With Christmas less than six weeks away, this could be the last opportunity for retailers to make the most of their planning time for everyone's favourite and busy annual shopping-fest, according to Mark Bower, digital marketing, advertising and media specialist.
With Christmas less than six weeks away, this could be the last opportunity for retailers to make the most of their planning time for everyone's favourite and busy annual shopping-fest, according to Mark Bower, digital marketing, advertising and media specialist.
Trading performance can literally make or break the year's results, or sometimes the entire businesses. But Mark Bower, managing director of digital agency Coolpink, said online opportunities are still massively underestimated, perhaps due to heightened focus and pressure in other areas, online activity should be embraced not ignored.
Bower has given RetailTechnology.co.uk readers his five top tips for a successful multichannel festive 2010 season.
1. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Understand the scale of the opportunity. Information is a key to success so make use of analytics, research and industry trends in an attempt to properly understand what a multi-channel Christmas 2010 looks like for your business. Through a lack of understanding and appreciation many potentially successful opportunities are missed. With 12 years in digital I've been a frustrated witness to missed opportunities, so don't fall victim in such competitive times. Now is a crucial time to start understanding what all those figures mean to your turnover and most importantly, bottom line, figures for the year.
2. Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
Plan to out-think the competition this year…Fortunately it’s not too late to get back in the game – though time is short. Take a long, hard look at your Christmas plans and figure out how a multichannel approach could help you to amplify and compliment your existing season marketing efforts. What could you do differently this year in an attempt to out think the competition, as opposed to merely trying to out shout them? Media is expensive, whilst a dollop of creativity is a great leveller of playing fields. Now is a good time to be thinking outside the box! Consider some different approaches, high impact, elegance and cost effective. It's about quality not quantity.
3. While shepherds watched the flock by night
Understand your analytics: A good place to start is by defining some really simple but critically important key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business. In our collective experience the number one sin in analytics is not focusing in on and understanding which numbers really matter the most.
The second cardinal sin would be a tendency to aggregate things like conversion rates and cost-per-action (CPA) targets across wildly differing product lines, or in most cases, across the entire business. While this approach can offer a general indicator of overall performance, this is one area where the extraordinary granularity of online reporting really comes into its own.
Considering this data is used to make critical business decisions about marketing activity and site redevelopment, it really does warrant the attention of senior managers – whom I would encourage to ask as many difficult and probing questions as possible until they are completely satisfied that they a) understand what is going on and b) are convinced that they have correct, useful data upon which to base such decisions.
4. Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow
Ramp up your visibility on search engines. Increasingly, people start their multichannel shopping journeys in cyberspace. As more and more potential customers flood into the market in the coming months, search volumes rocket. Make certain that you are visible to these early stage researchers in order to get a shot at the sale when they eventually do decide to buy – be that online, from your catalogue or, heaven forbid, by intrepidly braving the British winter and actually turning up in your physical stores.
5. Joy to the World
Systematically optimise your onsite experience and conversion rate. So now we have a good understanding of how our multichannel audience are moving between and interacting with the various on and off line manifestations of our organisation or brand. So what? How do we get more of them and how do we sell them more stuff?
Again, while doubling your media budget could be a tad daunting, often massive improvements in onsite user experience and ultimately conversion-to-sale can be achieved by investing relatively inconsequential sums into effective testing and onsite conversion optimisation. In short, instigate a program of regular onsite measurement, testing and improvement. Flirt with A/B split tests or go the whole hog and commit to a long, wholesome relationship with multivariate testing. But whatever you do and however you measure it, do it systematically and do it regularly.
So there you have it, added Bower. Five fairly broad-brush pointers towards a more prosperous, better integrated and ultimately more profitable Christmas trading season. To reiterate, it’s not too late to make a decision to make 2010 the year that you do things significantly differently and really make the multichannel approach pay dividends.
