|
In this issue of the Food-by-Mail Industry Update, we are introducing our first annual pre-holiday checklist geared specifically to online marketing. We hope this checklist gives you several ideas that will drive more traffic to and sales from your website during the upcoming holiday season.
In the Oct-Dec issues of the FBMIU, we will cover trends and results we are seeing from specialty-food mailers throughout the Fall/Holiday 2010 season.
We would love to hear from you if you have any experiences—from trends in site traffic and catalog delivery times, to online techniques that are helping you sell more food—you would like to share with our other readers.
If you have any questions about the checklists, or you want to talk about new ways to grow your food-by-mail company, please drop me a line. In addition, if there are other topics of particular interest to you that you would like us to cover in a future edition of the newsletter, please let us know.
We hope these checklists and all of the information we cover in the Food-by-Mail Industry Update will help you generate higher sales, more orders, happier customers, and record profits in 2010!
Warmest regards,
Tony Cox
President
5th Food Group
About 5th Food Group
5th Food Group helps specialty-food companies grow and make more money by developing, managing, implementing and analyzing their online and mail order marketing programs. We are the only internet/catalog marketing firm that works exclusively in the specialty-food industry. Helping smaller companies or large companies with small mail-order or internet divisions is what we do best.
Website Marketing & Usability
Our website is updated with all of the new prices, shipping rates and graphics from the new catalog so we have a “common voice” across all channels. We have a written schedule for seasonal home page changes and know what they will be in advance of the season. We have placed our gift card location in a prominent location on the homepage. We have categories set up to emphasize affordable products (i.e., stocking stuffers, gifts under $30, etc.). We have “mystery shopped” our site to ascertain any major pitfalls that need to be resolved before the holiday season, especially related to navigation and our checkout process. We have placed our holiday shipping cutoff dates in an easy to find location and have a plan in place to reference them across all marketing channels. We have updated our on-site search terms to incorporate all new product offerings and seasonal terminology.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
We have a paid search program live on Google Adwords that includes our branded keywords as well as an extensive keyword list promoting our best selling products (non branded keywords). We have separated our branded keywords from our non branded keywords into two campaigns, each with a unique budget and bidding strategy. We have Display Network campaigns separated from our Search Network campaigns with their own unique budget & bidding strategy. We have a written schedule for seasonal ad copy changes, keyword changes, and landing page changes on each Google & Bing ad group. We have reviewed last year’s PPC campaigns to discover what worked and what didn’t so that we can effectively optimize our holiday campaigns. We have migrated all Yahoo campaigns to Microsoft AdCenter to prepare for the search alliance. We have cleaned up our year-round campaigns to remove non-performing terms and poorly converting ads. We have set up Sitelinks on branded campaigns and major non-branded campaigns to improve CTR. We have created a Google feed, connected it to our corresponding Adwords campaigns, and will update and resubmit it monthly.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Our website is optimized for higher organic or natural search engine rankings—each page has a unique URL, page title and Meta description that are “keyword rich.” We have updated our sitemap to include our new holiday categories and products and uploaded it to all major search engines for maximum visibility. We have updated our Meta descriptions on major categories and products to include seasonal terms and any relevant promotions. We have updated our image alt tags to incorporate seasonal terms. We have optimized our site content for seasonal keywords/phrases. We have created new landing pages on holiday gifting.
Email Marketing
We have a written game plan for our e-mail campaigns including offers, subject lines, and transmission dates. We will only send e-mail to customers who have asked to receive them. We are using customer purchase history to segment our email list. We will use e-mail to preannounce catalog mailings and new products, make special offers to drive more sales and site traffic, and to announce ordering and shipping cutoff dates for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other major gifting events. We have an email plan in place to capitalize on Cyber Monday and the post-holiday sales week after Christmas. We have cleaned up our email list, removing hard bounces and moving non-responsive names into a reactivation email list. We have email signup sheets in all retail locations and are entering the new names weekly to make sure they receive all of our holiday email campaigns. These opt in names will get a special “welcome aboard” email with a special offer to convert them into online customers.
Social Media Marketing
We have a written schedule for social marketing updates/posts (Facebook, Blog, Twitter) so that we don’t fall behind during the busy holiday season. All emails will have social links to our Facebook, blog & twitter pages to remind them to stay connected with us and social share links to share our emails in their social networks. Our seasonal promotion schedule incorporates Facebook-specific promotions and Twitter-specific promotions. We have added social share buttons on all website pages. We have added Facebook “like” buttons on all product pages. We are monitoring our brand on various social channels to understand the impact of our various holiday marketing campaigns.
Analytics
We are analyzing the traffic from our social applications to determine the ROI and overall effect on site traffic and customer loyalty. We are tracking all email campaigns to analyze which offers are performing the best during the season to make changes on the fly if necessary. We have set up various conversion funnels to analyze cart abandonment and fix any bottlenecks. We are monitoring our PPC campaigns to determine if different ad positions make a difference on conversions or click-through-rate (CTR). We have set up filters to remove our internal IP addresses from our analytics data to keep reporting results as clean as possible. We have set up advanced segments to look at our branded traffic and non-branded traffic separately across all channels. We have set up goal funnels to review email signups, catalog requests, site engagement, and more.
|
5th Food Group