It’s that time of the year when shoppers are thronging retail outlets in the hope of getting a steal of a deal. But as you might have already realized e-commerce today has caught the fancy of shoppers in a big way. If you are a digital marketer, then you must have an ace up your sleeve to leverage this positive customer sentiment. You need to be sure that your message reaches the customers, breaking free from the clutter that is around this time of the year.

Today, customers are savvy and you need to take cognizance of that while devising your marketing campaign. So what makes you stand out from the crowd, capture mind-share and eventually pull in the customers? Now the million dollar question that you need to address as a digital marketer is “HOW DO I GAIN A HIGHER MIND-SHARE & WALLET-SHARE OF MY CUSTOMERS”?

The deals that e-commerce players offer is much more profitable for shoppers as compared to the deals offered by offline retailers. During the shopping season around this time of the year, people are naturally hunting for the best deals online. Hence, as a digital marketer, you need to have a well-planned approach to get the best bang for your buck this holiday season.

Your 3 Point Agenda for a successful Online Venture

• Pay Attention to Social Networking Sites – The explosion of social networking sites is one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 technologies. Your customers are everywhere. Learn what they are saying on Facebook, Twitter, et al to dovetail your digital marketing strategy
• Your Online Review Strategy is critical – People today make shopping decisions based on online reviews. So it pays to have good reviews about your company together with the products and services that you sell. Influence your customers to give their feedback, reviews and product ratings, which will bolster your digital marketing campaign
• Email Marketing Pays Rich Dividends – Even in this age of the social media explosion, email is an effective way to reach out to people. So make sure you have a flawless email marketing strategy in place. Send mails to people to give them a preview of all that you are going to offer this Thanksgiving holiday shopping season. This will surely give you great ROI

How Brands are Wooing Consumers this Black Friday

Legendary PC maker Dell is offering Jaw-dropping discounts. Its door buster sales include:

• Tablets starting at $99.99, Laptops at $189.99, desktops at $199.99, the Alienware gaming PCs starting at $549.00
• Special deals on a full range of consumer electronics, including TVs as low as $167.99, monitors starting at $99.99 and Bluetooth speakers starting at $29.99

………And a lot more such incredible deals beginning November 27.

The world’s biggest retailer Wal-Mart is dumping the one day ‘Black Friday’ sales model and instead moving towards an annual holiday shopping season. If you thought that only brick and mortar sales is Wal-Mart’s forte then think again because this beast of Bentonville is going all guns blazing in giving some of the deepest discounts available online!

The biggest online retailer Amazon will offer new deals every hour. It will offer multiple ‘Lightning Deals’ along with two coveted ‘Deals of the Day’ every day this holiday shopping season. So any brand worth its salt is going to make the most of this season when people are not averse to loosen their purse strings.

Position² POV

The Thanksgiving weekend kick-starts the Christmas Shopping party. As a digital marketer, you must realize that it is manna from heaven for bargain hunting customers as there is no better time to shop than this in the entire calendar. But savvy digital marketers are looking beyond this holiday shopping season. It has been proven that the shoppers who buy from you during the holiday season more often than not, are just fickle customers. They might not provide a lot of value to you in future.

Now, as a digital marketer, you can change this with the right strategy. You need to collect information about these customers and utilize it to derive more lifetime value from them. This deluge of customers to your online websites need not be a onetime affair, but more of a regular occurrence for you.

We feel that the old retailer’s customer acquisition strategies for minimizing cost per customer acquisition is passé. In this situation, marketing intelligence & analytics, like Position²’s MiDash is the digital marketer’s best friend. It helps them understand in real-time the difference between the cost of acquisition & customer lifetime value for various customer types. Marketers can now identify channels and tailor make strategies on how effectively, they can optimize customer acquisition and retention. After all, a customer 50X more valuable than another, certainly needs a different acquisition strategy and cost.

Contact us now to retain your customers well beyond this holiday shopping season!

Happy Holidays!