What should a holiday e-commerce marketing plan look like? Here are some critical tips for building a successful and profitable e-commerce marketing plan through the New Year.
Build a Calendar
The single most important aspect to creating an effective e-commerce holiday marketing plan is to clearly plan out a calendar through the end of the year for marketing activities. This makes it easy to ensure that projects which require lead time, such as website additions, video marketing, static ad content, or ad copy are all prepared well ahead of when they are needed. Typically you should include a 10-15% contingency time padding on all projects.
A marketing calendar should also include a content release and special offers release schedule. This is the guide to actually releasing ads, and the only way to accurately ensure coordination across your marketing channels. In short, a detailed marketing calendar takes the guesswork out of your marketing/ promotions periods when things get hectic!
Organic E-Commerce Marketing
The core of your marketing efforts should be unpaid organic marketing, should as email outreach to users that have signed up, emails to prior customers, social media posts, and newsletters. Providing preview content of sale items, pricing, and other special offers can be a great way to draw in your audience and have them ready and waiting to purchase from you when the sale goes live.
Organic social media content again should be planned out, with varying types of content shared. Engagement can also be reviewed through analytics channels. Email open rates should be tracked, CTR on links, sale landing pages, etc should all be tracked to measure success.
Reviews are a significant factor in any organic marketing campaign and can be a direct predictor of success influencing your close rate and even SEO ranking. Do everything you can to bulk up on reviews, and hopefully find a few customers that would be willing to provide a testimonial for use on your website, email marketing, and social media. A video case study or video testimonial is one of the most engaging forms of testimonial content that can be readily shared throughout your marketing channels.
SEO strategies should always be in place with targeted keywords, content plans, backlink practices, and regularly posted articles.
Paid E-Commerce Marketing
Search, shopping, Facebook, Instagram, youtube video ads, and others will likely be the bulk of your paid marketing plan. Just like other types of campaigns, these should be planned out well ahead of time, with sharp-looking creative implemented to increase return on ad spend.
Using multiple versions of ads is critical to test what types of ads perform best with your audience. Ad campaign analytics should be reviewed weekly in an effort to fine-tune campaign settings including keyword settings and demographics.
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Paid ad campaigns can be as simple or as complicated as you want, and as your budget allows, but creating A/B testing scenarios increases the cost little, and is a valuable tool. The importance of proper audience segmentation, targeting, bidding, and testing cannot be overstated. Any of these can make or break a marketing campaign, which is why working with professionals to build and tweak PPC campaigns can quickly pay for itself with a reduced cost of acquisitions and more leads.
E-commerce Inventory, Shipping and Returns
While not strictly marketing, it’s paramount to a successful e-commerce business and marketing campaigns that current inventory levels be taken into account. This can affect pricing strategy based on what items are selling quickly and what are lingering. It’s extremely important to work with your supply chain and logistics team in order to think through inventory levels needed, and plan ahead if possible on “hot” items that will be featured in sales promotions – this might require the supply chain department to carry higher levels of inventory on these products, etc.
Consumers are becoming more and more expectant of free or very cheap shipping and easy returns. Shipping can itself be a sales strategy featured in marketing. Examples of this would include special limited-time offers of free shipping on orders over $50 or $100, or free shipping for a day or two.
While returns can certainly be expensive to handle on the business side, it’s paramount for many customers that they know they can return items without a tremendous headache. Having a plan and clear policy in place for this will set expectations correctly.
Ultimately any interaction after the sale will be a reflection of customer service and can help or harm your brand by way of spurring the customer to leave a positive or negative review.
Make sure you Market to Prior Customers
Perhaps the single most important tip in this article, is that it’s critically important for your firm to market heavily to repeat customers. You should have a list of prior customers, and use this as a basis for email marketing campaigns throughout the holiday season. If possible, you can segment this list based on demographics or the type of product they bought previously. This lets you tailor content to generate the best chance of action from the audience.
Video Content
Video ads are a great way to break through the competition in e-commerce marketing. Digital campaigns that utilized video content will without a doubt generate much higher CTR and lower cost of acquisition.
Organic video content like case studies, customer interviews/testimonials, new product showcases, etc are all great ways to build engagement with your audience. Through organic reach, you can become a thought leader and surpass your competitors, with video blogs being more and more popular as a tool to grow a social media follower base.
Video content for e commerce brands can be wide randing, whether ads or the organic video content referenced above can also be used in email marketing, again, this will drive engagement and encourage a much higher click ratio on emails sent.
Video content takes longer to create than static content, so any desired video content or video ads should be planned well ahead of time in.
Your audience will respond better to video content than other forms of ads, and this can make a large difference to campaign performance when video ads are integrated into paid campaigns.
More and more video content represents a large portion of marketing content, with many brands having numerous video case studies that can be sent to leads and help push them down the funnel in addition to PPC ads, and organic video content.
Volan Media is a top e-commerce marketing agency, regularly creating e-commerce marketing campaigns and e-commerce video marketing content.
