Put these dates in your diary, and make sure you market your business around them!
- November 28th - Black Friday. This is traditionally the last Friday in November, typically when most monthly paid workers have received their final pay before Christmas.
- December 1st - Cyber Monday. Originally created by US marketeers Cyber Monday is the 1st Monday following Thanksgiving, but companies in the UK have followed suit to capture the increased ‘Desire’ to spend at this time.
- Manic Monday - 2nd Monday in December. This is a relatively new key date. This day in 2013 saw a huge 10% increase in traffic on the same day in 2012, resulting in some 120 million visits to retail websites alone in a single day.
- Christmas Day, Boxing Day and post Christmas Sales are big opportunities which will be covered in our next blog post. Look out for this in the next few days.
Building anticipation and knowing what you are going to promote are equally important.
The plan should include:
- Will there be any offers or discounts?
- Are you going to promote any specific items?
- How are you going to promote them?
- What actions should the customer take to take advantage of your offers now... eg can you create a sense of urgency by offering a discount that expires on a certain date?
- Research and make a note of the best times to promote your items via email marketing and also social media. For example an email campaign may work better during the day whereas more people are active on social media in the evenings.
- Prepare any banners you are going to display on your home page promoting your best offers
- Prepare the images of your stock and add them to the website (with a ph9 site you are able to do this and choose to leave the items in a pending pool to be published at a specific time/date)
- Really look at the way your stock is laid out on the website, does it need any changes? Are all of your products really easy to find?
- Ensure any offers, promotional codes and incentives are setup and ready with the correct start/end dates applied. Our advanced promotional codes and discounts facility allows you to create offers such as Buy one get one free, Buy 3 for the price of 2, etc
This is critical to getting as many customers to your website as possible. At this time of year every business is competing for every pound spent so you need to:
- Stand out from the crowd by creating beautiful and engaging emails that will entice customers to your website to make their purchases. Don’t worry if you can’t do this yourself, ph9 offer a professional email marketing design service, just give us a call. Our email design service starts from £395+VAT.
- Ensure you send your emails at the best possible time. How will you know when this is? Hopefully you’ll already have a history of sending out email marketing and be able to report on the open rates, click throughs etc and work it out from there. If not put yourself into the mindset of your customer. When would they be most likely have a spare minute to look at their emails?
- Review and resend. A few days after a campaign has been sent, check the statistics and decided if the e-shot was successful or not. If the campaign wasn’t a success, think why and make the appropriate changes, maybe it just went at the wrong time so just schedule the campaign to be sent out again at a different time & date.
If you are interested in having a mailshot designed for your business please contact us
Facebook & Twitter have increasingly become an important tool for the initial engagement of customers so it is vital that you promote your items/services using these channels.
You can schedule your Tweets/Posts in advance which will help save time later during the busy periods. We like HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com) for scheduling pre-scheduling our Social Media posts.
Ensure that each social media post includes a link back to your website. If you are promoting a particular product or category of products, provide the direct link rather than just your home page.
If you are running an adwords campaign review it to ensure that the Ads, keywords, bid strategy and links back to your website are all active and relevant.
If you’re not promoting yourself using Google Adwords, ph9 now offer Managed Adwords services for businesses with a minimum budget of £545 per month. For more information please contact us
Thank you for reading part one
Look out for part two coming soon!
If you need help with your website, banner designs, bespoke email marketing or Google AdWords please don't hesitate to get in touch.
