Now is time to ramp-up and expand your digital marketing and social media marketing channels. Below you will find practical strategies designed to increase website traffic, social media engagement, and on-site conversion rates, which leads to more sales, revenue, and profit. If you know me, you know I believe in implementing a comprehensive, multi-channel online marketing strategy, so you need to be doing several things at once to full leverage Internet marketing and social media to it's fullest.
Website Tune-up Ideas:
New Years themed main graphic (on the home page) – Special promotions and great sales for the new year. Free Shipping is the #1 promotion that motivates consumers. “Resolve to save in 2015 with these killer deals!”
New Years themed company logo - Try adding a little graphical flair to your logo for the new year. Maybe it’s time to re-fresh your branding or tweak it slightly for the new year.
Launch a “New Years Deals” page on the website that can be linked to with a graphic on the homepage, header, or side column. And then promoted via email and your social networks. Pages like this can get ranked organically in the search engines and bring in free traffic so make sure they are optimized with good content.
Refresh your header/footer promotions – your website’s header and footer are good places to advertise promotions. Make sure you are effectively using your header with phone number, tag line, logo, navigation, and special offers.
Free Shipping Offer – consumers love free shipping, it’s the #1 promotion in ecommerce. Push it in emails, website graphics, social network pages, live chat, and the phone sales center. Whatever your promotion, make sure all your departments are mentioning it to your prospective customers and previous customers.
A/B testing – on product pages, homepage, and other important pages to boost conversion rates and see what works best. We use a couple of the top tools to run A/B testing on client’s websites like Optimizely.com.
Online Marketing Campaigns:
Retargeting Banners and Facebook Ads – make sure your web retargeting banner ads and Facebook retargeting ads are using a New Year theme with a trackable promotion and call-to-action designed into them to be more effective. If you need a good retargeting company let me know. We are retargeting on Facebook now with Adroll, and to email subscribers with Perfect Audience. Make sure to use Facebook Custom Audiences to target ads to your email lists.
Product Catalog – Make sure your product catalog feed is all updated so it can be syndicated to the shopping engines and tracking the conversions. We are using GoDatafeed.com to track conversions from shopping engines and making sure the feed is formatted properly. Less than $100/month to use their service. Adds and manages your product catalog on several shopping engines.
Site Speed/Server Load – Make sure your website server can handle the influx of traffic very well and is loading as quickly as possible at all times. A "NO EXCUSES POLICY" needs to be in effect. Nothing kills conversions like a slow loading website. Check into “load balancing” and server error reporting, to keep an eye on it. Use website monitoring alerts so you know when your site goes down.
Abandoned Shopping Cart Follow-up Emails – Use automated, abandoned shopping cart follow-up emails to convert more visitors into sales. We have a couple of providers for that like Yieldify.com. They do shopping cart abandonment emails and on-site overlay offers through pop-ups that capture email.
SEO – Content/Blog Posts – posts about New Years resolutions and deals, ex. "10 Top New Year Resolution Ideas for the Family." Have a proactive content marketing strategy is a great idea to land people searching for topics and products related to the new year. I have a team of writers for blog posts, we do articles at $39/each for a 400 word optimized post. We also do online press releases through PRWeb.com, the leading online press release company.
SEM – Paid Search – making sure your paid search ad content and keyword campaigns are updated with New Years offers especially for your branded terms. Expanding keyword lists into New Years-related product and niche search phrases. Make sure to leverage Google and Bing shopping for your product catalogs, it's a must. I have 12+ years of paid search management experience, let me know if you want me to analyze your Google Adwords or BingAds accounts.
Affiliate Marketing – Freshen up banners, text links, and offers/promotions with New Years offers. Recruit new affiliate partners. My agency is the leading affiliate agency on the CJ.com network and we manage in-house programs as well. I have personally been managing affiliate programs for 12+ years.
Mobile Website – make sure you have a good mobile version of your website live, I recommend mShopper or dudamobile.com for an automated mobile site. But there are other plug and play solutions if you don’t have a custom built mobile app. If you don't have a mobile-optimized website or directing mobile users to a mobile optimized version of your website, you are completely missing the boat and the issue needs to be addressed immediately.
Pro-Active Live Chat – I LOVE this tool!! Pops up from the footer on all visitors with a nice message stating, “Welcome, can we help you with anything?” It’s an info first, promotion second chat management strategy that adds the human element to your web traffic, tracked with coupon codes. This is a proven strategy to increase conversion rates and boost interaction. Great for selling and resolving customer service related issues.
Exit Pops - launching an "exit offer" for website visitors abandoning the website is a great way to offer an incentive to those folks and convert more sales. Check out ExitIntent.io for a great performing, easy to implement entry/exit pop up for your site.
Social Media Strategies:
New Year or Valentine’s Day-themed Sweepstakes or Photo Contest – "NEW iPad Sweepstakes!" You could do an amazing New Years Sweepstakes or Valentine’s Day Photo Contest to increase fans, email opt-ins, and viral sharing. It’s also a great strategy for converting your email databases into fans on Facebook so you can engage with them there. Typical budget would range between $500-2500 for a contest, depending on how big and exciting you wanted to go with the sweepstakes. We use a sweepstakes tool called Woobox.com which is $29/month and handles all of the functionality. All you have to do is fund the prize budget and we can handle all the design elements for you. These can be promoted on your website, on your fan page with Promoted Posts, and to your email databases. Not to mention when the winners get their prize we ask them to share a picture on the fan page holding their prize which is promoted on Facebook. Press releases can also be done for the sweepstakes to boost reach. My agency launches and manages social media strategy for clients. We do quite a lot of sweepstakes and contests to grow and excite fans, followers, email opt-ins, and web traffic.
New Year-themed Fan Page Cover images - always keep your Facebook cover image timely!
Refreshed Fan Page profile thumbnail - Fan page profile pic too!
Facebook Fan Advertising – consider allocating budget to advertising for more fans on Facebook through 20145 so you can market deals to more people with “Boosted Posts”. Then using Facebook Offers and Facebook Boosted Posts to monetize your fans and track the ROI of your fan advertising. We can handle this process for you really well, we have the Facebook formula down to a science.
Facebook Custom Audiences – upload your email databases to Facebook to run advertising against the lists. Very effective for converting prospects into buyer and previous customers into repeat buyers.
Twitter Ads – Add targeted followers, sponsored posts to targeted audience, and NEW Twitter audiences which works like Facebook custom audiences.
Instagram – You MUST be on Instagram with a company page and posting pictures and links to it, with numerous hashtags per post to gain followers.
Email Database Strategies:
Email Creative – Launch a series of New Years-themed email offers. We have design capabilities for HTML solo emails and customer newsletters.
Test Subject Lines – Refine subject lines, include first name in the subject line whenever possible for personalization. Make sure you are getting full deliverability, check out Ongage.com.
Responsive Design HTML Emails – these are mobile friendly emails and a must with the surge in mobile phone usage.
Email Platform – I highly recommend pop-up email capture on site traffic to grow emails and then sending drip follow-up emails and measure the conversion. I know how to work with any platform and I have an excellent newsletter editor that works for me, so if you need newsletters or emails created and deployed let me know.
Email Frequency – I recommend daily deal emails or weekly emails throughout the New Year. I’m on all the major ecommerce retailer’s email lists, so I see everything they are sending out. Ramping up frequency is definitely en vogue for big ecommerce sites.
Retargeting Email Openers – this is a newer element of “retargeting” where you can drop a cookie on email openers and then advertise to them on the web and on Facebook via retargeting campaigns. Check out Perfect Audience for this.
Don’t be shy – Email is the #1 revenue generator for ecommerce, so make sure not to under-do it.
Bonus! 10 Website Conversion Rate Boosting Strategies:
Customer Referral Program – Use tools like FriendBuy.com or ReferralCandy.com to launch a Thank You page widget and/or stand-alone customer-referral program sign-up page. Bonobos.com generates 25% of their online revenue with their referral program.
Pop-up Live Chat – boost interaction with website traffic and provide promotions through proactive live chat.
Pop-up email capture in exchange for a coupon on organic traffic – Yieldify.com or JustUno.com for email and/or Facebook Like capture.
Testimonials/Reviews – important to boosting confidence in the website and products. Make sure to properly leverage your customer reviews on your product pages and social media with tools like Yotpo.com and TrustPilot.com.
Shopping Cart Abandonment Email Follow-ups – Yieldify.com is the recommended tool for automated shopping cart abandonment email follow-ups.
Visitor/non-Buyer Retargeting on the Web and Facebook – Adroll, Facebook, Twitter, Perfect Audience.
Trust Logos – Norton’s Trust Seal, BBB Online, SSL logos.
A/B Testing Tools – you use Optimizely.com or Convert.com on your website to split test page elements of any page or set of pages.
Internal Email Sending – i.e. frequency, design, subject lines, promotions. Make sure not to under do it.
Running Facebook Sweepstakes that can be advertised on the website to collect more visitor data, so they can be remarketed to via email and Facebook. Running sweepstakes with Facebook apps like WooBox.com are a great way to ramp up Facebook likes, email opt-ins, which in time will boost overall website conversion rates because it makes your site stickier and creates excitement with your brand.
There are some of the areas you need to be looking to have a great strategy with in the new year to really maximize traffic, engagement, and revenue. Let me know if you might want to discuss these suggestions on a call or feel free to share internally and have those staff members contact me with any questions. Our agency rates are very affordable, in fact:
ww.olayinkaoyelamicorporation.com connects brands with marketplace to drive traffics, grow sales and revenue for return on investments
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