such as social media, email marketing, and PPC. Each campaign should include a custom coupon code, which can also be used to track which campaign is most effective for a specific promotion.

Track Your Results for Next Year

Along with your coupon codes, there should be ecommerce tracking set up in your Google Analytics. This will help you understand which sources are providing the most sales during the holidays. Understanding your return on investment (ROI) will help you create more powerful campaigns for next year.

Closing Thoughts

Your online store should undoubtedly be taking advantage of Cyber Monday this year. To effectively promote your exclusive deals, it’s best to start teasing them early. However, promoting your deals this week can encourage your followers and potential customers to add your site to their Cyber Monday itinerary for awesome products at stellar rates.

Team Eminent SEO

Eminent SEO provides strategic SEO campaigns with measurable results along with expert website design, development, pay per click, content and social media and organic website marketing. 800.871.4130.

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If your company is going about its marketing efforts this holiday season in the same manner as it does the rest of the year, you’re doing it wrong. Not only are shoppers in a frenzy searching for presents for loved ones, but there are several days during the season that are designed to encourage consumers to open up their wallets.

If you’re the owner of a business or at the helm of a marketing team, you’re about to receive several ideas on how to tap into the holiday spending craze and make your company’s products or services stand out. Before we get to those suggestions, let’s rewind a bit and take a look at just how big the holiday season is when it comes to how much money is being tossed around.

Looking Back at the 2014 and Previous Holiday Seasons

Marketing and retail experts now consider the holiday shopping season to stretch from before Halloween to after New Year’s Day. In fact, an estimated 30 percent of shoppers begin their search for holiday presents before Halloween. However, when it comes to measuring retail dollars during the holiday season, the standard window is from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31.

Analytics firm comScore has been keeping a very close eye on U.S. holiday spending in recent years. In 2014, comScore found the total amount in retail sales during November and December was $838.9 billion, about 3.5 percent growth over the previous holiday season. Shoppers are expected to drop $885.7 billion during 2015’s holiday season, which would be a jump of about 5.7 percent from the same time frame in 2014.

Holiday Transactions via Desktop

To the surprise of almost no one, online sales are on the rise during the holiday season – although transactions at brick-and-mortar stores are still significant. In 2014, consumers spent just under $70 billion online during the holiday season. That was up almost $10 billion over the holiday period in 2013.

Shoppers used their home or work desktop computers to spend $53.3 billion during the 2014 holiday season.

Take a look at the 2014 Holiday Season Spending vs. Corresponding Days in 2013: http://t.co/c91zirdVVS pic.twitter.com/v8SKYLDK5F

— comScore, Inc. (@comScore) January 9, 2015

The following chart illustrates the steady growth in desktop holiday transactions since 2010:

Final 2014 #desktop online holiday sales up 15% vs. year ago: http://t.co/sa2JBuzIMk #ecommerce #retail pic.twitter.com/tbwdwi0LGA

— comScore, Inc. (@comScore) January 7, 2015

When you look at the hottest days for holiday purchases via desktop in 2014, all but one of the top 10 days fell in December. Cyber Monday won the individual day battle for the fifth straight year, according to comScore. The day after Cyber Monday (sometimes called Cyber Tuesday) came in second. Black Friday finished in just fourth place, one spot behind Green Monday (a term coined by eBay for a day that is one week after Cyber Monday).

Top 10 #Desktop Spending Days in 2014 Holiday Season: http://t.co/5SY3kq7XRE pic.twitter.com/OR22hcqBFi

— comScore, Inc. (@comScore) January 13, 2015

The 2015 holiday season will have a bit of a wrinkle, however. As two of the hottest online shopping days should fall in November. Cyber Monday lands on Nov. 30 this year, with Black Friday coming on Nov. 27.

Mobile Holiday Season Sales

As you’re probably well aware, consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with making a purchase with just a couple of button presses on their mobile devices. According to an IBM report, mobiles sales constituted more than 22 percent of all online transactions during the holiday season in 2014. That was a jump of about 27 percent over the 2013 holiday period. Mobile holiday season sales are projected to surpass $36 billion in 2015 and skyrocket to more than $60 billion by 2019.

As you can see, it is ever so critical to make sure your business’s website is mobile-friendly. Every online asset that belongs to your company needs to be optimized for mobile. If some assets aren’t, you need to get somebody on the job, pronto. Don’t let your website sit with clunky mobile navigation and slow-loading pages this holiday season. That will ensure you miss out on your proper share of the billions of dollars that get poured into online purchases this time of the year.

Your Holiday Season Marketing Strategy

Now’s the time to bring your holiday-themed products to the forefront. If you don’t have any holiday-themed items, dig into your numbers and see which types of products or services tended to be more popular last holiday season. People are ready to spend money this time of the year, so you and your team have to prepare a consistent blitz on every channel available to you, including social media, email, digital ads and more.

Shoppers love specials, so now’s the time to mark down prices of your some of your products or services, and then you have to let online users know about it. At the very least, plan to slash some of your prices on the major spending days, such as Cyber Monday and Black Friday. You should have all promotions for those two days pinpointed at least the week before Black Friday, and be ready to send midnight emails on the day of those two shopping holidays. It’s also helpful to tease your promotions with an email or two starting exactly one week before Black Friday.

As for your website, you should benefit greatly from creating a dedicated landing page of holiday content, including the items that either pertain to the holidays or are going to be on discount during this time. You also might want to consider adding site-wide holiday design accents to show your celebration of the season, with sidebar or horizontal banners that take your visitors to either your holiday landing page or certain holiday-themed products or services. You may even want add holiday language to the meta data of certain pages on your site, specifically the ones of products or services that you’re really pushing during the season.

‘Tis the Season to not be Stingy

Shoppers are dropping some big bucks during the holiday season, so your business should too as you market during the holidays, especially if you’re trying to reel in some of those ready-to-spend consumers. Even if you’re not one to throw money at Facebook and Twitter ads, you’re definitely going to want to try it on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and perhaps a few of the other top shopping days listed above. Make it clear what good or service you have on special, and be sure to stress the urgency of the promotion.

If you want to go even further, set up pay-per-click campaigns through Google AdWords that lead to certain pages on your website (especially if you’ve created a holiday landing page). Banner display ads are also worth exploring, particularly if you have a talented graphic designer on staff who can deliver creatives that pertain to specific promotions you’re running during the season.

But What if I’m a Service Company?

If your company doesn’t offer tangible products and instead provides business-to-business and/or business-to-consumer services, it’s still possible to tap into the holiday shopping craze, even if you don’t have any offerings that directly apply to the season. If you’ve analyzed your sales over last year’s holiday season and even the ones before that, then you should arrive at a specific set of services that you want to feature and even mark down this time around.

Consider offering a gift card (even if it’s digital only) on your website. Even if a few of your website visitors during the holiday season decide they don’t need your services, they may have someone in mind that does. Thus, a gift card will come in handy. You may also want to look into going through an eCommerce marketplace like Groupon in order to offer one of your targeted services at an enticing rate to a large audience of consumers. On the days of the major shopping bursts, you obviously don’t have to promise your services on the same day, but you can lock in customers at a discounted rate for service you’ll provide later.

As a service provider, you might have to be a little more creative than retail stores and eCommerce sites are during the holiday season, but there’s no reason why your sales can’t spike during these two months in comparison to the rest of year. A focused marketing effort will put your company on the path to holiday success.

Don’t Stop at Christmas

As mentioned before, the holiday season doesn’t really stop once Christmas Day passes. Keep up your marketing push not only through New Year’s Day, which falls on a Friday in 2016, but through the weekend that follows. Use social media and email to stress that time is running out on select goods and services at special holiday rates.

You now know the hottest holiday shopping days, and hopefully you now have some ideas in mind on how you draw consumers to your business this season. Ultimately, your marketing plan will succeed if you understand, “What products or services do I have that will appeal to buyers this holiday season,” and “How can I best direct attention to these offerings.” It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, but hopefully you’ll figure out which tactics work best for your business. Best of luck to you and your team on making this holiday season shine brightest of all!

Need Help?

Do the suggested steps to succeed during holidays seem outside of your team’s capabilities internally? Eminent SEO can help your company excel this holiday season through our wide range of digital services, including custom email and social media campaigns, website improvements, mobile upgrades, landing page creation and more.

To find out more or get started today, just call: 800.871.4130.

Team Eminent SEO

Eminent SEO provides strategic SEO campaigns with measurable results along with expert website design, development, pay per click, content and social media and organic website marketing. 800.871.4130.

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With the New Year starting tomorrow, a lot of us are contemplating what 2015 will bring in terms of positive self-improvement and change. As an individual you might want to lose weight, eat better or quit smoking – something to improve upon yourself. But, don’t forget about your digital marketing campaigns as well! Out with the old, in with the new; here are some new year’s resolution ideas for your marketing campaigns:

Humanize Your Social Media Efforts

There are a lot of tools out there that we use as marketers to relay the content we create on behalf of our clients. Social media tools, like Hootsuite, can make it easier to post, but are you also engaging on behalf of those accounts without the tool? Going into accounts manually to engage with followers and prospects is the only way your followers will continue to engage with your posts. Otherwise the message becomes stale, and your client engagement diminishes. By manually engaging and posting once in a while, your audience will notice. It humanizes the profiles instead of making each post look like it was sent from a tool and scheduled to “set it and forget it”.

Increase Blogging Frequency

It can be hard to produce two or more blog posts per week on top of all the other work you’re doing on a daily basis for each campaign. Make more time for your client’s blogs and content marketing strategy. Studies show companies who blog 15 times or more per month receive 5 times the traffic. Quality content will always produce great results, so make sure you’ve dedicated enough budget for it.

Stay Involved with Each Digital Marketing Campaign

Each campaign is crucial to your business because they all need to work tougher in order to be successful. Strategies can become stale and outdated. Make sure you’re staying involved with the day to day process, so you understand exactly what is happening with each campaign. Dive further into the data to find pain points and fix them. When your client is constantly seeing success month over month and year over year, it is going to be a lot easier to retain them and build a long-term partnership.

Make More Time for Your Clients

Reaching out to your clients only when it’s report time or payment time isn’t a great way to nurture them. Giving a quick call or email letting them know how much you appreciate their business is not only great customer service, but it builds a positive reputation for you and your agency. It also helps retain your clients because you’re showing that you care about more than just receiving payment from them, but growing their business.

Takeaways

The most important thing is to make sure you’re sticking to these New Year’s resolutions all year long. For your clients to have successful digital marketing campaigns you should be focusing on what’s best for their business. By communicating with them, staying involved in the growth, and keeping up with the latest marketing trends, you’ll be able to reach your company and client goals this upcoming year.

Happy New Years from Eminent SEO! Call us today and we’ll help out you and your clients with our Reseller Services.

Team Eminent SEO

Eminent SEO provides strategic SEO campaigns with measurable results along with expert website design, development, pay per click, content and social media and organic website marketing. 800.871.4130.

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