Quick Tips for eMarketing this Christmas

If you haven’t started already, get a wriggle on.

The first week of the Christmas online sales surge has begun. This should be the most productive 6 weeks on your store’s sales calendar, if it’s not, here’s some quick tips to help take advantage of the increase in online retail spend from early November to mid December.

Your streamlined Adwords campaigns, CPC shopping position and marketing affiliates are about to be drowned out as competition for sales heats up and savvy marketers stay ahead of the game leaving you behind.

Competition for sales during busy periods is intense. Your well positioned eBrand will need some extra love and care as new seasonal players enter and existing competition tweak existing campaigns to maintain their position.

The difference between a great holiday retail period and otherwise could only be a few cents per sale and a little bit of time.

As a rule we monitor our eMarketing strategy weekly and review it monthly to ensure it is aligned with our business strategy. During the crazy period this task is performed daily to see who is outbidding us on our most valuable key words. Hopefully they are not as diligent as you are.

This of course takes time and skill, and all of the time and effort spent improving your Google Ad Rank will now start paying dividends. Those with poorly formed or irrelevant Ads will be paying through the teeth and often spend their profits on traffic. Profit is sanity, sales are vanity.

It’s worth a call to the friendly folk at the shopping search engines, they are happy to tell you how much you need to bid to appear high in their rankings. Although we have found we obtain a better ROI from Adwords, we often place a bet each way with a small budget for CPC shopping searches even if we don’t entirely agree with their cash for traffic business model.

Communicate with your affiliates, and remember that you are not their only customers. Consider increasing your affiliate marketing payout to help sway them to promote your store, not your competitor’s during the rush.

Good luck and best wishes for the holidays.