We're Almost There.
Thanksgiving's in two days, and then the madness begins. Millions of emails, millions of ads, millions of sales, millions of people crowding your stores, your phones, your web sites.
What Should You Expect?
There are a few trends you should be ready for this week, and here's what to do about them:
1) The early start. A growing list of large retailers are going to be open for part or all of the day on Thanksgiving itself. I'm not sure I like this trend; it takes people away from their families and glorifies buying new stuff on a holiday that celebrates being thankful for what we already have.
That said, you can still send a message on Wednesday, wishing your customers a happy holiday and giving them a special online sale just for them for Wednesday and Thursday. Your web site can work for you while your employees are enjoying the holiday with friends and family.
2) Comparison shopping and showrooming. If you own retail locations, expect a lot of people in your stores to be looking at their phones while shopping, using price comparison apps like RedLaser and Amazon's Price Check to help them decide whether to buy with you or not.
The best defense is a good offense. Prepare by researching your pricing and justifying it. You can offer things that larger retailers can't - like personalized service and a more flexible return policy. You can also package items together to make comparison shopping a little trickier. Consider offering price matching on some items if you notice a lot of people showrooming certain products.
3) Layaway. Layaway made a comeback a few years ago, during the recession. It's still here and services like online layaway are driving the growth of this payment method. It's a little late to set up layaway now if you don't have it already, but you should be alert for customers who might want this service and determine what portion of your shoppers might use it. You might ask people who are leaving your store empty-handed or putting back items if layaway service would change their minds, or do a survey of your email customers.
What are you doing differently this holiday season? Please share in the comments.
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Are You Ready for Cyber Monday?
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Are You Ready for Cyber Monday?
I hope you've got your online promotions planned for Cyber Monday, which is coming right up on Monday, November 26.
In 2011, consumers spent more than $1.25 billion online during the Monday after Thanksgiving, up 22% from the $1 billion they spent in 2010. What's more, average order value was also up almost three percent, to $198.26.
Want your share?
Of course you do. Even if you're not quite prepared for Cyber Monday, there's still time to make the most of the opportunity. Here's how:
1) Make your deals simple and shareable. Your offers should be easy to understand, redeem, and share. People do a LOT of comparison shopping on Cyber Monday and you don't want your deals to get lost by being too complicated. Also, easy-to-share deals mean customers can get you other customers. Make sure there are share buttons on every page, and include an "I got a great deal" sharable message with your purchase confirmations so folks can tell their friends what they bought.
2) Tell them about it! Announce deals for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, the weekend, and Cyber Monday on all of your channels. Customers expect consistent experiences on email, social media, and your web site, so make sure everything's updated.
3) Don't forget about SEO. Make sure you're using keywords like "Cyber Monday," product terms, and deal-related messaging in your web copy, so that search engines can find your work.
4) Update your ads. If you're running online ads, update your creative to reflect your Cyber Monday offers. Outdated ads will confuse your customers.
5) Is your operational house in order? Do you have what you need to keep your inventory status current, ship out extra orders, deal with special requests, handle complaints, send out additional promotions, and update your web site? If not, now's the time to act.
Need help getting ready for your best Cyber Monday ever? Let me know - I can help.
Want your share?
Of course you do. Even if you're not quite prepared for Cyber Monday, there's still time to make the most of the opportunity. Here's how:
1) Make your deals simple and shareable. Your offers should be easy to understand, redeem, and share. People do a LOT of comparison shopping on Cyber Monday and you don't want your deals to get lost by being too complicated. Also, easy-to-share deals mean customers can get you other customers. Make sure there are share buttons on every page, and include an "I got a great deal" sharable message with your purchase confirmations so folks can tell their friends what they bought.
2) Tell them about it! Announce deals for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, the weekend, and Cyber Monday on all of your channels. Customers expect consistent experiences on email, social media, and your web site, so make sure everything's updated.
3) Don't forget about SEO. Make sure you're using keywords like "Cyber Monday," product terms, and deal-related messaging in your web copy, so that search engines can find your work.
4) Update your ads. If you're running online ads, update your creative to reflect your Cyber Monday offers. Outdated ads will confuse your customers.
5) Is your operational house in order? Do you have what you need to keep your inventory status current, ship out extra orders, deal with special requests, handle complaints, send out additional promotions, and update your web site? If not, now's the time to act.
Need help getting ready for your best Cyber Monday ever? Let me know - I can help.
How Grey Poupon is Generating Leads, Collecting Customer Data
You may have seen some recent buzz about Grey Poupon's Society of Good Taste, a club you can apply to join on Facebook (yes, people do get rejected). I thought this was a little mysterious, so I started talking some friends into applying with me to see what happened.
If you go on over to Grey Poupon's Facebook page, there's an app you can click on to apply, and then Grey Poupon will use a Wolfram-Alpha-like app to assess your Facebook presence.
Grey Poupon will look at how many friends you have, how many photos in which you've been tagged, how many schools/employers you have listed on your page, how many other brands you like, and your listed interests (in bands, hobbies, movies, etc.). It will then give you a score and let you know if you've made it into the Society.
If you have, then you'll be extended a special offer. Right now, in exchange for more information - your name, street address, and email, you're promised a free tote bag. Then, you're encouraged to invite friends to apply to the Society for Good Taste.
I am floored by the amount of data Grey Poupon is able to collect for marketing purposes here. The data-head in me is feeling hungry, and not for fine-grained mustard.
Grey Poupon (a Kraft brand) can now crunch age, sex, school, employer, location, hobby, and interest data for its fans, and see their photos and other content. It can also use the address data it collects to purchase income, net worth, and other household financial data for its Society members.
Also important, it does reject people from the Society: Those who don't have lots of Facebook friends, aren't tagged in a lot of photos, or don't have a long list of brands, movies, and music they like listed on their pages. This means that Grey Poupon is building a community of Facebook influencers whose power they'll be wielding on behalf of their brand.
I think this is brilliant strategy, and it's interesting to see thousands of people willingly give a brand so much information about themselves in return for a totebag. As a lead generation program, this is brilliant and inspiring.
What do you think? Please share.
PS - I'll be blogging here on and off, but I'm still working on Tito's Greenhouse. The garden is coming along...
PPS - If you go to GreyPoupon.com, the brand's Pinterest page comes up. What do you think of that? It's the first time I've seen a brand do this and I'm wondering what folks think. Is this something you'd try?
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| Image: GreyPoupon,com |
Grey Poupon will look at how many friends you have, how many photos in which you've been tagged, how many schools/employers you have listed on your page, how many other brands you like, and your listed interests (in bands, hobbies, movies, etc.). It will then give you a score and let you know if you've made it into the Society.
If you have, then you'll be extended a special offer. Right now, in exchange for more information - your name, street address, and email, you're promised a free tote bag. Then, you're encouraged to invite friends to apply to the Society for Good Taste.
I am floored by the amount of data Grey Poupon is able to collect for marketing purposes here. The data-head in me is feeling hungry, and not for fine-grained mustard.
Grey Poupon (a Kraft brand) can now crunch age, sex, school, employer, location, hobby, and interest data for its fans, and see their photos and other content. It can also use the address data it collects to purchase income, net worth, and other household financial data for its Society members.
Also important, it does reject people from the Society: Those who don't have lots of Facebook friends, aren't tagged in a lot of photos, or don't have a long list of brands, movies, and music they like listed on their pages. This means that Grey Poupon is building a community of Facebook influencers whose power they'll be wielding on behalf of their brand.
I think this is brilliant strategy, and it's interesting to see thousands of people willingly give a brand so much information about themselves in return for a totebag. As a lead generation program, this is brilliant and inspiring.
What do you think? Please share.
PS - I'll be blogging here on and off, but I'm still working on Tito's Greenhouse. The garden is coming along...
PPS - If you go to GreyPoupon.com, the brand's Pinterest page comes up. What do you think of that? It's the first time I've seen a brand do this and I'm wondering what folks think. Is this something you'd try?
I'm Taking a Break and Blogging Over Here Now
I need a break from writing about marketing, so now it's time to try something new for a while.
I've been an avid gardener for years now, and this fall, we're installing a greenhouse right in the back yard. We'll be growing vegetables and we're hoping to have some fresh produce to feed us into the winter.
Please join me over on Tito's Greenhouse, where we'll be sharing the ups and downs of building the greenhouse, laying out the beds, putting in the plants, and hopefully getting some vegetables and fruit out of the whole experience.
Thanks for reading this blog, and for all of your great questions and comments. Look forward to seeing you over on the Greenhouse.
I'll be back here sometime soon, maybe once the tomatoes are in....
Engagement: This is What Marketing Is Now
There's another layer to your marketing plans that's critical to your success. If you're not giving your customers the chance to share their experiences, rate your products, and ask friends for their feedback, you're missing out.
You see, most people don't just look at your advertising, your web site, or your catalogs anymore when they're ready to buy. They do online research, they check product reviews, and they ask their friends what they think.
So if you're not helping them do that, you're preventing customers from completing today's sales cycle. Why would you do that?
So, while you're getting ready for your holiday sales push, add a couple of things to your to-do list:
1) Product reviews: Product reviews enable your customers to share their thoughts with you, and give advice to one another - a key part of today's purchasing experience. Even poor reviews help you - they give you a chance to make it right for your customers and to improve your products and service.
2) Community: Is there a place online where your customers can congregate? Whether you run forums, a Facebook page, or a Pinterest presence, you need a place where people can share.
3) Sharing: One of my favorite local restaurants just ran a contest where users were asked to take a picture in the restaurant (of their friends, the food, the decor, etc.) using Instagram and then post it on their Facebook page. Hundreds of people participated and they got some great submissions, and wonderful images of their delicious dishes. Customers had a reason to return to their Facebook page again and again to see new photos and vote on their favorites.
4) Let Them In: People need a little more than ads or marketing copy to get them ready to make a purchase. Can you show your customers how your product fits in with their lives? Give them real stories from real people? Tell them a little bit about you and your staff? Explain what inspires you to do what you do? I highly recommend you make some videos to show customers a little bit more about who you are and what happens behind the scenes. Let customers in, and ask them to stay a while.
How are you engaging your customers? Please share.
Need a little help making some friends? Let me know. I can help.
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Make Your Content Go Viral
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| Together. Flickr user Dev Null. |
So if you're not helping them do that, you're preventing customers from completing today's sales cycle. Why would you do that?
So, while you're getting ready for your holiday sales push, add a couple of things to your to-do list:
1) Product reviews: Product reviews enable your customers to share their thoughts with you, and give advice to one another - a key part of today's purchasing experience. Even poor reviews help you - they give you a chance to make it right for your customers and to improve your products and service.
2) Community: Is there a place online where your customers can congregate? Whether you run forums, a Facebook page, or a Pinterest presence, you need a place where people can share.
3) Sharing: One of my favorite local restaurants just ran a contest where users were asked to take a picture in the restaurant (of their friends, the food, the decor, etc.) using Instagram and then post it on their Facebook page. Hundreds of people participated and they got some great submissions, and wonderful images of their delicious dishes. Customers had a reason to return to their Facebook page again and again to see new photos and vote on their favorites.
4) Let Them In: People need a little more than ads or marketing copy to get them ready to make a purchase. Can you show your customers how your product fits in with their lives? Give them real stories from real people? Tell them a little bit about you and your staff? Explain what inspires you to do what you do? I highly recommend you make some videos to show customers a little bit more about who you are and what happens behind the scenes. Let customers in, and ask them to stay a while.
How are you engaging your customers? Please share.
Need a little help making some friends? Let me know. I can help.
Related Posts
What is Story Marketing and How Does it Work?
Make Your Content Go Viral
Have You Tried a Facebook Promoted Post?
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| From Flickr user Sean MacEntee. |
For a little cash - usually, $5, $10, $20, or a little more, depending on how many Facebook fans you have, Facebook will make sure your post is seen by a larger percentage of your fans and their friends. Right now, if you have more than 400 fans on your page, you can promote any post for three days.
Why you should try it:
An average Facebook post will be seen by about 16% of your fans. One of my clients is doing better than that - their average post is seen by about 30% of their fans. They have a small, but very engaged community.
When we spent $10 to promote a Facebook post, we went far beyond that - our promoted post reached six times that many people - more than twice the amount of people than our total fan base. Many more people saw and shared our promoted post than usual.
What's more, we saw a doubling of engagement in the 10 days after our promoted post, gained some new fans, and we continue to see a 30% lift in engagement on Facebook, several weeks after the promoted post.
What to promote:
I'd recommend testing something entertaining - a video, photo gallery, game, or something else fun. Inactive fans - those who haven't interacted with you in a while - are going to see this post and you want to give them a reason to rejoin your active fan base.
But Beware:
Yes, we only spent $10 and got some encouraging results. But those $10 posts add up. Make sure you're budgeting appropriately - you don't want to be spending money every few days to promote another post unless you're seeing good results. Your priority should be generating quality, engaging content to serve your social media audience - once you have great content, then work on promoting it.
Let me know how this works for you. I'm looking forward to hearing your stories!
Does your Facebook strategy need a bit of a facelift? Let me know. I can help.
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You say it's your birthday? One more way to leverage your Facebook presence.
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Facebook is good for a lot of things, but one of my favorite things about it is that it makes your birthday really, really fun. Even people who rarely use Facebook visit their pages on their birthdays - after all, who doesn't want to check out birthday greetings from friends around the world?
You can use this natural inclination for birthday greetings to help your business. Did you know that you can target Facebook ads to people with a birthday in the next week? This is a time when people are already checking their Facebook pages to see all the postings from their friends, so make the most of it.
When you're creating your ad, at "Choose Your Audience," next to "Broad Categories," pick "Events," and then "Has a birthday in less than 1 week."
At this point, you're positioned to deliver some very targeted, relevant ads. You can deliver special offers with a message acknowledging your customers' special event.
Messages like:
How are you using customer data to deliver more engaging, relevant offers? Please share.
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When you're creating your ad, at "Choose Your Audience," next to "Broad Categories," pick "Events," and then "Has a birthday in less than 1 week."
At this point, you're positioned to deliver some very targeted, relevant ads. You can deliver special offers with a message acknowledging your customers' special event.
Messages like:
- Happy Birthday! Get yourself a little something nice this year. Click for your 10% birthday discount.
- It’s your birthday. We have a present for you – 10% off for your special day!
- Happy Birthday! Click to learn more about your special birthday deals.
How are you using customer data to deliver more engaging, relevant offers? Please share.
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Five Steps to a Better Facebook Feed
Using Facebook to Drive Retail Traffic
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