I N T R O D U C T I O N

Dear retail professional, if you’re reading this in Q3 or before, good news, there’s hope yet for your digital sales to skyrocket during the holiday season. (But you have some work to do.)

If this is Q4, it may be too late to tap into your full digital potential. (However, there are tactics below that can kick your revenue into high gear, even at the last minute.)

We have compiled ecommerce data from 100+ U.S. retailers, 100 million online shoppers and $40 billion in revenue to find the most powerful, repeatable digital tactics to maximize revenue, along with the biggest online roadblocks you need to avoid.

Even if you can’t implement all 7 tactics this season, don’t worry, there are at least three or four you can start tomorrow to tap into sustainable online growth, such as: How to find your most effective marketing channels.

How to find out who your customers are, where they’re from and how they shop.

How to retarget like an elite retailer (without the elite budget). How to turn new prospects into engaged, fans. Now let’s find out what the best-of-the-best retailers are doing today to grow their digital sales during the holiday season, and how you can follow their lead.

Quick, name the biggest online shopping day of the year. Black Friday? Nope. Cyber Monday? No. It’s third.

Yes, the top online shopping day in America was Cyber Tuesday, then Cyber Wednesday. Consumer spending habits are not what most retailers think they are!

Here’s proof:

If you’re focusing on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to the detriment of all other days between (and after), you could be leaving thousands, possibly millions, of dollars on the digital table. In fact, those two days only comprise 10% of all orders during the holiday season!

THINK BIGGER.

Who says Cyber Monday and Black Friday get all the fun? Don’t forget about Thanksgiving!

Don’t forget about the Saturday after Thanksgiving: Small Business Saturday.

Don’t forget about Free Shipping Day (the Friday before Christmas).

And don’t forget about Super Saturday. A.K.A., Panic Saturday, which is the last Saturday before Christmas.

You can start prepping your prospects and customers way back in July (July 4th) or way, way back in February (Valentine’s Day and Groundhog Day).

Why? Because the most successful retailers do not wait until the Q4 holidays to offer their best deals. Before the panic hits (and the competition hits), they get consumers familiar with their company and their website. Follow their lead and prep your prospects and customers for later sales before the giant shopping days hit. Get visitors to look at a lot of pages, including products they would otherwise have skipped.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are colossal opportunities, yes. Do everything you can to maximize their revenue-producing mania. (With tactics we’ll cover later in this article.) These days can make or break a company’s year in only a few hours, just be aware that consumers get frothy around the mouth and itchy around the wallet on many more holiday shopping days than these two.

Which brings us to Hack #2.

JOLLY GREEN TIP: AVOID DAILY DEALS Daily deals do not work. You’re wasting valuable online real estate space on both your email and your website for deals that may only be relevant to less than 10% of your audience.

The new reality in today’s market is that consumers start shopping earlier than ever. In fact, 29% of all consumers start shopping for the holidays before Halloween.

This means that you need to engage your customers and prospects at least three months in advance of the holiday season. If you’re reading this less than three months out, don’t fret. There’s still hope. (For example, Hacks 3 through 7.)

Your messaging needs to be tailored to catch consumers in the pre-holiday shopping mindset. Get on their radar. Tease them. Get them excited. Influence shoppers before they visit your website or walk into your stores.

Then, start your promotions at least 7 to 10 days before Black Friday. Better yet, start the day after Halloween. And remember, promotions and deals are not limited to only Friday and Monday (see Tip #1).

When Black Friday hits, the most successful retailers extend their Black Friday sales. Then, they extend Cyber Monday sales. But they’re not finished.

They offer a Black Friday Part 2 sales promotion. Then a Cyber Monday Part 2 sales promotion.

If you only focus on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and you only send your messaging out during that week, you will lose revenue to the retailers who plan longer, plan smarter and break a sweat the day after Halloween.

Mobile ecommerce growth is not coming next year or the next.

It’s already here.

One out of four online purchases in 2014 came from a mobile phone or tablet. Mobile shopping increased 32% from 2013.

Brian C. Cornell, Target Corporation CEO

We know that 75 percent of our digital traffic will come from mobile by the holidays, so it’s an incredibly important ‘front door’ for Target.”

“

M O B I L E O P T I M I Z E D N O T M O B I L E O P T I M I Z E D

Consumers are becoming more engaged than ever on small, personal devices. The days of endless browsing for offers and promo codes have been replaced by a search for content that grabs them. (Hopefully your content.)

When a person uses mobile search to make a decision, they are 57% more likely to visit a store.

And when consumers are in your store, be aware that they do search for one particular nugget: price comparison. So be aggressive and competitive with your offers. (Because the consumer always knows).

The smartest retailers connect with the local inventory. To drive more in-store traffic, they show local store inventory availability on mobile product listing ads and connect consumers to their local storefront online.

! PAINFUL FACTYou can’t tap into mobile revenue until your website is optimized for mobile.

Create a simple design that is fast, fast, fast with smartphone capabilities.

Then focus again on speed.

Use proper mobile redirects to ensure search engine crawling. And make sure you can offer mobile payment options such as Paypal and Google Wallet Instant Buy to reduce friction as much as possible.

Think like a consumer. The fewer steps, the less friction, the better.

Make it easy, fast and painless.

Go to this link (on your smartphone) and test your website’s mobile speed: http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ If your site passes the speed test, you may also want to dig into Google Analytics and hunt down your mobile only queries, to see if any keywords jump out at you. And if they do, try like heck to ramp up your mobile PPC campaigns (within reason) and call your SEO guru to see how you can improve those keywords in Google’s Search Engine Results Page.

IT IS TIME FOR A MIND SHIFT WITHIN THE RETAIL INDUSTRY, FROM SINGLE PURCHASE REVENUE PER CUSTOMER TO CHANNEL ACQUISITION VALUE. Retailers must optimize their ad spend for long-term, high-value customers. Stop wasting your money on low-value customers.

B A U B L E B A RCase study

Baublebar, an online fashion jewelry retailer, discovered that their best customers were coming from Facebook. However, Facebook was not driving high numbers of conversions.

But they looked at the data again and realized that customers who visited their website through Facebook offered a much higher value than every other customer. In fact, Baublebar soon discovered that they could predict future purchases of their high value customers.

I. What are your highest-performing marketing channels?

According to 100 retailers, 100 million online shoppers and $40 billion in revenue, the two most important channels in the retail industry—regarding engagement and growth—are paid Google Search marketing and email marketing.

No surprise that Google Search marketing is so popular. However, this channel is expensive, broad-based and highly competitive. It didn’t make sense for Baublebar to allocate a high percentage of its budget to search, and it might not make sense for you.

The big surprise (but not to savvy retailers) is that email marketing is the single most important marketing channel to building sales.

Email lets you engage with personalization. (True 1-to-1 marketing). And if we look at the three biggest shopping days of year, guess what leads them in regards to conversions?

Email. With a whopping 25% of all orders.

II. How are the most successful retailers engaging consumers with email?

They utilize email capture campaigns on their website and mobile site with a specific opt-in hook: special “access” to their Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. This is something you can implement in less than one hour.

Ask people to opt-in to email even if they are already on your list. They are showing a sign of commitment. Create hype and urgency by telling your prospects that they will get an email with a countdown to access your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals.

(Don’t worry, you don’t have to utilize a countdown, though it’s an extremely effective tactic.)

Email your list one to two times a day, starting on the Monday before Black Friday. Yes, that’s right, once or twice a day.

Remind people with teasers such as “in 2 days we’re sending you something awesome” or “see a sneak peek of our products.” Get them excited with enticing, catchy subject lines. You need to prime people for your deals because you have to compete against crowded holiday inboxes.

The result: Your website will be top of mind when Black Friday and Cyber Monday (and all the other shopping days) roll around. Your audience will actually seek deals in their inbox from your company.

Psychologically speaking, this is the power of compliance momentum. The consumer agreed to receive these offers. Then, when the offers show up, the consumer is triggered to act.

EMAIL MARKETING IS A POWERFUL TOOL. BUT IT CAN BE INFINITELY MORE POWERFUL WHEN IT’S HIGHLY TARGETEDSuccessful retailers utilize data mining to better understand their customers. Yes, it’s difficult to get data out of silos and talk to other pieces of data. When done right, however, you can focus on overall sales of your company, not just online sales. (Regardless of when the transaction occurs.)

Done properly, your sales team can talk to your marketing team who can talk to the analytics team.

G U E S SCase study

A powerful example of mixing data “silos” is when GUESS combined their online purchase data with offline loyalty programs.

GUESS was bringing in-store data in through Lotus but they were not leveraging it. First, they wanted to bring that data in and ask the hard questions:

What does this data mean?

What is the holistic view?

What is the lifetime value of the customer?

GUESS had their ideal customer in their minds, but they thought their best customers were young, urban and living in Brooklyn.

The data said otherwise.

GUESS’s most valuable customers were coming from suburban Arizona.

So GUESS inquired about geographic marketing. They brainstormed what to put in front of these customers to engage them and entice them into making more purchases.

Before, they thought Brooklynites were buying accessories and jeans, so they previously put their marketing dollars behind that. Oops.

GUESS found that their high value customers (HVC) were actually purchasing sweaters and knits.

So they started targeting these HVC with specific emails that pushed these products.

JOLLY GREEN TIP: LEVERAGE ESTIMATED CROSS DEVICE CONVERSION TRACKING IN GOOGLE If you want to know your customers, you have to also know where they come from. Maybe someone browsed on mobile, but completed the transaction on desktop. You need to credit that conversion with the appropriate dollar attribution in your campaign. How? Keep an eye on Estimated Cross Device Conversion in Google Analytics. Here’s how:

1 / In Universal Analytics you can tie different sessions together (enable it)

2 / Have a different phone number on your mobile site than desktop site so you can track it 3 / Capture email on mobile devices

B A C K C O U N T R YCase study

CONSUMERS WANT RELEVANT CONTENT. Backcountry understands this, and has identified product affinity segments to deliver more personalized emails. They also use predictive analytics to target customers with personalized content.

For example, they send email on skiing to consumers who are interested about skiing. Hiking emails to consumers who love hiking. Etc.

This tactic isn’t necessarily about the last SKU a consumer clicked on in their email (though that’s a nice tactic to use) this is about predicting what product a consumer will purchase in the next six months.

Now, you may not be in the position to implement predictive analysis today, but you do have data you can mine to find your high value customers. And you can start gathering their emails today to maximize their purchasing power.

Knowing your customers is a vital step in improving revenue—especially from your high value customers. Now, let’s take it to the next level, let’s talk retargeting.

Your prospects are not your customers. So smart segmentation throughout the Google Display Network can break your offers up. Put pixels inside your emails and upload your email list to Google so you can retarget—so you know who is who, what they’re looking at and what they’re doing.

Who abandoned a shopping cart, for example?

What product did they abandon?

With retargeting, your cost per acquisition will be low and your return on ad spend will be through the roof. Talk to your ad-buying vendor about max bids and bid up when you can.

Why? You want to retarget those with the highest purchase intent (those who make it deep into your purchase funnel and those who open your emails and click-through to products). These are consumers with an itch to scratch.

During peak days, remove your frequency caps (because consumers are being bombarded by retailers and you need to be top of mind). Change your offers often. And be sure to change your ads to say “2 days left,” “1 day left” or whatever you can do to create immediacy.

Keep your brand top of mind and drive customers back to the exact product they showed interest in purchasing.

Retailers are always talking about maximizing their Google shopping data and product data feeds. Well, now is the time to optimize. Get real-time performance analytics, milk your best-selling products (pronto) and know your data and how to get the most out of it. No more questions. No more excuses.

JOLLY GREEN TIP Use Remarketing List for Search Ads (RLSA). It lets you customize your Google search ads based on the most important factor in marketing: user intent. Compared to the old fashioned Search Ads, RLSA offers a 250% increase in click-through rate. (So bid aggressively!) Here’s how it works:

1 / Visitor performs first search on Google

2 / Visits your websites

3 / Visitor does not convert

4 / Visitor searches for your keyword on Google again

Done right, social media can be one of your best acquisition channels.

Spend on Facebook Sponsored Post to Broadcast Sale, Paid Ads, Facebook Custom Audience and Facebook Retargeting. (We’ve found these tactics to be consistently successful for most every retail client during the holiday season.)

Who is unique? Who will spend the most? Where are they from? What products are they interested in?

Pull these dimensions out of your data and put them over into Facebook to target prospects who look similar to these high value customers.

Create smart segments and use statistical differences between these segments to target different behavioral attributes that matter and differentiate that message.

Utilize custom audiences with Facebook Advertising and offer different creative for different segments (naturally). Important: Every custom segment in your email list should at least be a custom audience in Facebook. For example: Best customers

Lookalike New customers - welcome series

Win-backs When someone makes a purchase, keep going after him or her. Holiday fever is real!

If you want to raise both your conversion rates and your average order value, here’s a secret: escalator deals.

Take your current Average Order Value (say $60)

1st Tier 15% lower ($10 off $50)

2nd Tier Double the 1st Tier ($25 off $100)

3rd Tier Double the 2nd Tier ($50 off $200)

Here’s how it works: you set up tiered deals based on your average order value (best practice is 3 tiers) and use different deals for customers and prospects (are you sick of segmentation yet?).

The power of the escalator deal gives you the best of both worlds: higher conversion rates and higher average order value. But beware of shipping as you get closer and closer to Christmas Day. Many retailers add a countdown clock into their “buy box” throughout the checkout process. (An extra nudge to purchase helps the balance sheet.)

And hey, if you have some discretionary income (dream on, of course) then why not venture into Pinterest or Instagram? Don’t jump into the deep end, per se, but throw a line in and see if you get any bites. The holiday shopping season is a feeding frenzy, so the more chum you toss in uncharted waters, the more big fish you may catch.

C L O S I N G

Successful retailers start planning their holiday season supply chain in May. By mid-July, preparations are often near completion—including SKUs, models, channels, regions, pallet displays, end caps and promotional planning.

But what about digital marketing and promotions strategies?

Quite often, they’re left untouched until early Q4. When it’s too late.

Right now, today, you need to start scheduling your holiday calendar. You need to pick what tactics you can start implementing today, what customers you can find that give you the most value and what channels are the most effective.

This is what the world’s most successful retailers are doing right now. Don’t get left behind.

Make the most of this holiday season and maximize your digital revenue like never before.