In order not to immediately “drain” the advertising budget, you need to start launching contextual advertising a month before the holidays. At this time, holiday-themed keywords are not so expensive. Motivate customers to choose gifts in advance, before the New Year's fever begins. Increase rates gradually, closer to peak days. Be sure to set up remarketing to reach users who have already been on your site but did not buy anything. Entering search queries with “your” keywords or visiting sites of the Google or Yandex contextual display network, they will see ads for products that they have already viewed on your site.
If your niche is highly competitive and your competitor's PPC budget is higher than yours, you can focus on the keywords they missed. You can use specialized services for this, such as Serpstat. By entering competitors' sites in the "Missing keywords" column, you can see a list and use them for contextual advertising.
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Articles written in the form of recommendations and descriptions of fashion trends are suitable as content . For example, “What to give parents for the New Year?”, “Green is in trend: 10 outfit ideas for the New Year's feast”. This is a great way to appropriately use keywords and convince the client of the relevance of the purchase.
Newsletter
Not all product mailings are mercilessly sent to spam. Personalization of the message increases the likelihood of a response. Send the client a reminder about the abandoned cart. On the eve of the holiday, people will not refuse what they were greedy about the day before. If you want to simplify the task of mailing to clients who have already been on your site, use special services. They automatically generate a mailing based on the user's previous activity on the site.
Use storytelling. Let your newsletter start with an original Christmas story that will attract the attention of a potential buyer. Do not try to sell from the first letter. It is better to prepare a series of messages in which there will be no clear call to buy until the very end. New Year is a family holiday. It is especially effective if the stories from the newsletter touch on traditional values and are provided with corresponding photos. In this case, the call to pamper loved ones will be perceived less critically.
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Analyze constantly
Increased traffic is an opportunity to collect a large amount of information on the effectiveness of advertising channels. Constantly check Google Analytics reports on traffic sources. Consider the impact of high competition on the cost of advertising during the New Year period. You will quickly go into the red if you use many advertising channels without analyzing their payback.
If most of the communication in your store is done via email, install an email tracker to track letters. But this is not the most popular communication channel. This is because users want to learn information quickly, in real time. In addition, domestic buyers are constantly faced with the fact that some online retailers are sloppy - they do not respond to letters or online chat. When a gift needs to be thought out and received in advance, customers prefer not to waste time and communicate "live".
Therefore, we recommend focusing on call analytics. On New Year's Eve, buyers have additional reasons to call an online store:
find out if the product has been sold out;
Is the New Year promotion/discount still valid?
are there any additional holiday offers;
get a guarantee that the gift will be delivered on time.
Conversion to call is an indicator that businesses must take into account. There will be a lot of requests, and for a full analysis of the success of advertising campaigns, they are the most important indicator. For this purpose, businesses use call analytics services. They allow you to filter traffic by target requests and the sources from which they come. Determine which channels the most valuable clients come through and transfer the budget to them. And get rid of those that generate “empty calls”.
With high advertising costs during the New Year period, such data is a powerful trump card for an online store. Comments Konstantin Chervyakov, commercial director of the serviceRingostat:
Usually, those who do not bother with analytics build their campaigns in the following way. They select as many keywords as possible and start promoting them. As a result, such tactics quickly lead not to profit, but to losses. Instead, you need to focus only on those that bring target conversions.
Call tracking assigns a unique number to each advertising channel. Each website visitor sees a unique phone number. After a call, the log shows which campaign brought the potential client — right down to the keyword. By creating reports (in Ringostat, they can be generated for more than 30 indicators), you can track which channels are most effective.
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Respond instantly to requests and inquiries
Lost customers increase the cost of attracting new ones. Call tracking helps an online store not to miss a single request. In addition to analytical data, it collects information:
about all calls - answered, missed, received via the callback form, etc.;
about the reason why the call did not take place or was not accepted - helps to quickly identify problems with telephony;
call statistics for each manager - you can identify the weak link in the call center and take action or reward the most conscientious employees;
caller's phone number - if the call was missed, the manager will promptly contact the client before he goes to a competitor.
This is only part of the call tracking functions that are useful for an online store not only on holidays, but also every day. For example, flexible call forwarding scheme settings that will help you take a call in any case. When the workload on managers is at its maximum, you can forward it to the personal mobile phone of the head of the sales department. SMS messages about a missed call will also be sent there.
Here you can also set up voice mail instead of short or long beeps, which indicate that the customer's call to the store is not important. As a message, you can record a text in which you congratulate customers on the upcoming holidays and inform them that their number is recorded and they will be contacted later.
A callback widget on a website can increase sales by almost 50%. Use callback from specialized services or within the call tracking functionality. In the latter case, you will have access to detailed statistics on requests via the widget. Agree that such a pop-up form illustrates your increased attention to the client:
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The wording “We will contact you in 30 seconds” is not a vague chinese singapore b2c cell phone number data promise to call back sometime later. When you click on it, the call is simultaneously received by the client and the manager. To further motivate the client to buy, use additional callback settings. For example, the callback form from Ringostat can be configured so that it pops up on the screen after a certain action. Let's say, when visiting a page with the most popular product.
The callback widget from this service is also good because its design can be customized independently. For example, choose traditional New Year colors, thanks to which it will fit well into the design of your landing page.
Prepare your staff
After auditing technical capacities and advertising campaigns, it is equally important to check and “tune” the personnel. Hold a planning meeting with managers — convey to everyone the importance of the upcoming period and its serious impact on sales. Each employee must understand that “strike while the iron is hot” will have to be done in an emergency mode. Motivate with bonuses and discipline with fines — this works especially effectively if they are supported by real figures from reports.
If you have a CRM installed, you will see the actual workload of each employee and the number of closed deals. Analyze call tracking reports - how many calls the manager received, how long he kept the client on the line, etc. This information will help identify the "weak link" in your staff and correct it in time.
Nothing will save your reputation if the manager does not communicate correctly with the client. You have developed a festive landing page, thought out a stylish design, spent money to attract a visitor. A sullen "hello" from the manager, which sounded after half a minute of waiting, will easily destroy the buyer's enthusiasm. Do not rely on "maybe" - listen to recordings of your employees' conversations and analyze the mistakes.
If you have thought out a detailed holiday marketing strategy, your managers will not even have a chance to take a break on New Year's Eve. It is better to initially prepare for everyone to be loaded to the maximum. Provide additional personnel, "spare" workers with hourly pay, if this concerns couriers, drivers, etc.
Analyze the hours when the largest flow of requests occurs. If you have call tracking installed, pay attention to the distribution of calls by hours and time of day. Most likely, at this time you will have the maximum number of requests, and you will need to involve all possible personnel. Think over the schedule of the sales department in accordance with this data.
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Consider delivery terms
Timely delivery before the holidays is more important than ever. No one will understand your situation if you cannot provide it. If you do not have a logistician on your team, establish good relations with the courier service employees in advance. Get guarantees that all store orders will be sent on time.
Favorable delivery terms will make your offer even more attractive to customers. 84% of buyers prefer online stores that offer free delivery, 46% are ready to pay a little extra to avoid paying for it. Another 75% are ready to wait 5 days for it.
It's a tempting way to increase the number of customers, but it's also expensive. Here are some recommendations on when to offer it so as not to go broke:
if the product is small in size and has a low weight;
upon repeat purchase;
Set a geographic restriction by region or country.
For online stores that are not ready to make such sweeping gestures, it is better to play it safe. During the holiday period, introduce pre-payment for delivery, rather than upon receipt. This will help you avoid losses in the event of a product being rejected.
Conclusions
On New Year's Eve, Internet users want a miracle - original gifts for themselves and their loved ones, at a reasonable price and with the best delivery conditions. And it is desirable to find them on one site. A visitor to an online store on the eve of the holidays succumbs to the excitement and is easily motivated to make a purchase. The task of e-commerce is to use this time profitably. However, for this, your site must be well ranked, and its advertising must cover a wide audience (and it is highly desirable to target it). Correctly setting up campaigns is not enough - it is important to ideally organize the reception, processing and sending of orders. And high sales figures and a large amount of analytical data are already a New Year's gift for your online store.
