Is It Too Early to Start Planning Your Holiday Campaigns?

Spoiler alert: the answer is “No!”  This year digital sales during the holiday shopping season will be bigger than ever. As noted in this Entrepreneur article: 

“Insider Intelligence’s U.S. Ecommerce Forecast sees digital sales growing by nearly 18% in 2021 compared to 2020. Brick-and-mortar retail is also predicted to grow, but only by approximately 6%. The forecasters believe that the growth will continue after the pandemic subsides as it is likely to be a permanent shift in consumer behavior.”

Every year, most retailers see a majority of their sales during the period leading up to and including Cyber Week, the days around Thanksgiving and the following Cyber Monday.  With this expected growth for e-commerce, digital marketing strategies during the holidays should be defined and developed as early as possible.  This article highlights the importance of this for a few specific channels.

• Search-engine marketing (SEM): Unlike search-engine optimization, or SEO which often has a long lead time to deliver results, it’s not too late to start optimizing SEM campaigns for holiday. As noted in the article, “Generic keywords will be useful throughout the year, but during the holiday season, it is important to narrow them further and target customers even better than normal.” 

• Email: This tends to be a large channel for retailers during most of the year and they should be designing compelling content now for their holiday communication. Inspiration is a big part of holiday shopping, including finding unique gifts or great deals, and retailers can be optimizing email content and messaging to capture customers when their intent to spend is highest.   

• Social Media: As this article states, sales this channel is expected “to increase by more than 35% this year to more than $36 billion.” This is another opportunity for retailers to target the right customers during the holiday.  To do this they need to analyze where their campaigns perform best with their target customers because the same campaign may not be effective across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.  

As someone who has worked in ecommerce for the last 10 years, I can confirm that retailers are thinking about holiday tactics as early as June and July every year.  Black Friday through Cyber Monday is basically the “Superbowl” of retail and companies would be best served by focusing their holiday messages on relevant content and in the right channels for their business. 

Instagram is a new e-commerce channel

On Tuesday March 19 Instagram announced of a new feature in-app checkout. Isn’t it exciting? Now you don’t have to go to another website of a brand to make a purchase, but can seamlessly do it on IG. Now this function is only available in a testing regime for 23 business in the US, but expected to expand soon enough. 

Now businesses have a whole new selling channel, which gives them access to more than 1 billion users. Moreover, it addresses one of the pain points that is a website creation. For a small business it might be long, expensive, and cumbersome to create a whole new good e-commerce website and make people to go there. When the feature is launched for the big audience, they will only need to create an Instagram account. 

What is interesting, that at the rise of Instagram nobody expected it to be such a great business/advertising platform. Maybe someone did... It seems that IG slowly moves towards WeChat politics of "all in one". Now we have not only option of posting pictures & videos, but also of watching IG TV, chatting, and even buying items. The more services, the more people are attracted and tied up to the app, the larger is potential customer base. 

What I do believe in is people’s laziness. Customers do really appreciate products/services that make their life easier. When on brands’ websites cart abandonment rates are high, they are going to be lower for IG potential buyers, because the procedure is easier. 

It is expected that with this novelty a whole new bunch of advertising techniques will emerge on Instagram. Companies will start to think not only about number of followers and engagement level, but also conversion rate, some kind of cart abandonment levels, etc. Definitely instagram will leverage this opportunity!

With help from 007's Daniel Craig, “House of Cards” star Kevin Spacey and singer Adam Lambert, Alibaba makes China's Single Day larger than Black Friday.

In the annals of television history, China's “Tmall Double-11 Night Carnival” might go down as the watershed moment when 21st century retailing geniuses first truly fused online shopping and entertainment into one awe-inspiring juggernaut of consumerism.

More cynical types may see the star-studded, three-hour live broadcast — created by e-commerce behemoth Alibaba and featuring celebrities such as 007 actor Daniel Craig, “House of Cards” star Kevin Spacey and singer Adam Lambert — as the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.

A combination of the Grammys, the Oscars, a game show, the Home Shopping Networkand Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve — all counting down to China's equivalent ofBlack Friday or Cyber Monday — the program was created by Alibaba to stoke interest in “Double 11,” a newfangled Chinese holiday also known as Singles Day.

The Nov. 11 event, which originated in the 1990s as a sort of anti-consumerist Valentine's Day for the singles set, has quickly become China's biggest shopping day of the year, thanks to a blitzkrieg of publicity efforts by Alibaba starting in 2009.

This year, Alibaba said total transaction volume on its Tmall.com platform alone hit $14.4 billion on Wednesday, far ahead of last year's record $9.3 billion. By comparison, U.S. retail store sales reached $9.1 billion on last year's Black Friday and about $53 billion for the entire Thanksgiving weekend, including online sales through Cyber Monday.

http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fi-alibaba-china-double-11-singles-day-shopping-20151111-story.html

Facebook can help you buy anything (except friends)

Facebook just announced that it is acquiring a personalized shopping search engine called TheFind, which has over 15 million current users.

TheFind touts its search engine as the only way to search everything available for sale on the internet, and can match even very vague terms like "white sweater" with a vast array of relevant options.

TheFind also has localization features, meaning that it can return relevant results within a specified geographic area in case the user prefers to buy in-person. Since TheFind aggregates prices across the universe of online and brick and mortar vendors, the user doesn't need to traverse multiple websites (or physical locations) to find the best deal.

Facebook plans on shutting down the search engine capabilities, but rest assured that they have some clever plans for monetizing this technology. Most likely, this will involve better contextualization of posts and messages that Facebook users generate to make advertisements even more hyper-targeted than they already are.

Perhaps in anticipation of this acquisition, Facebook recently launched an ad sales team with the express purpose of promoting specific items that advertisers are trying to push. There's no doubt that TheFind strengthens Facebook's ability to pitch this service to advertisers, as well as charge a significant premium versus

Although Facebook ads may now potentially become even more creepy than they already are, this acquisition should be a win-win-win. It's win for consumers, who should receive more relevant and better offers; win for advertisers, who can better match ads with the right consumers; and a HUGE win for Facebook, which should be able to further mark up its ad inventory.

Sources:
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-buys-shopping-search-engine-thefind-2015-3

http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/13/to-boost-commerce-in-ads-facebook-buys-and-shuts-down-shopping-site-thefind/#lKyTXd:9NJM

Hashtag eCommerce - Tweet to Buy

A start-up called Chirpify is allowing consumers to make purchases via tweets and posts using a new kind of hashtag called "action tags." How it works: A business uses a hashtag like #Buy #Oreo in a TV or online ad, then consumers would post that action tag to their social network and a transaction would be executed through PayPal.

According to Nielsen, almost 50% of all smartphone users claim to use their devices while watching TV and almost nine in 10 homes have at least one smartphone or tablet that can be used as a second screen. Furthermore, Chirpify is seeing a 4% sales conversion rate on the 10,000+ products it's already offered, which is significantly higher than traditional web display conversion rates.

I think this will appeal to brand marketers for several reasons. First, it's instantaneous. Brands can translate the excitement and interest created by a great ad into sales simply and easily. Second, it will also serve as an opportunity to better measure the impact of TV advertising, which has historically been difficult due to the time lag between seeing the ad and the purchase. Third, it's a great way to engage with customers and can multiply the impact of the original ad.

However, I also think that there are some drawbacks that could limit the success of this concept. First, in order to compel consumers to make that purchase right away, I think the products are going to have to be limited edition or include some sort of discount. Second, I think the products will also need to be relatively simple and less expensive because if consumers need to research the product, they will be less likely make that instant purchase. Lastly, I just wonder whether this idea will actually catch on and people will purchase enough through this S-commerce platform for it to be viable. I'm a slow social media adopter, I'm not convinced I would ever buy this way...what do you think? Would you tweet an action tag to make a purchase?

In conclusion, this is a very interesting idea with great potential, though it does have some drawbacks, as every medium does. As a brand marketer, I'd be interested to test this, but I'd first need to understand the ROI implications, which I think are pretty complex given the multiple mediums (TV, online display, social) as well as the potential word-of-mouth that a brand could get out of a successful campaign. They've just signed several big brands, so it will be exciting to follow the new campaigns and see how well they perform.

For more information, read the Mashable article here.

CHINA: Alibaba.com: Green Commerce Continues

In class,Prof Jeremy guided us pretty well on thinking more broader and deeper about online dynamic applications like E-commence, online auction,real estate broker,dating,social networking etc. Triggered with the comprehensive "picture" addressed by him, I think, besides personal social and entertainment needs, how should we come up with the indivudial social responsibility of protecting environment by using internet tools toward "Green" products. For you enrichment, I hope the article could give you a sense of what's going on in China about the green commerce and trigger you thinking about how to embrace the new energy ecological system global trend.

June 5, 2009, 7:31 am

"Despite the downturn, online trade in environmentally friendly products is holding up well", said CEO of Alibaba.com, the Chinese e-commerce and business-to-business giant. Over the past two years, the company reports that its Web site has seen a steady growth of searches for alternative energy resources like solar and wind power, electric cars, fuels and organic products. Solar-powered energy and organic products are the fastest-growing green sectors, increasing 71 percent and 68 percent year-on-year, respectively, in the first quarter of 2009, according to the company. Solar lights are among the most popular green items sold online, as countries in Europe, and parts of the United States begin to replace traditional streetlights with sun-powered alternatives. “Despite the downturn, online trade in environmentally friendly products is holding up well,” said David Wei, the chief executive of Alibaba.com. “This is because going green not only saves money, but it also creates money, especially as more entrepreneurs develop innovative products to support growing global demand.” Some members of Alibaba.com’s trading community agree.

“Climate change is having a positive impact on our business. Our sales have been growing by 30 to 40 percent over the past three years thanks to strong demand for green products from customers in the U.S., Europe, Middle East and Southeast Asia,” said Xiao Benpeng, the international trade manager for a company based in Hubei that specializes in high-tech solar energy products, and a member of Alibaba.com. China itself has set goals of generating 16 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, and it has set aside about $30 billion of its economic stimulus package ofr the energy conversation and ecological engineering. Alibaba.com executives say they believe that these large-scale green projects will translate into multiple e-commerce opportunities.

Amazon launches mobile shopping service

Amazon is putting text messages to a new use allowing for comparison shopping on-the-go for users with any cell phone service. Amazon's new service "TextBuyIt" lets customers send text messages to find products on Amazon's web site.

Here's the company's guide on how the service works:


TextBuyIt enhances Amazon's current mobile solutions, two mobile sites, one of which is for iPhone users. While Amazon's executives claim to target the new service at impulse shopping, such as the guy leaving a concert and deciding to buy the band's CD before getting home, the blogosphere frames the service as another way to compare prices next time you are in Borders or CircuitCity.

Source: FoxBusiness, Techcrunch

Cyber Monday - Survey data with some interesting notes

Spurred by study saying that up to 3/4 of web shoppers were unsatisfied with the experience, Future Now designed a survey to see who was leading in online retail. They then sent out an army of mystery shoppers to rate the sites. There were some very interesting results.

To analyze the extent to which websites focus on the customer experience, Future Now sent mystery shoppers and Conversion Analysts to over 300 retail websites to gather information for our 2007 Retail Customer Experience Study.

What the Customer Focus Study Reviewed

The study consisted of visiting a retailer’s website and answering a series of Yes/No questions about the availability of 69 different factors that reflect a focus on customer experience. These factors were weighted based on our 10 years of optimizing retail website experiences and totaled to arrive at an eventual score for each site. The features we asked our shoppers and analysts to address include:

• Quality and detail of images (e.g., “Could the shopper zoom in?,” “Did the retailer provide product images from multiple angles?”)
• Product copy description answering the shopper’s implicit questions
• Whether the retailer offers customer reviews
• How the retailer met the shopper’s gift buying needs (e.g., “Did the retailer offer gift wrapping, messaging or gift certificates?”)
• Ease and simplicity of checkout (e.g., “How many pages did it take to check out?” “Did the retailer provide a progress indicator?”)
• Retailer’s ability to address the shopper’s concerns (e.g., return policies, guarantees, third-party seals and security assurances)
• Ease and clarity of retailer return policies
• Providing of shipping and tax totals early in the checkout process
• Offering multiple payment options (e.g., pay-by-check, PayPal, etc.)
• Offering estimated delivery times and showing in-stock availability for items
• Offering in-store pick-up where physical stores exist

We specifically asked the mystery shoppers to ignore:

• price points (inclusive of tax, shipping and handling);
• the ease in locating the products;
• the efficacy of the brand in conveying confidence;
• the impact of overall design on credibility and sales;
• the entire customer experience from search to purchase fulfillment.

Rather than evaluating the entire customer experience, this study provides a benchmark for retail sites based on more objective criteria. Therefore, our 2007 Retail Customer Experience Study provides a thumbnail view of how businesses speak to the needs of their customers.

There’s much work still to be done and plenty of opportunity for improvement. The top-rated site in this study scored only 67 out of a possible 100. Even the top-rated company has plenty of room to grow before it has thoroughly delighted its customers and improved its bottom line.

More data can be found here:
http://www.grokdotcom.com/2007/11/26/cyber-monday-future-nows-2007-retail-customer-experience-study/

Interestingly, a whopping 35% had a checkout process with more than 4 steps.... As we all go online to buy presents, helping us speed through the process should be a priority...