JumpFly Blog: AdWords, Yahoo & Microsoft Advertising

So Christmas is almost here and if your sales aren’t as good as you like, don’t fret, there’s still the post-holiday shopping days. Have you ever gone to the malls a few days after Christmas? The crowds are intense, but the sales are pretty darn good. Kind of like Black Friday, only without having to stand in the cold for hours.

Post-holiday sales - those two or three days after Christmas when people are looking to return their ill-fitting or “dud” gifts and spend their Christmas cash before they go back to work - can really be a boost to your business, if you are ready. Start looking now at what items you have quite a bit of. What do you need to move in order to make room for new lines or product? What has a great mark-up that you can easily afford to mark down and still make money on? Start thinking now about what you can mark down or offer as a BOGO (Buy One, Get One Free) or Buy One, Get One 50% off.

Consumers are trained to think of those days after Christmas as super-discount days. I know people who don’t do their Christmas shopping until after Christmas, just to save the cash or buy more for less. One of my clients already knows that anything Christmas related - from ornaments to tree toppers to nativity sets to Christmas dolls, decor and figurines - will be deeply discounted starting the day after Christmas. They don’t want to have to store it, and they need to make room for Valentine’s items.

So do your post-holiday sales strategy thinking now, before you hit the holidays yourself. You just might find that Christmas 2008 was better than you thought it would be.

More about Nikki
JumpFly PPC Management Specialist

I’ve lost count of how many websites I’ve gone to where the immediate question comes to mind: “Hello, is anybody home?” The website looks like it hasn’t been updated for years. It’s not necessarily a color scheme issue, or a graphic design issue, or the fact that the site could just be plain ugly. It’s just the fact that there’s no indication of anything current happening on the website. It’s hard to give potential customers confidence in a site, or convince them to purchase something from a website, or entice them to fill out a contact form, if they are not sure that someone is actually minding the store.

I’d like to offer a few simple solutions to help rectify this “empty” feeling. First, you can put up a date stamp on the site that reflects the current date. This can go in your header, near your navigation bar, or anywhere in the upper portion of the website. Yes, it’s a potentially useless bit of data that even an abandoned site could be using, but at least one of the first impressions that a new customer will get is one of “now.” And first impressions are absolutely critical for first time visitors, especially in the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising arena where you are paying per click for each one of these new visitors.

Second, put up a current bit of news about your company, your business category, the products you sell, the brands you carry. Date the news and update it about once a week. Again, it’s all about giving the website a “lively” feeling, that someone is actively minding the store, putting up fresh current tidbits of information. The news really could be about anything, but you’ll get more mileage out of it if it relates to your business and products. This could include starting a blog, which is very similar to this. Or you could just carve out a small space on the home page and update that with some timely bit of information every week or so.

Finally, and I think most importantly, give your calls-to-action a sense of urgency by giving them an end date that’s no more than a few weeks or a month out. If you offer Free Shipping, then also mention the month in the same sentence. For example: Free Shipping in December! Maybe you will offer Free Shipping in January, but then again maybe you won’t. The same thing goes for any sales you might run. If everything is 5% off, then offer 5% off in December. Maybe you will offer 5% off in January, but maybe you won’t. If you leave Free Shipping or sales offers open-ended, then you don’t give customers a strong incentive to buy now. They’ll think they can just come back later and get it, but of course then they have a good chance of never coming back at all. Once they are on your site, you need to do everything you can to close that sale as soon as possible. This all ties back to giving the site a sense of being “current.” By putting an end date, or a month name, into all of your promotional pushes it gives the site a sense of being “alive” and “fresh.”

More about Jack
JumpFly PPC Account Executive

Looking to drive sales this holiday season? Offer free shipping. Free shipping has huge perceived value and can pay-off in added sales.

Case in point: one of my retail pay-per-click (PPC) advertising clients that I manage here at JumpFly offered free shipping on any size order for the last 10 days. Business was brisk, to the point that they were running out of the small free gift they were offering on certain size orders. Their free shipping on any order offer ended at Midnight on December 1st, and they went back to their regular shipping offer (free shipping on orders greater than $75). How did sales do on December 2nd? Dropped by 50%.

According to Ken Cassar, an Analyst at Nielsen Online, “Free-shipping deals is a minimum cost of entry.” What does that mean? Unless you are the only retailer in your niche, if your prices aren’t the lowest of all your competitors, and you’re not offering free shipping, you have absolutely no enticement for someone to order from you. The Internet is all about comparison shopping. It takes one click to leave your site, and without a reason to come back, you’ve probably lost the sale.

Another case in point, I did an A/B test in Google AdWords for another PPC advertising client where we compared a free shipping offer versus a percentage discount. The dollar savings of the percentage discount was more than the free shipping offer; an end customer would have saved more money with the percentage discount. Surprisingly, at the end of the test, the free shipping offer outconverted the discount by a pretty hefty margin.

So what can you do if you can’t offer free shipping on any order? Offer free shipping on orders over a certain amount. If you already do that, like my client above who normally offers free shipping on orders over $75, than reduce that minimum dollar amount. One option is to figure out your average order size, than make the free shipping offer just a few dollars higher than that. (Think about Amazon.com and their Free Super Saver Shipping. I know that I’ve added another item to an order, just to qualify for that $25 minimum. How about you?)

And if you do offer free shipping, whatever the deal, make sure you highlight it everywhere on your site and in your ads at Google AdWords, Yahoo and Microsoft. Remember that it does no good to have it only on the home page if you’re sending your ads to an internal landing page. Make sure the offer is displayed everywhere, on every page, and on your shopping cart. You still have roughly eight more days of online shopping, depending on when your cut-off is for guaranteed Christmas delivery. Use that time wisely.

More about Nikki