Virgin Holidays last year on the day before Valentine’s started sending customers an email that, when opened, plays a wolf whistle sound. The tone for the mailer was flirtatious inviting customers to participate in a holiday offer with their special one.With the holiday season retail upswing, optimizing your campaigns with newer tools and tactics can help you get greater engagement and conversions for your brand.
Discovery Card conducted a Valentine’s Day Shopping Survey and found that:
Men expected to spend an average of USD 127 on their ladies, and the ladies USD 74. Of the women, 53 percent said they would purchase gadgets for their men.
65 percent would make their purchase one week before February 14
10 percent of men would wait until February 14
39 percent of women planned on spending nothing
22 percent of men and 15 percent of women planned to purchase a gift online
Here are some clever ways to be ready with Campaigns for categories that are not known to be the categories of choice and may not offer a romantic get-away or a dinner for two.
Getting your Website ready
Customize your website to target the mobile shopper. As seen during the holiday season, most shopping and search s on Mobile and your campaigns need to look at audience that is searching for products in a mobile environment. The website should have adequate tools to customize offers for a customer searching for products via an app, by including tools such as Store maps.
According to Media Post
“Target wants to make clear that its mobile presence is driving in-store traffic. Not only are store pickups higher, but things like store maps were accessed over 400,000 times. Also, activity on its often-lauded coupon app Cartwheel has grown substantially. The apps added 2 million new users during the holiday period. The company claims that the app itself has been responsible for more than $1 Billion in promotional sales since launch..”
Optimizing Your campaigns for Mobile
Google’s Best Practices Guide for mobile campaign recommends including ad customizers, rich mobile experiences and setting up site links to direct your mobile user to the right landing page.
Here are some interesting formats that can get your brand more visible for the special event.
Optimize your AdWords Campaign with the newest tools from Google Shopping Campaigns
Auctions Insight Report
Auctions Insight report lets you optimize your PLA campaign by analyzing your performance with the Peers.
The metrics you can obtain are impression share, overlap rate and outranking share, you’re able to see trends amongst your peers and strategic opportunities to improve your bidding strategies.
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The other similar reporting tools help you optimize bids, devices and arrive at search impression shares.
Another way to optimize your search campaign is to go with Google Merchant Promotions that can help you advertise products alongside search ads.
Ad Extensions and Ad Customizers
Ad Customizers, a new AdWords tool that lets you show highly relevant text ads to your customers, in real-time, even when you have thousands of products, services, and promotions—all changing by the day. Check out this video to see how you can put ad customizers to work in your accounts.
Some other tips shared by Marketing Experts are:
Keyword Bidding
Bid competitively on the day before and the day of Valentine’s Day to capture as much slacker intent as possible. Raise bids in markets where demand is high to capture some traffic. An easy way to do this is to run automated rules to bid up certain keywords as you get closer to the big day.
Remarketing
Set up a remarketing campaign to pull in users that were on your site and did not sign up for an offer earlier. Reel them back in with an enticing offer, a witty display ad or a clever message.
Optimizing Email marketing campaigns
Email Marketing still gets the results and it is important to prepare your email campaign for the mobile user
in addition to keeping in mind that the segmentation based on demographics will be useful in getting better response.
Mention shipping cutoff dates in your emails
Promote gift cards. Messaging like “always the perfect fit” or “for the woman who knows what she wants – even when you don’t” are ideas
Create urgency and stress the benefits of getting things done now (and remind guys how annoying malls can be!)
Solve their problem in your headlines and email content messaging
Include gift finder images or links in your email if you have one
Slip in some customer reviews for the “don’t take our word for it, take hers” touch
Promote e-gift certificates for last-minute shoppers or hard to shop for partners
Solomozone 