Last minute online marketing ideas for Christmas

It’s less than a month to Christmas.

If you’re a B2C business, here are my top five last minute online marketing tips to help you get more sales. By the way, today’s post is inspired by Jim Stewart’s “Top 3 reasons why I hate numbered lists”. Thanks Jim.

1. Optimise your site for “Free Shipping” and “gift certificates” (if you offer them). You can introduce the search term “free shipping” almost instantly site-wide if your CMS or online store supports appended descriptions. In practical terms this might mean that you could rank highly when people type in a product you stock with free shipping such as, “blue widget product free shipping”.

   You can see the big spike in search traffic for these search terms each year, a little like a heart monitor. Search activity around “Free shipping” has really intensified since 2009. No flat-lining here.

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3. Christmas Coupons are also a way to offer promo-code discounts – but if you’re going to offer them, make sure they’re featured prominently on your own website. One (not so ‘Christmasy’) business that does this quite well is www.hostingbay.com.au with their ‘AU40’ discount code offering a 45% discount mentioned site-wide. As a broader strategy I also recommend you optimise a page on your website for “your brand coupon code | promo code” to try and outrank the “retailmenot” type sites. If you don’t want to discount (ie. stay well out of the race to the bottom), keep your prices the same and instead add value, such as small freebie with each purchase or extended warrantee periods.
5. Create Google AdWords and Facebook campaigns which focus on Christmas. Use ad copy like “great last minute gift this Christmas”, “or perfect gift for mum this Christmas”, or even “…on special this Christmas only”, etc. Type “Christmas gifts” into Google for inspiration, there are heaps of early movers bidding like mad in there. Redballoon, you know who you are.

   On Facebook, there are quite a lot of people who “like” Christmas. If you’re one of them, you’re probably seeing Christmas related Facebook Ad’s and have been for some time.

If you haven’t got cracking with email marketing – now’s the time to start. I don’t normally write about email marketing simply because it’s a whole other topic for another blog somewhere. Despite the doomsayers telling us email is dying, I can tell you now that for the vast majority of the online retailers we have on the books, email marketing is the second or third highest revenue source behind Google, and usually higher than AdWords. Make sure you campaign tag all links in your email so you can track everything in analytics.

1. Google Remarketing is another way to get some quick wins on the board before Christmas. Since we’ve started with Google Remarketing I’ve personally been amazed at how successful it can be in improving online sales (and brand awareness) for online retailers (and anyone else for that matter). If you’re not utilising Remarketing, you’re being negligent. Use Google’s amazingly easy to use “Display Ad Builder” to bust out banners all over the internet. Creep people out and follow them with Ad’s after they’ve visited your website pleading them to come back. Actually, I was just kidding there – don’t do that; play a straight bat and use Ads with emphasis on your brand only. Don’t forget to run text Ads too!

Have you got any others? Feel free to share them below in the comments.

For more Online Sales expert advice, click here.

Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.