How to leverage the busiest online retailing day of the year – Cyber Monday.

During the festive season, one of the biggest days online retailers need to prepare for is what is known as Cyber Monday, the busiest day for online shopping transactions. Especially relevant to online businesses with a global presences that include the US, Cyber Monday presents a great opportunity that can be leveraged to its full potential with a small amount of preparation.

This year Cyber Monday falls on December 1^st, giving retailers and marketers just enough time to optimize their paid search and mobile marketing campaigns.

Optimizing your Google Paid Search campaigns for Festive Retail Success.

Trevor Claiborne, from Google’s Inside AdWords crew offers the following tips for retailers who would like to maximise their PPC campaigns in preparation for Cyber Monday:

• Check your budgets, and consider increasing them to avoid exhausting your budget too early in the day.
• Tweak your copy. Promote any special offerings in your ad text. If you have a holiday special that differentiates you from the competition, be sure to showcase it in your ad.

Making the most of your Mobile Marketing campaigns for Festive Retail Success.

According to bulk messaging provider Clickatell, highly personalized, targeted Bulk SMS campaigns provide a highly effective medium that has proven to be successful at increasing campaign revenue and improving marketing ROI.

They have just published a guide aimed at retailers in time for the festive season, aptly entitled the Festive Retailers Holiday Mobile Marketing Guide. The PDF guide contains a Festive Mobile Marketing Cheat Sheet, Mobile List growth tips and guidelines on creating successful festive mobile campaigns. They also include mobile marketing campaign ideas that can be used to promote your online retail store in time for Cyber Monday:

• SMS your customers festive vouchers which are redeemable online.
• Send Christmas Stock Arrival alerts via text informing your customers of new stock.
• Provide information regarding online promotions.
• Offer festive price alerts via mobile encouraging online store visits.

For more tips like these, download the entire guide here.

By making a few adjustments to both your search and mobile campaigns for the holidays, your retail business can prepare to make the most of not only Cyber Monday, but the festive season in its entirety!

You don’t need to be an expert copy writer or hold a marketing degree to be able to write display copy for paid search advertisements that will get prospects clicking.

Writing effective copy is simple and if you stick to the basic tips below, you will be able to put together ads that will yield a positive return in no time.

Let’s say, for the sake of this post, that your business sells accessories, such as handbags online. We’ll take a look at the simple tips below and see how to apply them practically to PPC ads.

1. Use your keywords in your headline.
This is a pretty basic tip, but you’d be surprised how many copy writing professionals seem to overlook it. If we were targeting searchers looking for “genuine” or “pure” leather handbags, we would want to include that as part of our headline text.

2.  Don’t waffle – include the most relevant information about your business first.
When writing your copy, remember to focus on user benefits. In addition to the standard descriptive text about quality and style, make your ad stand out from the competitors by telling buyers why they should choose your product instead of anyone else’s. What sets your offering apart? If you are the only online handbag retailer in your area to offer 24 hour delivery free of charge, put this information in the ad copy. 

3. Make sure you have a clear call to action.
Don’t leave your prospects guessing – make it clear what you want them to do, and, more importantly, why they should do it. Continuing with our online handbag retailer example, we should include an instruction telling potential customers to “View online catalogue now” or “Order online today.”

4.  Choose the most relevant landing page – or build a new one.
 Prospects don’t like to have to work to purchase your product or sign up for your services. Make it easy for them to find what they are looking for. If they searched for “genuine leather handbags”, don’t sent them to your homepage which lists all the other accessories you have for sale – point them straight to the handbags. And if you sell both genuine leather and imitation leather handbags, make sure you point them to the page for genuine leather handbags. 

5. Write more than one ad per ad group, and test the results.
Come up with a couple of variations on your ad copy and see which versions work best. With time you will learn which phrases or variations generate the best click through rate and will be able to put these learnings to use.
Now, let’s take a look at examples of the type of ads we could put together to test based on the tips we have just read:

Pure Leather Handbags
Imported brands. Next day delivery
View full range online. Order now.
StylishAccessories.com/leather_handbags

Genuine Leather Handbags
Real Italian quality. Free 24 hour
delivery. View online catalogue now
StylishAccessories.com/leather_handbags

Handbags – Pure Leather
Match style with quality. Free delivery
within 24 hours. Order online today
StylishAccessories.com/leather_handbags

According to Google, “ad text is a crucial distinguishing factor in luring a user to your website. Successful ads are clear, well-written, specific, and compelling.”

By sticking to the simple tips above, you will be well on your way to writing effective PPC ads and soon enjoy the return on your investment!

Happy writing – and to your prospects, happy Googling!

The webinar focused on converting leads to purchasing customers through a number of strategically targeted communications.

 ”80% of your best leads will only purchase from you next quarter“ 

A mistake many acquisition marketers (especially those facing pressure from above to make targets this quarter) have been guilty of, is expecting to the customer to accept your marriage proposal before you have had a first date. Myself included.

Marketing Guru Seth Godin championed the concept of turning strangers – aka leads – into customers, and customers into friends in his book Permission Marketing. You wouldn’t expect a potential mate to say yes to a long term marriage commitment on or after the first date – why would you expect anything different from your prospects or leads?

 Tying in with Godin’s metaphor of courting the customer, the webinar discussed three activities smart marketers should incorporate into their online efforts in order to convert leads to customers: 

• Building a community: Leveraging thought leadership
• Building conversations: Social media for BtoB
• Building trust and value: Lead lifecycle management

Imperative to point number three is the act of building trust between yourself and your leads before asking them to purchase. But how exactly do I do this, I hear you ask?

The key is to offer your leads something of value and ask virtually nothing in return. This can be done by offering a white paper, guide, or free ebook on topic of choice. These are cheap and relatively easy to produce, and can provide fantastic information and industry that  is exactly what your leads are looking for.

Follow up with another offer of value – this will make your lead like you even more. Offer an opportunity to attend a free webinar, or send a power point presentation containing Ten Insider Industry Tips. Again, this costs you virtually nothing and helps entrench your position as trusted friend and advisor in your leads mind.

 Go ahead with as many valued filled offers as you can come up with – each serves to build and strengthen the relationship with your prospect. Hopefully, if you have been effective, your leads will look forward to your emails and being contacted by you.  

Finally, construct an offer tailor-made to your prospect that will add value to your leads business or day to day activities. If you have managed to successfully build a trusting relationship with your prospect, and provided an offer of relevant value, you will be well on your way to converting your lead into a customer.  

While it might take a bit longer to date your customer, the results speak for themselves, so resist the urge to jump in with the hard sell before you’ve even made it to the movie

“Paid search continues to be a strong money maker for more than one third of the marketers surveyed, but that number is down steeply from the previous year.  The decline reflects an increase in competition that raised keyword prices and lowered ROI.

SEO continues to increase in popularity. Its low costs and high returns make it a leader among more than half (57%) of the marketers surveyed. Those numbers were 45% in 2006 and 33% in 2005.“  
 
 This according to an interesting report in Marketing Sherpa, which confirmed my thoughts in a recent posting of mine “Is SEO worth the time and the money”.  

When attempting to answer the question as to which online media brought in the highest ROI in 2007, Marketing Sherpa compared paid search ads, email (house and rented lists), ads as newsletter insertions, contextual ads (text ads) and SEO.

SEO outperformed the lot with a 57% ROI.  The trend is up from 2006 wherein paid search came in as the on top earning form of online media (49%), followed by email house lists (47%), with SEO in third place at 45%. 

Consistently, rented email lists showed the lowest returns with 11% ROI in 2006 and a dismal 7% in 2007, once again reinforcing the train of thought that when it comes to email ROI house lists are king.

 While I agreed that outsourcing your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can be rather expensive, it must be, that of all the forms of eMarketing – banner and email to external lists included, it is my experience that SEO is the most profitable.

In our business we drive a large percentage of our sales via our website – it is not only our brochure, but our sales vehicle.  We are fortunate to have highly sophisticated tracking systems in place to measure not only online revenue, but the number of clicks and registrations of all of our online marketing activities. Consistently, SEO ranks amongst our highest “earners” in terms of bringing in online revenue, as well a clicks and registrations. 

 
Because we serve the international market and are a South African company that has a global reach, one of our core goals are maintaining and extending our international web presence. While email and banner campaigns are useful for driving quarterly revenue via targeted promotions, SEO is the staple in our marketing diet and would be the segment of our budget we held onto, if we were hypothetically forced to choose. 
Businesses that have a few marketing pennies to spend on online advertising, should not waste them on banner advertising or email marketing (by purchasing external lists), as these are costly and hardly show the returns that SEO or even PPC could provide.

Rather invest as much as you can on these getting your organic and paid search rankings as high as possible and you are very likely to reap long term rewards. 

Here is a great B2B Case study from Marketing Sherpa demonstrating how a white paper press release that was SE optimised helped promote an organizations niche product in a very limited market. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30329&ff=true 

Of course, different strategies and approaches will always vary according to industry and product, so this is not to say the SEO and PPC are the only way to go. But for a largely online business, in my experience, they certainly are worth the investment – remember, optimizing your site for SEO is something that you can do yourself and need not cost you a fortune.